Rusty

Congratulations to Marlon Gerber for claiming this month's cover shot of Waves Magazine (Australia).

Congratulations to Mahina Maeda for taking 1st place in the U12 Division at the Surfing America Championships!

Jay Davies & friends surf their home break in the latest vid from Elsegood Productions!

Rusty is proud to announce the release of the Wired Series, hooded fleece with headphone drawcords! Inside the pocket is 1/8 inch jack so you can hook up your iPod, iPhone, and most music players. Built with HB3 technology, the headphone drawcords are completely machine washable, so there's no need to take out the wire when you throw it in the wash.

With the release of such a sweet product we put together a pretty bitchin' microsite so scroll down for a preview of all the features or click here to skip the BS and head over right now!

GREEN DAY COLLABORATION AND ENTER TO WIN CONTEST

Legendary punk band Green Day collaborated with Rusty to produce three unique rock inspired Wired Series fleece. Check out the Green Day Wired Series fleece that will available in July at Pacsun! While you're there, be sure to enter the Rusty Green Day Wired Series Giveaway for a chance to win 2 VIP Green Day concert tickets, a Rusty/Green Day Surfboard, Green Day Rock Band, and more!

RUSTY WIRED SERIES

Click here to have a look at the full line of Wired Series fleece available in both Mens and Womens styles!

WHERE TO BUY WIRED SERIES

If you're jonesing to buy one of these fleece right now, here's where they're available. Note: Only the Wired and Set it Straight Styles are available for purchase in June and the rest of the line including the Green Day Collab will be available in July).

Available online to BUY NOW at: Kona, Jack's Surfboards, Bunger Sayville, and Bunger Surf.

Also available to BUY NOW at specialty shops - click here and enter your zipcode for a store near you!

Available to BUY NOW online at: Bunger Sayville.

Available to BUY NOW at specialty shops - click here and enter your zip code for a store near you!

The last few blogs I've covered Bob Simmon's influences on modern design, and an overview on rocker. A natural segue would be a little history and discourse on bottoms.

Here's a short list of some bottom contours that have been utilized over the last 40 years: Vee bottom. Spiral vee. Hulls. Tri-Hulls. Tri-plane Hulls. Bonzers. Venturis. Double-barrel vee. Clinker bottoms. Channel bottom. Six-deep channels. Four-deep channels. Belly channels. Curved-belly channels. Phazer bottoms. Micro Grooves. Triple con. Double concave. Reverse vee. Step tails. Hydro hulls. Hydrofoil. Jet bottom. Slot bottom. Double-deep concave.

And...the single concave. Why single concave?

A little background: Concaves in surfboard bottoms have been around since Bob Simmons introduced them in approximately 1946. Some big-wave guns from the late '50s and early '60s have concave in the bottoms, all the way through the tails.

But for the most part, surfboards up until the late '60s had convex bottoms. Sure, there were plenty of nose concave designs for noseriding, but concave in the back half of the board was more the exception than the rule. In 1966, 1967, longboards started to shorten up a little and vee bottoms were introduced. The panels on either side of the stringer were relatively flat.

Bob McTavish circa 1968; pretty futuristic looking board: double concave entry feeding into a vee bottom.

Vee helped these still relatively high-volume, wide boards, to tip over, and carve a shorter arc on rail. The problem was, in more powerful surf, when turning these deep vee bottom boards, they had a propensity to tip over, run on one rail, and lift or climb right out of the water. They would spin out.

Bottom turn or spinning out? '70s SURFER cover.

As the boards evolved over the next couple of years, they got shorter, and eventually narrower, and the deep vees became passé. The late '60s shortboards still had some genetic residue from the longboard era: slightly rolled noses with a lifted rail up front, but the rails were firming up in the middle, laterally a little flatter, and the tails were down railed with shallow vees. Hulls still enjoy a strong and loyal following with the folks who frequent lined-up pointbreaks with almond-shaped pockets

Classic '70s single-fin bottom. Photo: Brody

By '70 and '71, rails are down all the way; nose-to-tail, bottoms are much flatter, and the vees are starting to get dished out into something called "spiral vees." The elevated spine of the vee still helped to initiate turns and provided drive and direction. By dishing out or hollowing out the vee panels towards the rail, more bite, or hold, was created. Water was routed through the troughs and spiraled out through the tail. These types of bottoms were the norm for a few years. There was lots of experimentation with wings, stings, and other types of template breaks in conjunction with smaller, secondary concaves exiting through the outline breaks.

Aussie shaping legend Terry Fitzgerald was a major proponent of these "Flyers".

Fitzy explains: "The jump came in the winter of '72. My Hawaiian influenced boards just didn't have enough tail area to skate over the flat spots at Narrabeen. So, I ADDED wings (or what we called flyers). The idea was that by adding the wing to the rail it would add more planing area, but you'd still have a narrow tail for in the pocket and bigger waves. The 'wing/flyer' had to be pinched to allow the rail to stay in the wave and run you higher as well (á la Bunker's idea). But, the wing also gave you a break point for snapping out of the lip. So, three pure benefits: More planing area to get across the flats; pinched wing to stick in the face and ride high on; a break point in the rail to snap off the lip on. [Tested in Hawaii that year and then launched in December '72, January '73 in Australia.]

