For the most part surfboards have always evolved in degrees, or small steps. And for the most part the design changes were a synthesis of an older surfboard iteration and something new.

One of the biggest changes of course was the material change from wood to foam. But the new foam boards were not a whole lot different in design from their wood counterpart.

As an example the early foam boards and the older wood boards had similar deck curves. Cutting deck curves in a wood board takes some effort. Gluing the stringer in a foam blank so the blank has some deck curve was easier to do.

Along with getting deck curve in a board, cutting some of the volume out was a step for more performance surfing as well. Reason being, deck curve made for a rail line with curve so your surfboard could make moving along the wave face less difficult and less foam volume helped make the board less difficult to maneuver.

Couple those changes with the fin design changes in the mid sixties (which I've talked about here) and we were well on  the road to performance surfing.

As boards got more and more maneuverable what began to happen was the realization that the typical rail line of a 9 foot plus surfboard was too long.  We could get even more maneuverable and have more control of ours boards on the wave face if the rail line was shorter. Which is what fueled the short board revolution.

D.R.       

A 7'10" Gadget. The length of this board is considered a mid-length. Though through the first 6 months of 1968 it would have been called a short board.

One of the changes in surfboard design after boards went from balsa wood to foam was rocker.

The early balsa wood boards were pretty straight from nose to tail. The boards were made by face gluing wood planks together to get a solid piece around 20 inches wide and 9 feet long and thick enough to  cut a surfboard  from. That big block of wood then was cut and shaped into a surfboard not unlike hand shaping an eps blank now days. The difference being eps blanks are profiled and have rocker cut and glued to a stringer.

The wood board was just a big plank. The end result for the most part was a surfboard with a nice outline, as thick as the wood plank would allow with some curve from rail to rail on the bottom, a little curve from rail to rail on the deck, a bottom rocker curve from nose to tail with the decks from nose to tail pretty flat.

The original plugs for surfboard foam molds were similar to the balsa boards of the day. That was what was known, so the early foam boards as far as shape were quite similar to the balsa boards.

The bottom rockers were ok but because the decks were flat the rail line from nose to tail was pretty straight. That long straight rail line began to change from the early sixties, because the foam blanks could be made with nose to tail deck curve and when a wood stringer was glued into the blank it helped keep that curve in place. As well you could cut the stringer to any number of bottom and deck curves for custom rockers.

With bottom and deck curves better surfboards became more maneuverable, combined with the foam cores which made boards lighter performance surfing was getting it's start.

D.R.

It may be a little hard to see but in the above picture I've pulled a string from nose to tail across an early sixties surfboard. I can barely get the fingers of my left hand between the string and deck... pretty flat deck curve.

This second picture is from a mid sixties type board. The space between the string and deck of this boards is double the space of the early sixties board.

Again it's a little hard to see but the rail line curve is quite different between the two.