"The Pipeliners: How Dick Brewer Bookended an Era," by Mark Fragale, Longboard, Sept 1998

On rare occasions, a series of events involving people, places and ideas comes together and produces greatness. Such was the case in Dick Brewer's brief but fruitful pairing with Bing Surfboards.

In the winter of '66-'67, reports were filtering into California of Dick Brewer's new and innovative surfboard designs coming out of Hawaii. Moreover, Brewer had a following of top-name surfers riding his boards. Duke Boyd, Bing Copeland's close friend and advisor, was quick to acknowledge these developments and urged Copeland to offer Brewer a place at Bing Surfboards.

Brewer had recently completed a short run with his Dick Brewer Model big-wave gun for Hobie Surfboards, and was anxious to pursue new and different designs. Further Brewer-Hobie combines were nipped in the bud, however. Brewer recalls, "I requested R&D money that I desperately wanted to further develop my speed and gun designs, and ultimately launch my mini-gun project. Hobie had elected not to fund the endeavor and I decided to set out on my own.

"In the summer of '66, without a contract [to any board manufacturer], I flew to California to check things out. I was friends with the crew at Harbour Surfboards: Greg Tucker, Steve Bigler, Dean Elliott and Mike Marshall. They hooked me up with Rich Harbour and I worked there as a production shaper, shaping between 100 and 150 Trestle Specials. That was a board I really believed in. The rocker was correct in every detail, kicked in the nose and flowing evenly throughout. Just magical! They were relatively lightweight due to the decreased volume of the narrow template. The Trestle Special would play a significant role in the eventual development of the Bing Pipeliner."

During Brewer's short stint at Harbour, he also worked with Steve Bigler on the Cheater model and produced guns for Mark Martinson, Jock Sutherland and Jackie Eberle. Brewer liked everything about Harbour Surfboards except its Seal Beach location, and he made it clear from the beginning that he would be returning to Hawaii at the end of summer. Before leaving California, David Nuuhiwa had convinced Brewer to stop by to see Bing. While the meeting was favorable, no deal was made.

Brewer returned to Maui where he and Buddy Boy Keohi built boards under the Lahaina Surf Design logo (LSD). West Maui and Honolua Bay in particular were the fertile testing grounds for the new Brewer designs.

In the fall of '67, Bing Copeland and Duke Boyd flew to Maui on a mission to recruit Brewer to Bing Surfboards. This time around, things moved forward. As part of the deal, Bing made arrangements with Surfline Hawaii's proprietor Fred Schwartz and backer Jimmy Pflueger. (Surfline was a Bing dealer at the time.) This would give Brewer a Hawaiian base to produce surfboards under the Bing label. A contract was signed.

To welcome Brewer into the Bing fold, Copeland and Boyd bought a new Skil 100 planer as a gift. They wanted to have it chromed-plated, but the casing material was better suited to high-luster polishing; the result was a gleaming tribute to both the tool and the shaper.

Thanks to a Bing Surfboards surf magazine ad campaign, Brewer's new gleaming-silver planer became a powerful marketing tool, defining Dick as the surfing world's first media-hyped star designer. The Hawaiian connection was pushed via the inclusion of a plumeria motif. David Nuuhiwa was the surfer most frequently associated with the Brewer-Bing program.

Brewer's first focus at Bing was to bring his designs into the mainstream, and not just Hawaii. The Bing Pipeliner was the way to go.

Although it was never formalized, Brewer had described both his Surfboards Hawaii and Hobie guns as "Pipeliners"—Surfboards Hawaii was the North Shore-based company Brewer founded in 1961—and they all used roughly the same adjusted template. He officially tagged the design "The Pipeliner" after he jumped over to Bing Surfboards.

The Pipeliner was available in three models, all with their own identifying laminate: the Pipeliner (referred to as the "Standard," or "Pipeliner East" for units shipped to that region), the Island Semi, and the Island Gun.

All models shared the same stringer design: a redwood center strip with offsets available in a choice of white or blue high density foam or wood T-bands. This was a carryover from his earlier design with Hobie, but the stringers were scaled down in width and material to reflect a growing desire for lighter boards.

