I've owned thousands of surfboards, but never bought any of them. I've made them all except one. That was my first surfboard and I got it when I was a junior in high school back in 1964. While in wood shop class, I made a miniature surfboard 3' long. It was made out of Walnut and Ash complete with 3 stringers, tail block, and a laminated checkerboard skeg. I made a clock out of it. The local surf shop owner, Norman Ritchie of West Coast East Surf Shop, liked it so much that he swapped me a brand new custom surfboard for it. While watching Dick Catri and Gene Eschenbrenner, two of the hot shapers of the area, shaping Walker Foam surfboard blanks into West Coast East surfboards, I realized that I was really stoked seeing surfboards being created before my eyes. I wanted to be able to do that too! Gene was a great and talented guy and taught me a lot. He would make up names for the building process and I would write them down so I wouldn't forget. Dick, who had recently come from Hawaii knew all of the current ways that the surfboards were being built in the Islands. Slowly, I too, learned how to do all the different phases of surfboard construction. About a year after high school, I started my own surfboard shop and have been officially building Bud Gardner Surfboards since May 6, 1966. At first, like many other surfboard builders before me, I built the whole surfboard myself, but as custom orders started to stack up, I had to have help so I taught and trained guys how to fiberglass, sand, and finish surfboards like the way I was taught, passing the building process along. I have personally shaped and colored every Bud Gardner Surfboard ever made and I had a lot of talented craftsmen help me build them for more than 40 years, guys like Joel "Red" Raff, Fred Grosskreutz, Dave "Davo" Dedrick, and Ed "ET" Towns, some of the best fiberglass laminators in the industry, Larry Pope of LP Glass, perhaps the best surfboard sander in the world, Joe "J.R." Roberts, one of the best surfboard polishers that ever buffed a board, to name a few.
To stay in the surfboard industry for more than 4 decades, one has to adapt and diversify. Although I now specialize in building the fanciest longboards which usually wind up hanging on the wall as art, through the years, I've built every shape and size that the custom customer could imagine. I am currently taking custom orders for a limited, very classic special board with every option available. It's hard to beat my impressively equipped, "Bitchin' Edition" model. This special five stringer surfboard has
four side stringers and a 2" Balsawood center stringer with matching nose and tail blocks, fiberglass tips and a wood removable fin. I do all the construction on the "Bitchin' Edition" models just so I can give each one that little extra TLC and personal attention. It's just about impossible to get a Clark Foam blank with this stringer combination today so replacement of the blank is not an option. I still have a nice supply of Clark Foam blanks, sizes from 9' 3" to 10' 3", but only 5 of them have the "Bitchin' Edition" stringers. These are the last of the fabulous Clark Foam blanks made before they went out of business. When they are gone, they are gone forever.
Over the years I've spun off other products that are surfboard oriented, 2' scaled and detailed miniature surfboards, surfboard clocks, 5' scaled and detailed longboard tables and even turned hatch covers off of old World War II Liberty ships into nautical resin coated tables. My proudest spin off are my paintings, my resin on fiberglass art. When I started building surfboards back in 1966, the surfboard industry had only one way of applying color and that was by brushing colored resin on the sanded fiberglass surface of the surfboard. To do this, one had to know how to have control over the hardening of the resin. After the catalyst (hardener) is added to the colored resin, there is only a few minutes time before the liquid resin hardens completely. If the right amount of catalyst is not added and mixed properly, the colored resin will not harden. After the design was painted on the surfboard, the board was then coated with clear gloss resin and polished. The surfboard industry no longer paints its designs with colored resin. Surfboards are now sprayed with latex paint on the finished shaped blank under the fiberglass. Painting with colored resin is now practically a lost art. I mastered this lost art media and first started making resin on fiberglass paintings in 1972. I start with my own designed "fiberglass canvas". They have beveled edges, rounded corners and are 1 thick. To paint the art on them, I apply the same techniques I learned when painting surfboards with colored resin. I use both opaque and transparent tint pigments mixed with polyester resin. After all the art is applied, my paintings are then glossed with clear resin and polished. My paintings have a look and feel that is unique and all their own. Some of my paintings have been on display at the Melbourne Beach, Florida public library since the first day it opened. To see my paintings, go to Google.com and then type in Bud Gardner Surfboards. The site shows not only my surfboards and paintings, but many of my other beautiful items that I create in my "Green Room Art Studio", where everything created is made out of foam, wood, fiberglass and resin. My latest resin on fiberglass paintings are the bar tops in the Longdoggers Restaurants in the Melbourne area and the newest one in Daytona Beach. Each section of the 35' bar has detailed renditions of my surfboards painted in colored resin, glossed and polished.
