I just pulled a 9 ft hp longboard out of a trash pile in my neighbors front yard. It has got its share of battle damage... busted up tail along the rail line and a fist size hole in the rail... but nothing some wax and duct tape cant fix (not worth a permanent fix since materials have been had to come by lately and PU boards die here anyway). I had just been thinking about how I wanted one so I could do the LB division too at the local contest. Not that I have any chance of winning at LB or shortboard but a $20 entry fee is a small price to surf HH to DOH barreling waves with 3 other people out, a tee shirt, and a post contest throw down. I have also scored in the past from trash piles a 6 ft BZ foamie, a 70s 5"5 Frierson winged round tail twin (looks like what a lot of companies are putting out now in the shorter is better revolution), and a boxy railed Jim Fuller WRV 6 ft Roundtail (My personal garbage picker favorite that I rode through college).Who else has scored boards from the trash pile?
way to go man, i know where you're coming from. i moved to nj from brazil when i was 16 and didnt have money for a board and went a year and half without surfing it was torture. one day i went to the park and saw some kids throwing a surfboard around in the mud that they had pulled out of a dumpster. i told them i wanted the board and took it home. it was a 6'0" epoxy "flyboard" that had been custom made in manasquan for someone name katherine or katie my uncle helped me fix the busted tail and noise and i used that board for a year and a half after that
it wasnt from the trash but i got a wrv fish from a yardsale for 15 bucks. tail was in bad shape,had multiple small rail dings and the nose had been broken,repaired badly and broken again. some leftover cloth and rez from my brothers shaping shed, a couple hours work and its one of my go to boards.aint much to look at but thats the last thing im worried about
I don't know but if you go to the dumpster behind dunkin at the end of the night you can get free donuts.
my first board was a trash picker special...i was all of 8, i think. nose busted off, tail split open, numerous deck & rail dings. the thing was FUGLY. i took it home to my dad & said, "hey, can you fix this?" he just laughed at me & got his ding repair toolbox out. i stood up on my first wave (on a real surfboard!) 2 days later...i don't remember what kind it was, just that it was some POS late 70's/early 80's single fin...dark green rails & pale green deck, super rockered out nose, thick boxy rails. super floaty, though, so easy to paddle & impossible for my skinny-@$$ 8 year old self to carry. i must've dropped it every other session.
i bought a gary linden 6' swallow tail of some guy for $20 bucks. it was "unfixable" after a weeks of work i had it water tight. i absolutly LOVE that board. shes not pretty but that board is magic. i think the fact that i spent so much time repairing it is what gives me such a connection with the board. one mans junk is another mans treasure
Never plucked a board from the garbage. However, I have found an old McCoy 6'8" single fin under a house I was working on years back. It's on someone's wall now. I also found a 1979 Yamaha TT 175 trials bike in the shed of an abandoned house that was about to be demolished...... It's all complete, haven't tried to get it to run yet though
Sick! Gotta love free stuff. Me and my friends used to go dumpster diving back in middle and high school at the university in our town at the end of the semester when everyone was moving out. People would throw out stuff they couldnt fit in their car or whatever to take back home. We got a ton of Playstation and Super Nintendo games and all kinds of stereos and electronics. My favorite find was an old Sega game gear with a bunch of games, that thing was classic...
My first board was a 6'2 T&C Surf Designs thruster from the mid 80s pulled out of the trash can. It really wasn't in bad condition in all. It had some dings and wasn't definitely rode hard, but it was still water tight and had fins and rails in all right shape. Now at 10 years old it was a steep learning curve on that thing, but it was a free board. Free is for me. And along the lines of dumpster diving, anybody ever go "miles hunting". My friends dad was a big time thrifty, and on Saturday mornings we'd drive around the neighborhood looking for packs of Marlboros on the ground and take the miles of the packs. We'd end up with 500 miles or more usually and save em up for the big payday, haha.
My first board in Hawaii was really thick/wide 6'6" T&C that I found on the side of my roomates girlfiends house. She didn't surf and sold it to me for $20. A few months went by before I cleaned and truley reapaired it only to find out it was a Ben Aipa. I surf with it for about 2 years before going up to the factory to upgrade. It was a sick shape that I would bring to the outer islands, etc. Locals always wanted to try it out. I still have it.
Ya, we'd drive around the highways and local roads ripping the miles off the packs. You'd be surprised at how many people littered their ciggy packs, and didn't collect their miles. I don't think people litter them as much nowadays, but back then I'd find em everywhere. I scored some sweet gear thanks to Marlboro.
I found my first 3 boards in people trash within a week, different trash cans too! all were beat up pretty bad but they were free so nothing a little suncure couldn't hold together. first one was a 6'0" ultra light thruster, then a 6'1" pretty old school single fin wrv, then a pretty old school 6'6" twin fish. the thruster got destroyed in a hurricane. but the other 2 i still surf
