Start to finish, what's involved...

Ordering a custom McTavish from McTavish Surfboards on Vimeo.

Check this out and you will see the whole process and have an understanding of what is involved and the man hours and skills involved in building your board. Or if you want to do it yourself , what you have ahead of you. In my mind one of the best , most complete videos of this whole process. Now you will understand why a board costs what it does , when you see how many man hours goes into building a board.

Bob's getting funky

5ft 4" Mini Simmons

Fabric on the tail , nice ...

Spotted in Byron Bay a McTavish Simmons ?

Thanks Soul Arch

The Bobsled by Bob Mctavish

After nearly a decade of FISH boards getting us long boarders back on shorter equipment, there is a new solution on the horizon… The BOBSLED!

Fishes are fine if you surf them flat, and are happy to move your back foot around between manouvres, so you can get power into those fins right out on the rail. But if you wanna jam more VERTICAL, the fish doesn’t really wanna go there. The BOBSLED solves this problem by pulling the tail width in, and closing up the fin-spread, allowing you to snap from rail-to-rail instantly without moving your foot to find a point to dominate your fins. In other words, the Bobsled surfs like a regular board, but with paddle power supplied by a wider mid and nose template, like a fish.

But how do you make a wider board roll fast onto it’s rail so it can go vertical? The answer there is the classic McTavish bottom shape: Concave down the centre for LIFT, then BEVELS along the underside rails to soften it’s feel… instead of a cranky flat or full rail-to-rail concave, the bevels make the board feel NARROWER, and allow easy banking onto the rail into the turn.

The RAILS are boxy, carrying more paddling VOLUME out to the edges where thay can displace some water. No point in having a board measure 3.5 inches thick in the centre if the deck is heavily rolled, shedding all the volume and creating an uncomfortable rolled feel underfoot.

The fin set-up is pure QUAD, the fastest, best feeling combo on the planet! (But only if you get the fin-spread right, as we do. We’ve tested our quad spread on our team, from young short-board shredders all the way to us older vast experienced surf designers.)

LENGTHS are ranging from 5’5 (like the one I made for Slater) all the way up to the mid sevens. It’s that VERSATILE.

The BOBSLED… The new bankable, fast reactive high-speed shorter-board from the McTavish Team.