The three R's

Randy Rarick on Surfboard Restortion from Arico Productions on Vimeo.

Randy Rarick has made a name for himself in the last few years as a board restoration guru, and his Hawaiian surf auctions, which are a good place to sell some of his restored boards, have become the premier date for wealthy collectors to buy classic and important boards. Randy syas there are three r's in his business - repair, refurbish or restore. Sure we'd all like to find perfect condition boards all the time, but the reality is they usually show scars and bruises from their life. In the UK often the dings come from storage in a garage rather than big surf, and we're lucky in that quite a few people in the 70s/80s would buy a board, find out they couldn't surf it and leave it in the attic for 30 years.
There's always going to be a bit of disagreement about old boards having a glass off restoration, and the result is they are a perfect re-creation , with the only original bit being the foam and the shape. I think the board loses it soul and its stories through major restoration like this, but then again if a board is that trashed it will never surf again whats the harm. You get the feeling that the restored boards may never surf again anyway, they have become a valuable investment. Having said all that ,Randy does a beautiful job using the original techniques.
I can't see many glass off restorations happening over here - only a handfull of British boards are worth a serious amount of money,- and thats usually if they're in great original condition.

You might remember my Tris fish project. Its a board that had lots of weird add ons, including a car paint frenzy, a mast fitting, two mystery big narrow fin boxes and a non original single fin.

Jase at Leven surfboards has been helping to nurse it back to health and its half way through 'refurbishment' as Randy would say. Replacement keel fins are back in the original position, two huge and heavy fin boxes are now out and replaced with blown foam. Dings are fixed, a really thick non original gloss coat on the underside has been sanded back to get the weight down. The board was the heaviest 6 ft board I've ever lifted ! £70 spent so far which isn't bad since the fins were made from scratch , from a template from original Tris 70s keels. Sanding off the red and blue lines was a hard decision but it was obvious they weren't original and were put on to hide the original keel scars. All that remains now is to hide the white repairs, and I may do a cloth inlay over the fin box scars. Then gloss and polish and she's ready for the Hawaiian surf auction / 3 ft Godrevy - whichever is more likely.

This is what the board looked like when I bought it a few months ago. Why did I buy it ? Because UK 70s fishes are rare as rocking horse sh1t ...