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"The History and Culture of Surfing."
From a talk in Dennis Phillips’s Design Theory class
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on design
v5: What technology transfer between windsurfing and surfing do you see?
Mickey Munoz: I did a board for Surftech. Surftech comes from the windsurfing side of board construction as well as surfing.The custom manufacturers came up with a pretty interesting construction method. They start out with a light density core and then skin it with a high density foam that is skinned on both sides with glass, kevlar or pure carbon, depending on how much money you have and how sophisticated you want it to be. They are taking that same technique and applying it to surfboards. So they can actually build a board that can compete with a custom board for weight but it’s like twice as strong and durable. The downside is it requires molds to do it, so you are limited in design, obviously you can accumulate designs, but you can’t change as fast as the custom industry. The questions of windsurfing influencing surfing, obviously strap surfing and then lead into toe surfing. Literally and configuratively, they have taken surfing to new heights. I hate jet skies, unless you are on them.
I did an all carbon windsurfer for one of the Pan Am games for the Japanese. Made all the foils and it was an interesting board. I would have stayed involved in windsurfing, but the equipment was changing so fast, we were in a lighter wind area and unless you have some wind, I wouldn’t say it’s boring, but I would rather sail my big boat or go surfing. Just to maintain your own equipment, even if you are in the business, is so expensive. One wipe out and you wreck two thousand dollars worth of masts and sails, too much stuff!
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Jet Powered Surf Board
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v5: Have you ever done any outer reef tow in surfing?
MM: No, I’ve done some toe in at Mexico, nothing really big.
v5: How fast will they go with the tow in before you are on the edge.
MM: I think they are probably at the end of the apex because usually with the driver does is you line up behind them and you go out through the surf and pick a wave. You are out here like this and they turn and you are just powering the turn to get your speed. The jetski then turns and goes parallel with the wave and you drive into the wave. Well, when you have that much speed, you are in the wave way before it’s ready to break and that you can paddle into it. So, you have a lot of time to start lining yourself up and incidentally, most of the towing guys originally were surfers and windsurfers, so with the straps it gives you a lot more control, like bindings for snowboarding. You have a little bit of time to make the decision on whether you are going to drop in and really go for it. Of course, they are just pushing it and pushing it to where it is as radical as surfing the inside reefs as Pipeline and Indonesia, they are getting into 30 ft. or 40 ft tubes. Dangerous, people are going to die doing it. It is a peak experience.
Even at my older and I think wiser age, a lot of times I’ll come in after my best wave and think, “No, I’ d better go back out, the next one is going to be better!” (laughs) You keep going for it and that’s what they are doing, but just taking it a step further.
v5: When were able to work on you first board?
MM: I always claim my first job was sitting on wood balsa planks in Malibu
because they needed weight.
It start out in a rough blank shape then with a rasp they would start to find the shape. I would sit on the planks and watch them shape and I was fascinated by it. At the end of the day, my pay would be to go to the grocery store at the Malibu
Inn and buy a quart of beer and get to drink beer with the boys.
v5: Who shaped at that time?
MM: Matt Kiplin and Joe Quib were the principal guys around Malibu. Simmons
was in that era; he is credited with some legendary stuff. He was a pretty brainy guy, and I think he worked for Douglas at one time. They were just getting into composites, fiberglass and resins.
He couldn’t paddle very well, so to compensate for the paddling, he needed
stability and lighter weight. To that end, he started doing these composites, using plywood and balsa, and also one of the first to use foam.
They had some weird foaming deals going on, he dug pits in his backyard and
blew foam in the pits and then made molds. Then he did these very interesting sandwich boards and having some knowledge of aerodynamics, he applied a lot of those theories to the boards. He innovated with down rails, release bottoms, concave, slots and all these interesting aerodynamics features that are found on all boards made today. It’s amazing to think he was doing these things in the late forties and early fifties when the stand by lifeguard boards were on 100 pound.
My first board was a ten foot, six inch hollow rescue board. The lifeguard at the state beach showed me how to make a fin for it and glue it on. They were a bitch to surf, really tough! In 1950, I scrounged my allowance and bought a brand new Quid board for fifty-five dollars and that was my first real surfboard. At that time Simmons first boards were varnished and then he figured out fiberglass and polyester resin might make a good coating.
v5: Over balsa?
MM: Yes, over balsa, plywood and whatever his composites were. But then boards started getting lighter. The first balsa boards were varnished, but they would ding them and soak up water. So this friend of ours who worked at Douglas would take rolls of cloth...
v5: He hid the materials in his pants and walked out? (laughs)
MM: (laughs) Really, that is where the first boards came from, stolen materials from Douglas Aircraft.
v5: Was that the old plant on Ocean Park Boulevard?
