On Point, On Craft
By TSJ
Andrew Kidman: Greenough never made a lot of boards, and I know Simmons didn’t make a lot of boards either, but their contributions to the evolution of design have been remarkable.
Dave Parmenter: Well, you’re talking about times when things were moving fast and the design field was pretty much wide open. Today it’s harder to do because ever since Simon came out with his Thruster over 25 years ago, it’s all just been a period of refinement. There’s nothing new yet. Really, the only new kinds of surfing are tow-surfing or stand-up surfing, and even those surfboards are hybrids of other surf craft. There’s nothing new yet....
The Simmons and the Greenoughs get to a point where you get your ten boards under your belt and you can control your tools, and you can put out a board within a 20 or 30 percent variance of what’s in your mind’s eye, that’s the important thing. Some people can do it after ten boards. Some it takes 100. Some never get it. I’ve worked with people that are in that first dozen or so boards, and with the right discipline and blanks being as good as they are today, they can hit it.
It’s tremendously exciting. I try to tell people, as much soul as we try to impart, it’s still plastic, not in a negative way, but in the fact that the very word plastic used to mean malleable, shapeable. The thing can be glassed and ten years later you can go back in and grind it down, reshape it, rebuild it, re-glass it, change the fins; that’s the good part of plastic.
Kidman: I’ve seen a lot of older guys that aren’t really interested in anything else other than feeling how their boards go, grinding their fins down, knocking them out.
Parmenter: You can’t be afraid or impose these boundaries or limitations on what you think the surfboard is or what you can do to it. You can take a grinder to it and do almost anything to it, even after it’s been built. For me, it’s easier to start from scratch and build a new board, but for a lot of people it’s easier to go and Frankenstein something from an existing board, and that’s how you learn a lot. That’s what I like a lot about the removable fin systems that you see today. I wish I had them when I was younger because I spent so much time trying to learn about fins and fin configurations. But with the removable fin systems today, you can learn so much about one board even in one surf. Where before, with fixed fins, it used to take years.
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Photo: Tom Curren on a Tomo shape, Rincon, Winter 2013. Credit: Michael Kew
