My father is an auction junkie. If you’ve watched Storage Wars or American Pickers you get the idea. He’s been at it for over 20 years. Over the years he’s scored a few cool surf items for me including my $20 Skil 100 and a pristeen very rare Greg Noll for $75. Today he came through once again.
After cleaning 40 years of gook off the board it was in pretty good shape. Unfortunately at some point the owner ran it into the bottom putting the pictured stress cracks. Rather than making a proper repair someone made a half ass attempt to re-gloss the board with sanding resin. The deck side of the board is in very good shape.
Only other problem is the fin box is loose. After removing the gook from the fin a near pristeen fin emerged. Fin is huge standing 11" off of the bottom. I’m guessing the fin is worth more than I paid for the board.
My plan for the board is to get the fin box out the least invasive way I can and re-install it. I plan on grinding out all dings and repairing as good as humanly possible. Then the plan is to sand the whole board and give it a fresh gloss.
Looking for suggestions for the nose cracks and getting the fin box out as cleanly as possible. Was thinking of glassing the nose with a layer of 2oz or 4oz after carefully dremmelling out the black in the crack lines.
Then I plan on riding the crap out of it.
PS: It’s a 7’6 x 3 5/8 x 23. By the way, the wide point and the thick point are both only 35" from the tail. Serial number begins with 67 so I assume this board was made in 67.
7’6" ? Highly doubtful it was built in '67. Most likely, late '68 or early '69. The first Claude Codgen ‘short’ board by Con was the CC Rider wedge, a V bottom. That came out in '68.
That fin is a first generation FU and an excellent score. A very rare fin, since they switched to the Vari Set type after about a year of production on that round ended box.
Any ideas on getting the fin box out the least invasive way possible? My thought is to carefully remove the box then make a router template similar to the shape of the Hansen style box below and re-install the box. I would probably tint the resin for the box install to a cream white so things match.
I had the same exact board with the same issue with the fin box. The issue with the box is that the plastic that they are made out of was really bad, soft & flexible. I ended up selling the board to a guy that wanted me to put a modern FU box in it. To remove the old box all i had to do was take a dremel & trim the glass away around the box a little bit, then was able to use a pair of pliers to pull the whole box out. The plastic on the box was pure shiney & had little adheresion to the resin used to install the box. My recommendation would be to leave it alone if you can. Last thing you want to do is open a can of worms & not be able to have the original box.
I rode boards NEW in that era with those fins. All you had to do was hit the bottom sorta hard, which was easy because they are so deep, they broke. Yours has been sitting around baking in the sun and aging for years not good for old plastic fins. You have a couple choices. Remove old box and fin put in new box and have newer fins fiberglass to play with and “improve” the ride. Then sell the original fin to some collector. Ride it as is and risk breaking everything. Do all the repair on the old box and risk breaking the collectable fin. Hang the thing on a wall as is for history sake,
I’ll second that, but add - why not make yourself a reproduction of the board, with a normal fin box, while you have the board there? Be a fun project.
Board is amazing as is, so do nothing and sell it and you’ll be rewarded handsomely. Or call Fins Unlimited, and see if they have any of those boxes floating around, and convey with pics, and stuff its a restoration, and route out box, and install. Sometimes doing nothing is the best option. That’s a piece of surfing history, and should be in a museum on the East Coast.
Kind of bummed out by the responses. I’ve sold off a few collector boards over the years and regretted it every time. Also sold a collector board to a young ripper after I had painstakingly restored it only to have him impail the board on an outfall pipe a month later. Plan had been to restore it as a project and ride it myself. I get it about the fin…but to me the fin is what makes the board. That fin is stunning. Even I am surprised that the fin survives to this day. Hate to lose it or break it. Hate to stick the fin or board on a shelf and stare at it for the next 20 years wondering how it would have worked. I suppose I could make a copy of the fin in fiberglass to fit a modern box.
Regarding making a copy of the board, the materials alone would cost almost double what I paid for this one and that’s without having the cool high density foam stringer…
As far as getting the fin out, try a penetrating oil, and let it soak in the crack. Maybe also a swimming pool deck scaler to dissolve the dried salt, which is binding it.
Put a clamp on the fin, and hang the board , nose touching the ground, tail elevated a few inches, with some padding under it to catch it when it falls. Put a couple of sand bags, maybe 150 pounds or so on the board to add weight. Let the salt dissolve and come back in a couple of days. Save the box, and the fin. Pad the clamp against to fin so you don’t mar it.
Sammy, how do you know so much about boards and dates and the history?
I’m impressed.
Let me clarrify. I am looking to get the fin box out of the board in the least invasive way possible so that I can reglass the fin box back in the board.
This auction house is the best in my area. I’m sure there are others like it all over the country. This one is about 2 acres worth of stuff with half being inside and half outside. It runs every other week. Always tons of tools and quality antiques. My father’s gotten a lot of great stuff over the years from this place and another nearby. The best score he’s gotten surfboard wize was a 9’8 Greg Noll Duke Kahanamoku Hawaiian Nollrider with a killer fabric inlay and the original DaCat fin. It’s condition was a 9.5 on a scale of 1-10. $75.00 I rode it for a couple years before stopping after several collectors started offering good money for it. In a moment of weakness I sold it to a collector and it now hangs on display like a museum piece from the ceiling of a local surfshop.
The only down side is that now that everyone has smart phones its a lot harder to get steals like the one I got yesterday. Many of the bidders are dealers and they will search the web for values or text pictures to collectors on the spot. About 6 months ago another Greg Noll came up…it was a fat man board with 3 large logos but it was beat to hell and a brown turd. I authorized my dad to bid up to $550 for it just cause I wanted a restoration project and know how to do it. Some fool wanted it bad and the bidding ran up to almost $700. If you look too eager there are people there who will run up the price on you on purpose with no intention of buying. Its like gambling. You gotta have your poker face on. I actually went in person to inspect this board after my dad sent me the initial pictures. I walked over to it 3 times and very briefly checked it out being careful not to look overly interested and keeping my father at a distance. I then pulled him aside well away from anyone and authorized him to pay up to $400 for it (there is a 17% auctioneers commission you pay on top of your bid). I then left and let my 71 year old father do the rest. Luckily nobody else really bid on it and he picked it up for a fraction of what I was willing to spend.
Those auctions have been my father’s hobby for over 20 years. We bust his chops about it but he really does come up with some finds from time to time.
Cell phones are making auctions a fortune. Like he said…evrybody google searches everything. They google a Noll and find one on a website with high retail price and they use it as a guidline. I bid on a Skip Frye with half the glass torn off of the bottom. Some fool googled Fryes and went crazy on the bids. He never even looked at the bottom of the board.
The CC Rider is a nice stick. Claude Codgens is an East coast surfer and he is still building boards in Melbourne Fla. Nice find.
Your board was made in California in the Con Factory
Ace gave good suggestions. As others said, that box and the fin are fragile. I’d go with two options. Remove the box and put in a standard FU so you can ride it. Or, sell to a collector and turn a profit so you build a replica with the proceeds. If the board was a terminal case I’d say sell the fin by itself. Lots of old boards like that which are near museum quality but missing a fin. Rare fins that had short production runs in the 60s can fetch decent $$ from completist collectors.
I will also go out on a limb and predict the board is a dog. There were many wrong turns and dead ends in those years. This looks to be one of those.