Fitzy's ad from Tracks magazine.

Fitzy continues: "Wings were not something you created by cutting a piece out of the tail of your board. They were ADDED to the rail line/foil and planshape, and pinched to have minimum effect of rail-line entry but maximum effect on planning area when flat -- plus, the increased ability to run high and hold a high line.

"I've always been a concave addict (right back to an 8'9" that had a concave from nose to tail that I had custom built in 1967), so when the pinwings I was riding started to get stuck in the lip, I went back to an old trick off putting a concave in the pin behind the fin. You still had rail line, but a vacuum when flat (almost a swallowtail effect) so going rail-to-rail was a damn sight easier. The vees were always spiraled (rolled and curved), so changing the panels back to concave was an easy feed."

Before the shift to multiple fins, some of the best single-fin surfing was being done on channel bottoms. Six deep channels. And during the '70s, there was a lot of tinkering with bottoms, trying to gain speed and traction. Short, wide boards were loose but required longer, deeper fins to keep them in the water. The longer fins had a lot of frontal drag -- they slowed the board down. Narrower boards were quicker and required less fin but were somewhat impractical for most average surfers in average conditions. So, unless you were a very light surfer, or riding good, hollow waves all the time, the narrower boards were liking owning a Ferrari but being stuck in city streets most of the time.

The early '80s saw fairly short, wide boards with bottoms that still had remnant features from twin-fins and single-fins. Fairly flat under the front foot with vee running through the back third of the board.

Late 70's Canyon double wing, double barrel twinnie

With the advent of the three-fin surfboard, the search for increased traction and drive, while minimizing drag, was put on the back burner. Bottoms started to change. Check back next week for part two...

A short clip of Breyden Taylor ripping it up in his home state.

Here's the latest surf report from Damien Fahrenfort's iPhone at the Rusty House in Newport Beach, CA.

Nate Yeomans is coming back from his 2010 WCT break and plans to unleash the fury...

I love surfboards!

Ever since I was 13 years old and desperate for a surfboard of my own, I've loved them. Now that I'm 29 and have had quite a few to call my own over the years my obsession with surfboards hasn't diminished. I'm an dedicated collector with an impressive stash. I even keep a lot of boards that i've broken in two pieces. I get attached them to them!

Luckily, since I was 17, Rusty Surfboards has been hooking me up with boards. I've tried a few from other shapers along the way, but Rusty boards always have the high quality that I rely on. Rusty, the man himself, is also one of the most intelligent and innovative shapers out there. He listens to feedback and incorporates it into new models. He experiments with materials and fin placements. He keeps it interesting.

It had been a while since i'd gotten a new quiver, so recently I ordered up 5 new boards. Now that i'm no longer competing or worrying about forcing turns on waist high mushburgers for the judges, all I want to do is get barreled. I've also been really loving the quads lately, particularly my 5'4 Dwart. So my most recent order was filled with tube riders, quads, and a brand new Dwart.

Of course, white surfboards are no good for photos, so the first step was to bust out the spray paint and get to work! My boyfriend has built a shaping room in our garage and equipped it with board rack, lights, masking tape of various widths, rolls of paper, and a selection of spray paint colors.

The first step is to put in the headphones, pick a favorite album (in my case it was Pacific Dust by The Mother Hips) then start by taping off the Rusty logo and around the rails (so that paint stays on top and you don't get over-spray onto the bottom.

I like to keep my sprays asymmetrical, so the next step is to use some paper to block off half of the board. I also like to keep some white, so I use thin tape to cover a few lines of white. I sprayed 4 boards before taking this photo and I recycle the tape, so that's why the tape is so beautifully colored.

There's a lot of thought that has to go into the layer on layer paint and tape routine. It can be tricky to visualize how it will come out depending on which color goes on first.

Pulling the tape is the most exciting part!

For the other half of the board I made a star stencil.

And finally..... ta-da! They're done!!!!
From Left to Right:
1. 5'4" Dwart quad
2. 5'11" GTR quad
3. 5'11" Kompressor quad
4. 6'1" Traveler thruster
5. 5'6" Slayer thruster

I'm heading off to Fiji tonight and bringing all but the Dwart, so I had to take out a couple and test them out before carefully stacking them in the boardbag. Here are are a few snaps by local photographer Alex Shea of me riding the GTR at my local beach.

This is one of my first waves on the GTR and I was just trying to feel the slide of the quad. It felt great!

I was a little worried about pulling into this little double up tube. I didn't want to buckle a brand new board!

Feeling good! I can't wait to get this thing into some big tubes in Fiji!

-Holly

For more of Holly's Blogs visit HollyBeckSurfs.blogspot.com