Hi Paul,
Great to hear from you again... I think it's been 2 years.
I'm glad you still have your board and are putting it up on the wall. At 5' 8", your board is extremely short, even for a Foil. It's over a foot shorter than any other one I've seen, and I've seen quite a few of them. It was probably made for a small person. Your board was made in 1969. We can't tell you the exact date, because there is no serial number on the board.
Here's what I have written before about the Foils in Ask Tom:
There were two Foil models – the Austrailian Foil and the Maui Foil – and some custom variations of each, depending on what the customer wanted and the waves they were going to ride.
The original Foil was designed by Keith Paull based on the short boards he was riding when he came over from Australia to join the Bing Team in late fall of 1968. Keith had recently been crowned the Australian national champion, beating out Nat Young and Midget Farrely who had owned that title for most of the 1960s.
The Bing Aussie Foil came out at the beginning of 1969 and was produced up until the beginning of 1970 when it was replaced with the Maui Foil, the board that Rolf Aurness won the World Championship on in Australia in 1970.
There are some obvious differences between the two models. Both boards were relatively short, mostly between 7 to 8 ft., with the later Maui Foil being slightly shorter. The Aussie Foil is wider in the nose and narrower in the tail than the Maui Foil. The nose of the Maui Foil is actually narrower than the tail of the board, the first of Bing’s shorter transition boards to adopt that feature. This is one of the key design features that we see in all high-performance shortboards today and for the last 30+ years. The rails are turned down in the tail on both models and turned up at the nose. The rails are also turned down thru the middle on the Maui Foil. The Aussie Foil has an "S" deck; it's humped in the middle and is cut deeply like a step-deck as it approaches the slightly kicked up nose.
In 1969, Bing would load up the Bing van with Foils and send Keith across Texas to Florida and then up the east coast, to surf and sell the boards at all the shops. That may be how your board got to New Hampshire.
Thanks for writing again. Good to hear from you. Please send me a picture when you get it up on your wall, to setwave@msn.com . Thanks.
Tom |
