This is in an early 70s Jacobs. It sure doesn’t look like any finbox I’ve seen.
Wild hunch tells me it’s an FU box that was damaged somehow and is missing the top.
Can anyone shed some light here?
Huh- people do some strange things to surfboards, but that’s a new one to me.
From the tail end of it, it looks almost like somebody cut out a FU box to the width of the underlying slot with a small diameter dado blade or small circular saw (trim saw, like the Rockwell/Porter Cable 314) or similar and did a really really good job of it. Nice straight lines, the upward curving cuts at the very tail end lead me to think it couldn’t have been a router.
If somebody had access to a horizontal milling machine, patience and a little skill, that could do it and the cutters on that would be of that small a diameter/radius. Clamp it to the table, shimmed and blocked to where the surface of the box was parallel to the table on the thing and the slot in line with the X travel of the table ( use a dial indicator and a magnetic base on the milling machine arm, move the table in X and Y shimming/adjusting until it was smack on) , yeah, I could do it that way. It’d be almost trivial doing the cut. Set it so the end of the box was under the forward edge of the cutter, raise the table ( Z feed) to cut the right depth ( looks like a smidge less than the overall depth of the slot) , turn the crank for the X feed intil you got to the end. A vertical mill would make different tool marks/cuts. It wouldn’t be any strain on the mill, certainly, those things cut tool steel with the right cutter. .
Why they did it is a mystery, though. Bored in High School Metal Shop, perhaps?
Then again, I don’t always understand why I do things. Why others do things is pretty much always a mystery.
doc…
This board was made after everyone switched to the last gen FU box. Another pic of the whole board indicates it’s a speed or semi gun shape made by Jacobs and fits right into the 1972-73 time frame. The interior measures 3/4" x 12-1/4" according to the owner.
That is one of the early “Sqeezee Boxes”. Only available in a long slot. I saw it in an add in a 1964 Surfie Mag. Add was for “Bearded Clam” Surfboards.
Ahh! Interior measurements huh?
naughty , naughty , but funny .