The history of the FP design was that we were building balsa boards in Gisborne back in 1997, when I saw a magazine article on a foam 12 footer made by Paul Joske. I phoned him up and asked what he thought of it. Any way Paul said that he got the dimensions from Skip Frye but that he felt that the board was under rockered with 5.5 inches overall , that it was a hopeless boardas soon as the wave started to throw, but nice in dribbly wavesSo, I realised that we could solve that problem by either getting rid of the icecream stick planshape and puting some curve in the planshape, or by dosing up the rocker. Just adding rocker with a parallel planshape makes a dog of a board IMO so I decided to do both, just give the board some curves.At that moment I flashed that foil shapes are optimised for moving through virually any medium. . . liquid gas or even solid, and that a foil cross section would thus move equally well through water or air. That's how it came about that we started using foil cross sections for our planshapes. So the FP 12 footer was the first of our boards to use the extreme pintailed foil section as a planshape.We ordered the balsa for the first 12 footer and built the planshape and rocker jig. Just as we had finished that stage the 'landlord' ( a well known Gisborne miser known as 'Dollars Simpson ' decided to put the rent up on the industrial building we were using by 50%. . . . so we had to leave.Next stop was the Gisborne backpackers run at the time by Gisborne surfer John Gisby, in a beautiful old historic mansion. We settled in out the back in the bus and took over a small unused shed for boardbuilding. John and I had to knock a wall out of the middle of the shed to make it big enough for the 12 foot length of the project. So the first FP 12 was born at Harris st Gisborne, a few days after our daughter Kirsten entered the world. John said that the board would be good for Waimea Bay. . . I hadn't thought of that at the time, as I was building it for the waves in NZ.No sooner had the board been built than John Gisby did personality change and kicked us out. John was sponsored by Councillor Larry Foster's 'New Wave' surfboards, and according to John, Larry told him to get us out of town or he'd pull his sponsorship. . . he didn't want any more board builders in town, even though we had built him and shaper Ray Dalton a balsa blank each a month or so previously.We took off to Pouawa beach free camping ground armed with three new boards for testing. . . the new 12 footer, a 7'9" 'Island Rocket' and the 8-4 'Phantom'. The first few waves were ridden without wax until I scrounged some from a camper, but the big board felt great immediately, as did the other two.That was 1997, so the machine is not a recent untested 'experiment' as some are claiming.Here's the board after a year of constant surfing, back in Mount Maunganui in a 5000 square foot hangar which was the next Power surfboards workshop.
The first board was 12 by 23 wide, and 2.25 inches thick, a solid muti directional balsa layup of 4 panels, each of equal thickness , glassed with a single layer of four ounce using WEST system, and graphite coated rails. I still have the original 12 inch by 7 inch spitfire fin, marine ply glassed with kevlar and graphite/epoxy.To be continued
The first board was 12 by 23 wide, and 2.25 inches thick, a solid muti directional balsa layup of 4 panels, each of equal thickness , glassed with a single layer of four ounce using WEST system, and graphite coated rails. I still have the original 12 inch by 7 inch spitfire fin, marine ply glassed with kevlar and graphite/epoxy.To be continued