Brewer credits Greg Noll Surfboards for ushering in lightweight foam blanks. "Greg Noll was blowing his own foam and experimenting with lightweight densities," Brewer remembers. "I recall seeing several examples produced by shaper Rick James of lightweight beachbreak boards that really stirred my imagination."

From the beginning, the Pipeliner was a game-changer. It shifted the parameters in which big-wave guns and speed designs would be designed and judged and did so in a very short period of time.

Brewer was certainly not the first gun specialist. John Severson wrote in the December 1963 issue of Surfer that it was Pat Curren who first built "big guns for the big surf; Curren recognized the need for a tool or weapon with which to tackle the heavies." Peter Dixon, contributing writer with Peterson's Surfing Magazine, and author of several period surfing books credits Joe Quigg with the first gun. George Downing was also very much involved in the process.

However, the design axioms of big guns made before the Pipeliner mandated that the boards be long, thick and heavy. Brewer was the person who broke away and challenged these long-standing criteria.

The Pipeliner Island Gun model was, in essence, the first lightweight big-gun surfboard. Spurred by his riders, furthermore, Brewer's designs were able to keep pace with changes occurring at the fastest rate in surfboard design history.

Brewer made a few trips to California to shape Pipeliners. "Brewer was very selective about who would be allowed to shape boards with his name and design," says Copeland. "Lead shaper Dan Bendicksen likely produced most of the Pipeliners built in California.”

Dan Bendicksen says, "I remember working on a short ran of Pipeliners. Larry Felker and Wayne Land shaped several Pipeliners too, but for the most part Brewer was the main source. We were busy producing the Nuuhiwa series: boards more suited for our East and West Coast customers." (Note: the Nuuhiwa Noserider and the Nuuhiwa Lightweight models were both being made at the same time as the Pipeliner.)

While in California, Brewer remembers heading south to Mexico with Joey Cabell and Jeff Hakman to test a few Pipeliners out. The trip was significant in that Cabell and Hakman helped convince Brewer to go even lighter with his boards. Clark Foam did a run of light foam for the Pipeliner and the Nuuhiwa Lightweight at the same time. To Brewer's recollection, they may have first pushed the foam density into the 2.5 lb. range, which proved too light for an acceptable strength-to-weight ratio. They settled at a 3 lb. density for the remainder of the Pipeliner run. The lightweight blanks featured a rocker design with a flat midsection and pronounced kick in the nose and tail. This became a vital part of Brewer's gun design criteria.

Meanwhile, as the boards got lighter, the fin design was changing as well. Early Pipeliners featured a wide-based 10.5" skeg with a high surface area. Jimmy Lucas and Brewer whittled away at this size until they had a 'new moon' shape that had a 5.5" base and 10.5" depth. This raised the performance of the Pipeliners significantly. Back in California, Jock Sutherland and David Nuuhiwa found the board worked better still with a larger base and less depth.

In the summer of 1967, Nuuhiwa broke the nose off of his Pipeliner. Brewer and Randy Rarick were working at Surfline Hawaii. Rarick suggested they round off the nose to create a 7' 8” board with a gun tail and a blunt nose. The board performed so well at Chunn's Reef that Brewer incorporated the design into his offerings. The repaired surfboard became the prototype for the Bing Lotus model. Brewer credits Rarick for the discovery, and flew to California to design both the Lotus and the Pintail.

In the winter of '67-'68, the Aussies came to Hawaii to participate in the Duke Classic. On the North Shore of Oahu, pintails were the accepted surfboard design. In West Maui and in a pocket of Australia, things were different.

After the Duke contest, the crew from Down Under came to Honolua Bay with their short deep-vee "plastic machine" boards. Bob McTavish and George Greenough and others were experimenting with new designs in Australia, while in Hawaii Brewer and his crew were focused on miniguns. In other words, Brewer and his crew were working the shortboard from a different angle.

Honolua Bay was ground zero. Local surfer and Brewer rider Leslie Potts was tearing the Bay wide open on a minigun that could trace its origins directly to the Pipeliner. What would be the ramifications from the showdown about to play out on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far from the surf media hot seats in Southern California?

