FOAM - Guild Factor

I don't know how a simple equation can tell you what you should be riding. It is a total guess and I think its totally unfair to the consumer.

Best trick is going to your local shaper, bring your boards you normally ride and tell him what you just wrote down.

I'm 225lbs 5'10 calculate that.

 

After crunching all of the numbers..(it wasn't easy) I calculate that you are fat/obese, or overweight(to be more subtle). But you might still rip. Are you Chino Surfboards? I'm good at math

 

BTW Franny. I mean no disrespect. I could afford to drop a couple too. Swell on tap for tomorrow, get pumped!

 

There's a lot more factors then just height and weight, unless you are tourist and just looking to rent a board for the day.

Yes.... go to your local shaper (one that knows what they are doing) and talk to them. Besides the height and weight, you need to tell them TRUTHFULLY about your surfing abilities. Also what are you looking to do when you are surfing? Another big factor is where you surf. Wherever you surf or frequent the most is what you want your board shaped for. You wouldn't shape a custom gun if you lived in Florida right?! If the board is for a trip then let him know where you are going and what the current conditions have been like there. If where you are going has really been pumping and is a wave of substance then you may want to beef up your glass a bit. If you're not planning to travel at all and live in say Florida then you want to be on the lighter side and don't need extra glass.

If its possible ask the shaper if he has something you can test drive to maybe narrow down your options, or maybe a friend has a board that you like, ask them if you can ride it for a few waves.

Whatever you do don't just buy a board for the name. Believe it or not a lot of these "megabrand" boards are actually shaped by local shapers. You can get the same exact board without the inflated price.

 

actually, i'm gonna disagree; i think this could be a great tool for a lot of surfers who are having trouble dialing in their dims & volume. they can take what they've been riding, volume-wise, & see how it relates to their weight. most recommendations i've seen suggest having about 0.3L per kg of body weight. for me at 190lbs, that puts me at around 26L...ridiculously low. i prefer to be more around 32 or 33L, which is closer to .37 or so.
& the idea that this is only applicable to ...lost boards? c'mon...

for some reason, a lot of surfers are scared of having too much foam or volume, but the truth is, for the vast majority, more foam is going to help them have so much more fun & catch more waves. anything that's going to help surfers be more knowledgeable about future board purchases & what will or won't work for them gets my vote.

 

my volume from good wave hpsb to uber-groveler varies about 1.5L or so. don't stress about it too much. if what you're riding is working for you, great. if not, a little more volume might be what you need. i prefer firewire's volume calculator as it's the most in-depth one i've seen & the more info you can feed into any calculator, the more accurate it's going to be. ci's is laughably pathetic.

 

hmm...maybe i'm the one not understanding this.

 

How can I figure out my board's volume?

 

so i had a pretty interesting & enlightening email conversation w/ Whitney Guild the other day after he emailed me about this thread.we conversed back & forth a bit & here's what he had to say:

"The Guild Factor was created to make surfboard selection a level playing field for surfers of different body weights.
The selection of one's surfboard should be directly related to one's body weight. Also in consideration should be your ability, fitness, age, and type of wave you ride.
Shortboarders that are fit and riding hollow waves, should be GF .34 to GF .37. Shortboarders less fit or riding softer waves, should be GF .37 to GF .42. Novices should be between GF .40 and GF .50.
This is across the board, for all surfers of all body weights. It is simply a ratio of your surfboard volume in Liters to your body weight in Kilos.
This will allow surfers to choose their surfboard volumes within 2 to 3 liters and will allow a larger surfer to compare his board's volume ratio with his smaller friend's board in direct proportion. If they surf the same surf spot and have similar abilities, it creates an even comparison.
Of course, length, width, and thickness are very important parts of choosing a surfboard, but volume should be just as important.
Whitney Guild Volumetrics"

 

Swaylocks had this formula up a while back:
1/2 length x width x thickness + 10 for every inch over 6'
Divided by 60.02 = L volume

It's not exact and doesn't account for certain variances in design but I've done the equation for dozens of boards I have, was looking at getting, or was just testing the math out on and it's a pretty damn good estimate.

 

i've used this formula in the past & when i compare my results w/ boards i know the #s for, it always seems to come out on the low side. for example, my rusty bali single is 6'2"x20"x2.5", 33.7L. that formula gets me 31.2L. the bali is pretty thinned out in the tail, but the rails are full & there's no way the computer program is that far off.

but back to the topic at hand, i'm surprised no one on here has commented on the words of wisdom from whitney guild himself clarifying the subject. has anyone played w/ it at all? it was interesting to see how little my GF varied (.37-.39, depending on board), compared to the volumes i ride & feel comfortable on.

