FOUR BY FOUR
PHIL USHER
PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE FAR NORTH COAST BY ANDREW SHIELD
MICHAEL CARSON
PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE NSW SOUTH COAST BY RAY COLLINS
COREY GRAHAM
PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE SURF COAST BY ULA MAJEWSKI
DALE WILSON
PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE GC BY ANDREW SHIELD
PHIL
THE COL SMITH CHANNEL
We were just doing normal pintails and round tails and stuff like that in the late ’70s period. I’d known Col for quite a few years before he became famous. Anyway, we met up and decided we were going to do the “Col Smith channel design.” He came up from Redhead, and we started doing them. We used my templates, and he showed me how to put the channels in. We ended up selling heaps of those boards over a three-year period. We did six, eight and 10 channels and the visiting Hawaiians rode them in the contests and stuff. So it was an exciting time. This board’s a 1980 model. A few channels from this era get ridden in the Burleigh Single Fin comp these days. I’ve never actually been up there for the comp. This one was in there last year and quite a few of them have made the finals. Harrison Roach and Mitch Crews rode this one, and that DJ fella, Paul Fisher rode another one from this time.
THE EDGE
This is what I call an Edge Board. George Greenough talked me into trying it. I was a little bit apprehensive at first, but it’s certainly turned out to be an exciting thing to ride. This one’s my son’s, its 5’8”, 20½” and 2⅝”. It’s got a double rocker almost – there’s a middle planing area, which is flatter. And I run vee through the tail and onto the edge. And when you stand on that vee and turn on that, the board will go around more than a normal board. Everyone that’s ridden them says that the boards actually feel smaller than what they are. I’ll put them in all sorts of different stuff from guns to longboards, to fishes and modern short boards. And everyone’s been very happy with them.
’90s ROCK
I’d started making what I call the Vent System, which is a deep double concave with a tail channel. Some of them had channels in the middle as well, following the rail curve. There were three different types of them. Barton Lynch had ridden some of them, and he got me