The rivalry with the Aussies was friendly, as Brewer and McTavish shared a shaping room in Lahaina and spent hours together talking design. McTavish's influence would be clearly visible in the new Brewer-made miniguns and Pipeliners: the Island Gun, Island Semi, and Mini-Gun all had a light vee in the tail.

Brewer remembers flying to Oahu to shape Pipeliners at Surfline, only to return to Maui to shape miniguns in the same week. Other surfboard makers, and the American surf media itself, had meanwhile not yet embraced the shortboard.

Back on the Mainland, the established surf industry was attempting to make sense of these events—Bing included. The best example is the 1968 Bing Surfboards brochure, which featured standard longboards harkening back to the mid-'60, alongside the Pipeliner, the Lotus, and the Australian V Bottom models.

By the summer of 1968, the, transition to shorter, and lighter boards was well and truly under way. The ripple effect of the Brewer Pipeliner design would be felt well into the next era .

Bing Pipeliner Fact Sheet, by Mark Fragale

PRODUCTION SITES: Bing Surfboards (California), Surfline Hawaii (Honolulu)

SHAPERS: Dick Brewer and Gerry Lopez (Hawaii); Dan Bendicksen, Larry Felker, Wayne Land (California)

 Also referred to as the "Standard", with the "Pipeliner East" offered on the U.S. East Coast.) A small wave speed shape with 60/40 rails. Both pintail and square tail featured the wide point aft of center.
Size: 9'4” to 10'
Nose 15.5"
Tail 13.75"
Width 21.5"

 A semi-gun with dropped rails in the tail and drawn high in the nose. Wide point 6" forward of centerline.
Size: 9'8"- 10'2"
Nose: 14.5"
Tail: 12”
Width: 20.5"

 A pintail full gun with a flat bottom in the tail and slight roll forward, with rails drawn high in the nose area. Wide point 10" forward of centerline.
Size: 9' 10"-10'
Nose: 14"
Tail: 10"
Width: 20.5”.

NOTE: Following Bob McTavish's visit to Honolua Bay in November of 1967, all Pipeliners build in Hawaii featured vee in the tail at Honolua Bay, Maui, Hawaii.

GLASSING: Early Pipeliners had two layers of 10-ounce Volan-finish cloth top and bottom. Later boards made in Hawaii had a double-layer 10-ounce deck and single 10-ounce bottom.

FOAM: Clark foam exclusively. Early boards used 4.4-pound density foam, late boards use 3-pound.

WEIGHT: Up to 32 pounds for early Pipeliners, as light as 19 pounds for later models.

FIN: Glass-on fin for Hawaii-produced Island Semis & Island Guns. California boards had either a removable fin system, or a glass-on.

TAILBLOCK: Non-standard; available on custom request.

STRINGER: Redwood center strip with t-band offsets or reverse t-bands. High-density foam t-bands available in blue or white.

COLOR: Boards were typically clear. Bottom-and-rail tint on request.

Bing Surfboards: Fifty Years of Craftsmanship and Innovation,

Dick Brewer made his first visit to Hawaii and quickly proved his mettle in big waves. The following year he moved there permanently. During the winter of ’61-’62, he opened Surfboards Hawaii in Haleiwa—the first surf shop on Oahu’s North Shore. Mentored by Bob Shepherd, Mike Diffenderfer and others, Brewer had already begun shaping, mostly big-wave guns. When Buffalo Keaulana won the Makaha International on a Brewer-shaped board in 1961, his reputation was virtually assured and in short order he was making boards for some of Hawaii’s top riders—big wave specialists like Buzzy Trent and Eddie Aikau, and hot up-and-comers like Jeff Hakman and Reno Abellira.

But in 1964 a labor strike cut off the supply of blanks and resin to Hawaii. Starved of materials, Brewer returned to the Mainland to work, and by the time Bing Copeland considered offering him a deal with Bing Surfboards in 1967, Brewer had done stints with both Hobie and Harbour on the West Coast. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Jeff Hakman had won the 1965 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational at Sunset Beach on a Brewer-shaped Surfboards Hawaii gun, and North Shore surfer Jock Sutherland had come to California to take second place in the 1966 World Championships riding a Brewer-shaped Harbour Cheater, while Steve Bigler took fourth, also on a Brewer-shaped board.

