Here’s a stringerless Keyo Plastic Machine I’m hoping to put in the show. Why…? Well back in early 1967, Bob McTavish and Nat Young had been working on a board able to pivot and carve from a single standing position. They came up with a wide tailed, vee bottomed, narrow foiled, short board, around 8 foot, dubbed the Plastic Machine.
This was the beginning of the end for malibu style boards and the cruisy Californian ‘down the line’ attitude. Before heading off to Hawaii that year, Bob and Nat knocked out a couple of gunned up versions suitable for heavy winter swells. Unfortunately they were wrong. The boards bombed at Sunset Beach and there were plenty of long swims.
McTavish at Honolua ’67 photo courtesy johnwitzig.com.au
However, later at Honolua Bay, on Maui, the new shortboards ripped – with their springy Greenough fins, stubbie form and ‘v’ keeled hulls allowing Bob and Nat to slice ably along the steep walled barrels and put themselves in places no riders had ever been before. Within a few months the McTavish shortboard, sped up with a few US tail and rail treatments, had over-run the Californian coast. And surfing was never the same again.