surfresearch.com.au   manufacturers : rip curl surfboards

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Rip Curl Surfboards 42 Bell Street Torquay Vic. ph 92 3774 5 Boston Road, Torquay Victoria Phone 612 252. 101 Torquay Road, Torquay Vic (052) 61 2904  1967 Bells Beach Surfshop, Torquay. Retailing surfboards from several Brookvale manufacturers-  Keyo, Wallace and Shane. 1969 Brian Singer, Doug Warbrick,  Andy Spangler, Wayne Lynch;  Note impact on local suf industry of the 1970 World Contest at Bells Beach-Johanna 1971  Richard Evans. 1974 Jim Pollock 1976 Wayne Lynch, Don Alcroft, 'Sparrow', Pat Morgan and Dennis Day ; 1977 Wayne Lynch, Pat Morgan and Rany Rarrick (USA) 1979 Wayne Lynch and Warren Powell 1985 Maurice Cole, Michael Anthony  Image right : Bell's Beach Surf Shop Rip Curl Model, circa 1968. Peter Turner Collection. Photograph : Andrew Sheild  ASL, June 1999. Issue 129 page 43.

Rip Curl at Boston Road, phone 252.  - black script and text.

Rip Curl at Boston Road  #230

Wayne Lynch Shapers Decal Rip Curl Surfboards, circa 1978. Image contributed, with thanks, by  Michael Rundell.April 2006. Other Rip Curl decals by contributed  Steve, June 2008.

Rip Curl Blocked Decal circa 1980. Decal image contributed with thanks by Snazzy,  December 2010.

Within weeks of the prototype Plastic Machines rolling out at the Keyo factory in Brookvale, most of the big Sydney manufacturers had their own version in production.

Doug Warbrick, who had enjoyed a box seat for the birth of the shortboard revolution, prevailed upon Keyo owner Denny Keogh to give Bells Beach Surf Shop the ...

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... Victorian agency so that they could take advantage of the summer boom.
'Claw' Warbrick managed to secure Plastic Machine #4 for his protege Wayne Lynch, commonly regarded as the most exciting young surfer in Australia, and a board numbered in the twenties for himself, but there was already a long waiting list and he had to return to Victoria and wait for delivery. Warbrick recalls: 'When our boards finally arrived everyone was blown away.
WIthin two days we had a hundred orders for them but Keyo couldn't supply for months.
It was a ridiculous situation.
My partners, Brian Singer and Terry Wall, and I had a discussion and decided we'd have to go to the knock-off blokes.
Brian drove to Sydney the next day to cut a deal.'

Singer, who when he wasn't running a surf shop was teaching at Lorne High (or more likely missing class to surf with his star pupil, Wayne Lynch), contracted veteran shaper Bill Wallace to produce a version of the Plastic Machine, but Wallace was also suffering from a backlog of summer orders, and ultimately Singer was forced to go to the relatively untried Shane Surfboards.
Shane Stedman had started out a couple of years earlier in landlocked Eastwood, building decidedly uncool surfboards for the mass market.
But the affable Stedman was a competent craftsman and a great marketer, and when he finally made the move to 'surfboards central' at Brookvale, he went after the market, signing big names, playing the psychedelic game and creating a big enough production facility to take on the surfboard establishment.
Singer shook hands with him on a deal to supply boards for the Victorian market.
In Noosa in the winter of 1967, Claw Warbrick had been fascinated by one of the Hayden boards that McTavish had built as he edged closer to defIning his new concept.
The board was certainly shorter and wider than most, but it was still a standard longboard, a fact that McTavish had attempted to disguise by getting a local artist to design a logo in the drug-haze style of Sydney artist Martin Sharp's Disraeli Gears album cover for the super-group Cream.
(If the shape wasn't quite there, at least the graphics would be!)
Under the logo, McTavish had placed the words 'Hot Kid Rip Board', a kind of ...

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... obscure shorthand combination of words that might be seen as the free-flowing verbiage of someone tripping on LSD... or so McTavish hoped.
In fact, the slogan went nowhere, but Warbrick remembered it, and when he took delivery of his own personal Plastic Machine, he had Torquay artist Simon Buttonshaw paint a flower power emblem on the deck.
All hippie art needed words, so Warbrick and Buttonshaw brainstormed and came up with a slogan in homage to the McTavish original- 'Rip Curl Hot Dog'.

When Brian Singer returned to Torquay with the news of his contract surfboard deal with Shane, the partners had to hurriedly decide on a graphic logo and a slogan that could be sent to the Brookvale decal guru, Jim the Printer, before the first boards were glassed.
Simon Buttonshaw came up with a mushroom cloud logo that all agreed looked great, but, recalls Warbrick: 'The original words from my board didn't fit, and we kind of felt they were too American anyway.
So we dispensed with the 'hot dog' part, and that left us with 'rip curl'.
None of us thought it was that brilliant, but you've got to remember, there was a lot of shit going around at the time, so it wasn't that bad either.'

Rip Curl Surfboards were manufactured under licence by Shane Surfboards until late 1968, when the Torquay partners went into production for themselves, using Singer's garage as their first factory.

Jarratt, Phil :  Salts and Suits - How a bunch of surf bums created a multi-billion dollar industry ... and almost lost it. Hardie Grant Books  85 High Street Prahan, Victoria, 3181, Australia, 2010. This copy provided courtesy of Paul Flack.