In the shaping room, Brewer’s clout was already beyond argument.

But getting him working under the Bing Surfboards label would be no easy task. Brewer had just returned to Hawaii and set up shop on Maui under a new label, Lahaina Surf Designs, with Buddy Boy Kaohi. Brewer had left Hobie in a spat and it did not seem likely that he could be lured back to the Mainland. He’d told Rich Harbour that he’d be going back to Hawaii permanently at the end of the summer of ’66, which is what he’d done after shaping 100 boards for that Harbour.

Copeland reckoned his own connections at Surfline Hawaii, Bing’s Honolulu dealership, could provide a local base for Brewer to work from in Hawaii, and there was no reason why Bing’s skilled Californian shapers couldn’t turn out Brewer-designed models for the Mainland market if the two men could reach an agreement. Duke Boyd and Copeland strategized an offer that couldn’t be refused. As 1966 drew to a close, the two friends flew over to Maui to make their pitch.

Copeland says he knew the Brewer-Hobie relationship had fallen apart when the shaper had asked for extra money for R&D on top of the piecework rates he had been getting for shaping that were already twice that earned by some production shapers in the Hobie stable. Copeland decided he would more than double Hobie’s piecework rate for Brewer—to $50 per board shaped by Brewer himself—and guarantee a $25 royalty for any Brewer-designed model boards that were shaped by others on the Bing Surfboards team. Plus, Copeland would install an air-conditioning unit in Brewer's Surfline shaping room.

And then there was the ultimate deal sweetener—a brand new Skil 100 planer that had been so highly polished it shone like chrome. (It would have been chromed too, says Copeland, except that couldn’t be done to a cast aluminum tool.) The package pushed all the right buttons with Brewer—including his car-buff soft spot for shiny objects—and the two men signed a contract.

“He had a following even back then,” says Copeland, alluding to the fact that Brewer would go on to become an icon in surfboard design evolution. “He had the reputation and we wanted to link Bing Surfboards with that. And it worked very well.”

In fact, it can be argued that Dick Brewer's short run with Bing Surfboards consolidated the reputations of both the shaper and the label and placed both securely in the surfboard building hall of fame. Brewer had respect for Copeland’s abilities, too. “Bing Copeland was one of the better shapers in California,” Brewer has said. “His accuracy was impeccable.”

The surfboard models that caused all the sensation were the Brewer-designed Bing Pipeliner and its offspring, the Pintail Lightweight. The Pipeliners (there were three models) were essentially a variation on a big-wave gun template that Brewer had been using since 1962 for what he then called his Summer Semis. Under the Bing Surfboards label, the Pipeliners were advertised as “all-around speed shapes” for the intermediate to advanced surfer. The standard Pipeliner and its cousin, the Pipeliner East (so-called because it was aimed at the East Coast market), were wider and more full in the outline than the Pipeliner Island Semi and the Pipeliner Island Gun versions that were clearly made for bigger waves, being narrower and with the widest point 8"—10" further forward than the Mainland-oriented boards, resulting in reduced area in the tail, which featured hard, down rails. All of the boards were equipped with a wide-based, low area, swept-back fin. The Pipeliners also had accentuated nose and tail rocker, a highly-refined rail line and slightly rolled bottoms blended to flat in the tail area. The later Pipeliners would weigh between 22 and 25 lbs, which was light for the time. As Gerry Lopez has said: “The Pipeliners were like the zenith of the longboard era; they were more tuned, lighter, thinner and lots of rocker for back then. I rode one a lot at Honolua Bay, and it was really a good board.”

By the Spring of 1967, Bing Surfboards’ advertising in Surfer magazine had a new look—psychedelic artwork—and a new announcement—the Dick Brewer Pipeliner—in addition to its promotion of the Nuuhiwa Noserider. Along with new grist for the advertising mill, Brewer's association with the label brought some influential team riders over the Bing, including Jock Sutherland, Sam Hawk, and Reno Abellira

But bigger things were ahead for surfing and board design. And when the changes arrived they were fast, furious and confusing, resulting in an historical controversy that still rages to this day: who was really responsible for the shortboard revolution? The real answer, it seems, is to be found with a series of almost synchronous events in which Brewer and Bing Surfboards played a central role, but that also involved a number of other key characters, especially Australian shaper Bob McTavish and his Down Under cohort, Nat Young.

