Swellnet recently interviewed Nev Hyman for a historical article, Three Fins Befoe the Thruster. Nev, along with a few other shapers, were experimenting with three fins up until Simon Anderson pulled back the curtain on the Thruster which got all the ingredients right and made other tri fin boards redundant.

It's a fascinating series of events that go some way to showing how discovries work; that they aren't pulled from a vacuum but are built upon the work of others.

The following is the full length interview.

Swellnet: Beginning in the late-70s you were experimenting with three fins on Ian Cairns' boards. Is that right?
Nev Hyman: Yeah, Kanga had ridden various types of three fins before - such as the Bonzer - but when I worked with him was during that transition period between twin fins and three fins, when we were trying to stabilise twin fins. Personally I could never make twin fins work on my backside. I hated them backside.

In late 1979, early 1980 I made a lot of twinnies with a stabiliser – a stabilising back fin. They had two large side fins and one small back fin. We played around with it for a while, then toward the end of 1980 we were doing smaller single fins with two small side fins. I made a board for John Nielsen that has the smaller side fins and larger centre fins.

We were playing around with all these boards just trying to stabilise a wide tailed board. Because we were going wider with the twinny. There was no other way to stabilise but use a third fin. That's what we were doing, and I wasn’t the only one doing it, but we were playing with that theory.

Then what happened was, Simon Anderson was working on the Thruster and Dougall Walker brought back the first Thruster to Australia. Dougall lent it to John and I got an opportunity to see that board and immediately it made sense. What we were doing was playing around with different size fins but Simon didn't play around with the fins, he played around with the planshape.

What Simon excelled at was to approach the whole thing from the ground up. He wasn't tweaking what we already knew. He used three fins, all the same size, with these wider tail boards. Meanwhile, we were playing with wing swallows and all of the above the idea. The idea of having that wide tailed squash was unique also. So Simon nailed it with that.

It made sense straight away?
As soon as I saw what Simon had done it was a no brainer - I started making thrusters! My fist interpretation of a Thruster was actually just a copy. Because that's what everybody did. But then the evolution from there was like, “Well, Simon's a big guy, the really wide tailed thruster works for him”. I didn't like the feel of the really wide tailed thruster, so I started making the tail pod narrower. Other guys started playing around with the fins All of that sort of stuff. There was a lot of experimenting. Really, from '81 thru to the mid-80s it was refinement of Simon's thruster. We all know that story.

What fascinates me is that it seems so obvious in hindsight, but of course the Thruster was a real step into the unknown back then. Some shapers were close to it, but they didn't take that step.
Yes, there was a point in time when people were considering three fins on a board in a creative way. There was Simon out ripping at Bells on a Thruster, but Kanga was out there on a three fin board too. It wasn't a twinny it wasn’t a single fin.

Did you draw any inspiration from Bonzers?
Well yes, to a degree. Malcolm and Duncan are mates of mine, not close, but I've known them for a long time. I met them in Hawaii first and I saw their Bonzas so there was definetely an interpretation. The whole venturi effect, the keels on the side...they were stabilisers for a single fin. But you'll note that my interpretation of the three fin board had upright fins. As in a smaller single fin with two side fins, or a smaller twin fin with, again, a small stabiliser on the back fin.

I have a friend that owns a Ben Aipa 70s Hawaiian gun with three fin boxes. It was meant to be ridden as twin or single. It's fascinating that it has three fin boxes, it looks just like a Thruster setup, yet the thought of putting three fins into it hadn't reached conciousness.
You would probably deduce from that, and I don’t know all the facts behind it, that when there were twins and singles, people would think there's no way you'd put a third fin in. I guess it's similar to when you've got modern boards with fin boxes for both thrusters and quads, it wasn't ever designed to stick a fifth fin in there yet that's what some people do and they swear by it.

So the board is sitting there with three fin boxes but we're not seeing what's in front of us. It might seem simple in hindsight but a quantum leap needs to happen before people realise that three fins are better than two or one.

To read the full article click here.