I really get stoked when I make my fancy classic longboards. It is my passion and my tradition. Making surfboards with all the bells and whistles is a challenge to my creativity and eliminates the boring part of this my filthy, hazardous to my health career. The harder and fancier the custom customer wants it made, the better I like it and the less it's like work to me. That must have been the attitude of the original surfboard craftsman, the ones that came before me because those guys sure produced a lot of beautiful longboards that are the classic collectibles of today.
Bud Gardner's motto is "To Ride Great, To Look Bitchin' and to be Treasured for a Long Time".
Bud Gardner is one of the original 1960's surfboard builders still building surfboards today and has just been nominated for induction into the 2008 East Coast Hall of Fame under the Pioneer Surfboard Builders division.
To reach Bud Gardner go to..
Google.com (type in) Bud Gardner Surfboards
Email address: bgardsurfb@aol.com
Phone: (321) 676-1587
P.O. Box 510322
Melbourne Beach, FL 32951
My Wonderful Woodie by Bud Gardner
It was just before summer in 1965. I had learned to surf two years
earlier when the surfing craze first hit the east coast. Surfing was the coolest thing around and it caught on like wildfire. Because I lived on Miami Beach,
it was easy for me to visit and hang out at the local surfboard factories of
which there were two. I got to know all the surfboard builders who had
moved from California to Florida. These guys were real cool and were
considered heroes to all the locals. They taught some of these local guys the
surfboard building process. It was considered a real honor to watch them
build surfboards. Slowly I too learned the building process from these
surfboard craftsmen and I wound up building custom surfboards for over the
next 40 years. One of them drove out from California in the first Woodie I
ever saw with it's spare tire mounted in the front fender. It was a 1941 Packard and it had a real fancy hood ornament. The driver's door must have dry
rotted away because they replaced it with one made out of plywood. All the
rear windows were plastered with different surfboard decals. With boards
sticking out of the back door, it certainly was a surfer's set of wheels. It was
beat up, had over 150,00 miles on her and smoked as it ran down Ocean
Avenue. I thought it was so bitchin' that I had to have one.
Every day I searched the newspapers trying to locate a woodie,but with
no luck. Even in 1965, they were scarce and hard to find. Then I had a good
idea. I asked my Dad for help. He drove a cab all around Miami for over 30
years and I believed he knew just about everyone. A couple of days later he
surprised me with the address and name of the person who was selling a 1949
Ford woodie. It was located about 35 miles away in south Miami. My Dad
thought it was a long way to go to see an old car, but he took me the next
day. As we finally turned down the right street, she wasn't hard to spot. She
stuck out like an old woodie should. She was painted a light pale green and
all the wood was painted grey primer. This made it hard, if not impossible to
see the condition of the wood, but I wanted it anyway. I paid the man the
hard earned sum of $135.00. Since I didn't yet know how to drive a stick
shift, my Dad drove the woodie and I drove his automatic. We drove almost
20 miles when the tired woodie's motor died. We had it towed to a garage
and left it there for a mechanic to put in another motor. This new old motor was an over-head-cam flat head six. This was a good motor and it ran real smooth. When we finally got it home, Dad put me through "manual shifting training" and I learned how to drive a 3 speed -on the column- stick shift.
Now I had my woodie, a surfboard, and a little knowledge of how to
build custom surfboards. I had just graduated from high school and I decided
to go to Surboard College, which really meant that I got a job working in a
surf shop in the Cocoa Beach, Florida area. My woodie would take me and
my friends and all of our boards to the local surf spots. We'd go down to
Sebastian Inlet and then go north to Shark Pit, Indialantic, R.C's (when Royal
Castle Burgers were still there), and to my favorite spot, Cocoa Beach Pier.
We could always count on my woodie to get us to the waves and home again.