In the late summer of 1967, Dick Brewer shaped a 10' 10" Pipeliner Island Gun for David Nuuhiwa, who rode the board during an early-season swell on the North Shore of Oahu. The session was a disaster, with Nuuhiwa breaking the nose off the brand new board and losing the broken section, which was presumably swept away in the rip current. Distraught, Nuuhiwa took what was left of the board to Surfline to see if it could be salvaged or repaired. Surfline’s fin maker and ding fixer at the time was Randy Rarick, known then as “Speedpatch,” who has since gone on to become a well-known shaper in his own right, as well the longtime director of the annual Hawaiian Triple Crown professional surfing contests on Oahu’s North Shore.

Here’s how Rarick recalls the sequence of events involving Nuuhiwa’s broken board:

“RB [Brewer] had built a beautiful Pipeliner for David and he had broken about two and a half feet off the nose at Gas Chambers, right next to Rocky Point. He somehow lost the nose and brought the back two-thirds of the board to the repair shop. It was a flawless board with no dings—just missing the nose. On a whim, I took the board and peeled the glass back a couple of feet from the break. I then took the lid off the garbage can in the shop and used that as a template for the nose and just made it flow from the rail to an abrupt rounded-nose template. I then reglassed the nose, glossed and polished it, and it looked like a brand new board again—only it was about 8' 0" or 8' 6" with a rounded nose and that super-clean Pipeliner pintail. I also re-foiled the fin to make it really narrow. Brewer came in and saw it and blew his mind on how good the repair had come out. David rode it again and came back raving about how well it worked!”

The shorter board fit right in with the work Brewer had been doing for other Hawaii-based surfers at about the same time—notably Gerry Lopez, Jeff Hakman and Gary Chapman—and it would not be long before the accidental prototype Rarick had patched up for Nuuhiwa was being offered as a Bing Surfboards model named The Lotus.

But shortly before all this happened, history threw surfing a curveball when reigning World Champ Nat Young and fellow Australian shaper (and three-time Queensland state champion) Bob McTavish arrived on the North Shore with some boards that were equally different from the classic longboard standard: nine-foot, wide-tailed, vee-bottomed boards with deep-raked, highly-foiled fins—these were the "plastic machine" boards that were already sweeping across the Australian surf scene.

Local surfers in Hawaii were not impressed with how the plastic machine performed during the 1967 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, as the board proved too skittish in big waves at Sunset Beach. But it was a different story when the McTavish and Youg went to Maui and surfed the boards on a six- to eight-foot day at Honolua Bay. The radically different surfing style that Young and McTavish demonstrated that day was captured by Aussie filmmaker Paul Witzig and became the closing sequence, and high point, of his 1968 movie 

. When the film was released the following summer, the world was put on notice that nothing about surfing was going to be the same as it had been before.

Back on the U.S. Mainland at the beginning of 1968, Bing Surfboards’ advertising promoted the Brewer-designed Pipeliner and Pintail Lightweight (“Our board of the year”) and would continue to do so through the summer months, upping the ante by taking out double-page spreads in Surfer magazine that featured the boards and the shaper with the sparkling planer looking as iconic as Excalibur in his hands. Meanwhile, Copeland was covering his bases by having Duke Boyd produce an eight-page promotional brochure that unveiled the Lotus and an “Aussie V Bottom”

“Big things were happening by mid-1968,” remembers Copeland, whose company made 3341 boards that year, an almost 30 percent jump in production from 1967.

That summer, Brewer came to the Mainland to shape some boards, although according toe Copeland, he was not very productive and mostly shaped for "guys who were on his team." When he did work, says Copeland, it was usually at night.

[Note: Brewer and Bing parted ways later in 1968, by which time the Pipeliner was no longer in production.]

PIPELINER

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