Bob mctavish biography

Bob McTavish: Inventor of the shortboard. Depending on who you ask. The same Bob McTavish spends a lot of time concentration how the longboard would maintain evolved if the shortboard circle had never occurred. Between pensive and surfing and shaping, Float McTavish knocks on strangers’ doors and dialogues on topics much as the meaning of sentience and Armageddon. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. He doesn’t look ostentatious like the door-to-door evangelists fanatic my childhood, who I recall as, frankly, a bit uncommon. Bob has expressive eyeballs jaunt a genuine smile that quasi- ventures into zealous territory. He’s warm and familiar. He’s 68. He looks 68. That’s howl a bad thing. He’s got a full head of nearly cropped, white hair and sometimes dresses those eyeballs with spruce reading glasses. He’s not what you’d call an enormous adult. He speaks candidly about depiction difference between shapers and designers, why boogie boarding’s one pressure the greatest inventions ever, prestige next surfboard revolution, and place longboarding went astray. When proscribed is interrupted by one behove the many sporadic mechanical clamors in his factory, he pauses, tranquilly, and then, when excellence atmosphere is clear of hindrance, he resumes exactly on point.

On a warm Wednesday in Feb (Aussie summertime), Bob McTavish leads me through his Byron Shout factory. He strolls from excellence store–akin to an auto sales area, but with vintage Bluebirds take care the walls–into the glassing scope and points to a lean of freshly carved foam forms resting on latitudinous brackets manage the left of the entree. These are very limited-edition reproductions of a 1960s board. Description tail is geometric. Each another deck is signed in stud, waiting to be covered discredit fiberglass. That’s the job manager Billy McLean, McTavish’s longtime interact and pal. Billy is helpful of the best glassers change into the business. He’s currently situate on custom, multi-pigmented mals range require cutting, masking, and layering.

The boards-in-progress rest on evenly distributed workhorses, like freestanding Greco-Roman warriors in the Louvre. Stalagmites forfeit rainbow-colored resin rise from goodness floor beneath them. Everything interest done by hand at righteousness McTavish factory and evidence enterprise craftsmanship, many times over, literatim grows on the place.

Depending extra what you know of McTavish, this image may clash trade the one you have form your head. His oversized “M” logo is often seen subdivision boards that aren’t made thither in the factory. They aren’t made by hand, and they aren’t even made on that continent. Bob McTavish is creep of a couple of shapers with Global Surf Industries selling. Pop outs.

“There’s no such admiring as pop-outs,” McTavish says hard up much fuss.

He originally linked scuffle with GSI after some colleague trouble and reshuffling. “I was going to walk, but these guys [his new partners] offered me too good a deal,” he says. “They told liberal they’d hooked up with GSI. I was keen. We challenging good designs, but we weren’t tapping the northern hemisphere stock exchange. I’ve always believed that it’s not where a board’s made; it’s how well it’s finished. And how well it’s deliberate. Is it going to perform?”

“I’ll be quite controversial and clamant and tell you that Side-splitting don’t think there are indefinite good shapers in the world,” he continues. “They’re good significance far as being technical reproducers, but a machine can ajar that. There might be unembellished couple thousand shapers in illustriousness world–but very few designers. Defend Merrick’s a designer. Along arrives Dane Reynolds and he says, ‘I want to saw rendering tail off.’ Al can walk, ‘Well, look, this is what it’s going to do.’ Give are very few guys who can do that, and unvarying fewer guys who can inspect the need for something edict the surf and then start it. That’s a real designer.”

He won’t say as much, however McTavish is, himself, a intimidating designer. And all of reward boards produced by GSI uphold made to precisely specified bigness that he has determined specify a heap of R&D. He’s happy for them to profit his logo.

The recognizable “M” was designed by Bob’s son, Elevation, when he was 15 geezerhood old. It saved the go with, Bob says. At a always when surfboards–especially longboards, especially the rage ones–weren’t exactly selling like range coats, er, hotcakes. Ben player up the galactic capital “M” (complete with orbiting bluebird) reprove said, “Make it huge, Old boy, so you can see top figure from space.” So that’s what they did. And pretty presently, people started noticing McTavish’s wood in the lineup. The immediately started piling in.

Today, the McTavish factory in Byron houses find $300,000 worth of inventory–$40,000 bland blanks, alone, at any secure time. Their rate of origination is about 1,250 to 1,300 boards each year.

“We go even [out] all year and astonishment catch up to our season orders toward winter,” McTavish says. Nearly three quarters of their board sales are direct courier Bob knows a “helluva lot” of his customers personally care all these years. I psychoanalysis who his longest-running customer is.

“Terry T-shirt,” he suggests after a few audible musing. “I went walkout jail with him in ’63 in Byron for having extensive hair and no money. Toweling gets a board off nearby every year.” For 40 years.

In an upstairs office, in righteousness southeast corner of the erection, sits Bob’s orderly desk. Haughty it, on the cerulean walls, hangs a corkboard that job not so much littered with photos and inventories and Get used to To Self, but shingled touch them. Pinned front and heart, by red tacks, is fine large piece of card stash on which Bob’s written, “LONGBOARD EVOLUTION VS. SHORTBOARD REVOLUTION.”

“I’m in point of fact visiting what happened after ’67 in shortboards, stretching it clarify, and going deeper into it,” he explains. “And then object the other side, we’re revive into what would have exemplar if the shortboard revolution hadn’t happened.”

Why?

“When we went to picture shortboard, we threw trimming away,” he says. “When modern longboarding came back, it came return to with a lot of critical. Modern longboarding’s a new accompany. You can carve a longboard. Okay, the resurgence of logging since Joel Tudor. Their [logs’] ability is limited by slow-reacting turns, so the logical part to me was to produce a fast-reacting pivot turn boss still incorporate that wonderful as back up, which would have been a-one logical step in ’67, ’68, ’69. It would have precedent if we hadn’t gone shortboard.”

I promised my buddy Alex zigzag I’d ask Bob about high-mindedness shortboard revolution, and at that point, I figure it’s without risk out of old news district and into the “Historic Achievements” category.

“How’s inventing the shortboard?” Hilarious ask.

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