All through the summer, between surfing and building surfboards, I
worked on my woodie, slowly stripping and sanding the grey primer off the
wood. There was some rotted wood, but I made new pieces to replace the
rotted ones. By summer's end, all the wood was varnished, the metal was
painted red primer, and the windows were covered with all kinds of surfboard
decals. It now sported a tachometer, whitewall tires, and a miniature chrome
piston for a gear shift knob.
On a surf trip to St. Augustine, my woodie broke down on the highway.
It had ran out of water and overheated. I waited until she cooled and filled it
up from a big puddle beside the road. Then I stuffed the rolled up sock back
into the radiator in place of the cap I didn't have. My two friends and I were
anxious to get on our way, but the motor still wouldn't start. We tried to push
start it down the highway with the cars whizzing by at 75- 90 miles per hour,
we were in the right hand lane pushing as fast as we could hoping it would
start. Just as she fired up, a highway patrolman pulled us over. He gave me a
ticket for pushing a vehicle on a public highway. He left and we were once
again on our way. I had to return to the area for traffic court for this offence. Being only 18 and the first time in court, I sat very nervously as I waited for my turn. I watched the judge give out $100.00 fines and jail sentences one after the other. I didn't know what to expect when he finally got to me. After 2 hours of watching this judge give out stiff fines and even sometimes screaming at the drunken and reckless drivers, my turn came. He started to read my case out loud and he and all the people in court started to giggle and laugh. But he didn't think it was funny for long and started to scold the highway patrolman who gave me the ticket and told him he should have
helped me instead of wasting the court's time. He fined me $1.00 or one hour
in jail. I paid the buck and was out of there.
By September of 1965, the surf shop which I worked for was slowly
going out of business. The owner couldn't afford to pay me in money, but he
paid me off in surfboard materials and I built my first five surfboards with my
own label on them, one for me and four to sell. With Hurricane Betsy on the
way, I decided to move back to Miami. Loaded down with all my boards
and all my stuff, me and my woodie raced home. Pushed by hurricane winds,
we flew down the turnpike at 85 miles an hour and outran the hurricane to
reach Mom and Dad's house safely. The next day when I unloaded my stuff,
my Mom came out and took pictures. One of them was of me in front of my
first four boards leaning against my woodie. Thirty years later, I gave a copy
of that photo to a friend who collected old surf photos. Somehow the photo
ended up in Universal Pictures production of "Flipper", made in 1996
starring Paul Hogan and Elijah Wood. The producer must have thought it
was perfect for their needs.
In the very beginning of the
movie, it is on the screen
with a zoom up shot for
nine seconds. The photo
took up the whole screen.
Universal Pictures used it
without my permission.
I tried to get them to pay
me for using it in their
movie, but they refused.
The lawyers told me that
going to court up against
a big movie company
is not easy and it would take
lots of money and years to
get compensation if anything
at all.
My woodie started to smoke a little after outrunning the hurricane. I
guess I burned something out going 85 miles an hour, but as long as I kept
enough oil in the motor, she ran o.k. About 6 months later, I started my own
surfboard factory and on May 6, 1966 I was in business.
One day while delivering some surfboards to a shop in south Miami,
my woodie had a flat in all four tires. One after another, they went flat. I'd
put the spare on and get the flat fixed. A couple of miles down the road,
another tire would go flat. I finally had to be towed home. My Dad advised
me, "Get rid of that bomb and get something you can count on". Now that I
was in business, I needed a van. So my old woodie took second place for my
transportation. I always meant to fix it up and put another motor in it and
new tires on it, but not long after it was painted canary yellow, while parked
in the front of the house, some drunken driver sideswiped my woodie and put
an end to her. She was smashed from the back bumper, all along the left side
ripping into the wood and tearing off the front bumper. All the side windows
containing classic surfboard decals were gone. The stearing wheel and my
left front tire was squashed in. I couldn't believe it. My wonderful woodie
which gave me so many good times was dead. I kept it for another year not
wanting to give up on her, hating to let it go, but she became an eyesore, and
pressure from my Dad to, "get rid of that junker" was mounting. So it went
the way of alot of woodies in the past - being towed away to the auto
graveyard.
I've had many vans during the 40 odd years of building custom
surfboards. My current maxi van can carry 30 of my classic noseriding
longboards. It has automatic transmission, air conditioning, and can cruise
easily at 80 miles an hour, but it will never take the place and the love that I
had for my old and wonderful '49 Ford woodie.
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