MM: Yes. Then a little company opened up called Falco and they started selling polyester resin and fiberglass. At that time they had a catalyst which was a yellow paste that was a sun cure. So you mixed this stuff up and get it all glossed, take it outside in the sun and that would cure it.
Then in the 1950’s, I sanded surfboards for a guy by the name of Alan Gomes. His nickname was baby Alan and he was one of the first guys I met in Hawaii who would talk to me and who was nice to me.
That’s not really true. (laughs) Joey Cabell used to surf in Queens and my first trip over there in 1954; he was the King of Queens. When he and his family moved to California, they started a glass shop in Venice. They were glassing all of Belsies and half Jacobs and I was sanding surfboards in this sandlot across the street of somebody’s house! (laughs) That was my first real paid job in the surfboard business. You asked a question earlier about shaping and making boards. I would say I made my first board in 1955. We started out buying one of two things, one choice being the end cuttings from the packed bundles. They would pack the bundles of balsa with half-inch thick slices of balsa wood, three and a quarter inch by whatever the length of the bundle. Since the straps went around those they would be dinged and damaged, so they would toss that stuff. So I would take it and
make planks and then shape boards out of that. Also at the time, there were
a large amount of surplus life rafts after the war maked of end grain balsa planks glued together. They were horrible to shape, so hard, but it was low priced material. You learn to glass just by getting your hands dirty no masks or gloves, just mixing it up and slathering it on with your hands.
v5: You didn’t have squeegees?
MM: I don’t think we had squeegees then, maybe brushes. We ended up looking tarred and feathered. When you are young and dumb you can do that! Then I shaped perhaps ten boards in the 1950’s, maybe one a month. Finally I went to work exclusively for Hobie and learned to make production shape and did that all through the 1970’s. I went on my own after that, building boats and a bunch of other things.
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v5: Where you building boats with him when you started doing the catamarans?
MM: Yes, we did the original fourteen. I had built my boat by then and went to work for a guy by the name of Carter Pyle. He had an eighteen-foot catamaran called the Pacific Catamaran, which is still a hot boat today. That’s where I learned to build boats and I save the odd fittings. So I had this big box of fittings and I go, “I have enough stuff to build a boat!” (laughs) I ended up building a thirty-foot catamaran. That was a great life experience because it was designing, engineering, problem solving. I was really plunging into something that I had little idea of how long and what it would take to do it.
It’s a real test of your own durability and perseverance and it took me seven years to launch it. I launched it in 1974 and I’m still working on it!
v5: Was Phil Edwards around in those days? Did you, Hobie and Edwards’s work together on what became the Hobie Cat?
MM: Phil had built a twenty-six foot catamaran and he moved to Hawaii and took his boat. He was in Hawaii during the initial stages of the Hobie Cat. We did all our research and development in the Alley of Broken Dreams. Hobie was pretty ingenious, he had this kind of universal platform that fit hulls, so we would shape up what we thought might work, putting one on one side and one on the other side, different hulls. We would go out and sail it, sailing one tack, look at what happened in the water and go over to the other tack and sail it on that side. Take some photos and shot some movies, rode waves. In those days we could beach launch from anywhere, so the idea was a simple boat that you could ride waves, with a high enough performance that it was fun and interesting. That was how the Hobie Cat was born. Hobie has this incredible ability to focus all his energy into what he is doing. He would leave nothing to chance, if he could build it, he would do it. So we built every single part, we did not do the actually castings but we would make stainless fittings and prototype everything.
We made our own trampolines and pretty much put those boats together. Hobie went from A to Z, from design to marketing, selling and collecting the money. That’s why he was such a success and why he still is. I believe the Hobie Cats sold more boats than any other did. He sold thousands of boats and I think it got too big for Hobie, so when Coleman came along and he sold the rights to them.
v5: Is there any rule of thumb regarding matching your height to a certain
size board?
MM: If you go to most legitimate board shops, anyone who knows anything about surfboards, they are going to put you on the right size board. For a person around six foot I would get on a ten foot board and the reason is it is a lot more stable and easier to paddle and get it into a wave, you want that stability. People ask me about surfing and I have been snowboarding for the last five years and skiing for forty years.
Snowboarding has helped surfing. The learning curve in snowboarding is straight up, once you get over the initial learning period, then it’s a race against pain! If you can survive the first two or three days, you are in there!
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Richard Tracey, Bob Lange and Mickey Munoz at the Cal Tech wind tunnel test for a soap box derby entry !
Finding the speed shape for boats, boards, skies and other toys is work.
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