Surf City, Sydney

both photos from Feb 67 Surfing World magazine

I wonder what made this curious stuff work or, more precisely, stick? I’m told by waxheads slightly older than me that slipcheck panels and chequerboard designs were applied with stencils to the forward areas of the board to aid in pulling off nose rides and assist judges watching from the beach. It was the oil companies in the mid 60s that first sensed the commerical potential of wax sold in cakes, although surfers had long known the advantages of household parrifin, mixed with a little olive or machine oil, to reduce deck slippage. Earlier on, brave surfers added a nipple chafing sprinkle of sand to their plywood deck varnish. Don’t recall seeing aerosol wax around the traps in the early 70s.