 

Low tech way - building your own tank wouldnt be that difficult. for shortboards, just constructing a 7' x 2' x 6" plywood box with some numbered black line increments (say 1 liter increments) on the inside wouldnt be that difficult.

remove fins, stand box on end, fill box up so the water level is somewhere in the middle of the increments, slide board underwater so it is barely submerged, see how many liter increments the water goes up. it would be perfectly accurate, and was invented by Archemedes oh about 1500 years ago.

 

i've found the GF to come in handy.
i'm 6'4" 220lbs so not your average shortboarder.

I rode a ...Lost Round Nose Fish for years and loved it. it was
6’4 21.5 2.75
(42.1cl)
GF = .43

I wanted something with more performance on the bigger days so i talked with Matt Biolos at a shaper's night last fall and he suggested a V2 Stub
6’4 21.00 2.75
(42.5cl)
GF = .42

i love this board but not on < waist high and/or mushy waves.

so i played around with the GF to find a new shortboard for smaller days.

i went with a ...Lost bottomfeeder. i wanted to make sure that this board not only had more volume but would allow me to shortboard when i used to have to longboard. it is a wave catching machine.
6’4×1 23.50 2.88
(49.something cl)
GF = .49

conclusion:
i was able find a board to ride on smaller days that would make me stoked. (i rode it all weekend)

 

if you've never ridden mayhem shapes, the Guild Factor is a great starting point...but be sure to follow the skill level and other advice, too. Firewire puts too much emphasis on age (skews volume way high), CI's calculator seems a bit low and Rusty's seems slightly high.

strange thing is, the GF recommends me 35 cL vol at max, but, a while back, Matt recommended I get 39.5 cL...he was way off as that board was a friggin boat on me

for those that say volume is overated, I disagree. Any bit of info to get you closest to the best shred stick possible, the first time, is a good thing...or you can buy three or more wrong boards in the search

 

You wouldn't have to build a box that's as long as your board. You'd need it to be only 1/2 as long as your longest board. Tape off the board someplace in the middle, dip the board vertically up to the tape, measure the displacement, flip the board and then measure the other side and add together.

But you wouldn't need to build anything if you had a large plastic trash can. The large 64+ gallon recycling ones are perfect because they're at least 41" deep and 24" wide (the diagonal is even longer) so you could easily measure a 6'8" board. And it wouldn't matter if you didn't know the can's capacity. Poke a hole near the can's rim and insert a small piece of PVC pipe or something to act as a drain. Fill the can until water starts pouring out of the pipe. Dip 1/2 the board and catch the water that pours out in a 5 gallon bucket. Measure what came out and there's your volume.

A while back I tried another way that was fairly accurate with a lot less work. The only thing I had to measure was the average thickness of the board using calipers. I think I measured every 4" along the stringer and every 3-4" out to the rail. It was a lot of measurements but it took less than 10 minutes. You can take the measurements closer together (every 1") in the nose and tail but you'll need to average those areas separately from the areas where you did the measurements every 3" apart.

You can either take your own picture of the board (straight on, centered on the deck) or download one from the Internet. I did it with a CI board and grabbed the image from their website. Just make sure you're grabbing an image of a board the same length as yours.

Load the photo into Photoshop, Gimp, or one of the many free programs that can count pixels. Scale the image to the actual length of the board, select the board's outline and let the program count the number of selected pixels. Then, draw a 1" x 1" square and get the number of pixels in that area, divide the total number by this number to get total surface sq inches, then multiply by the average thickness and convert in cu to liters.

I think the only accurate way would be displacement because even the volume numbers listed on the websites are from the CAD software and I'm guessing they don't take into consideration the glass, hot coat or gloss coat.

 

those numbers are accurate for the board when it comes off the machine. any "tweaking" done by the finish shaper changes the final #.

 

That's racist.

And this is why people who cling to arbitrary value systems, who also don't want to be embarrassed, should obfuscate their code. But bravo sir, bravo.

 

'I see dumb people' - 'Where?' - 'Everywhere.'

The gap between how smart you think you are and the nonsense written is blowing me away.
Got me so worked up I registered to post this knowing it's a 3 year old thread.

GF truly is no more than the ratio of body weight (in kg) to surfboard volume (in liters). Need a definition for it? --> kg/L
and the higher it is, the better it floats. Correlates enough?

 

^^^^^^ your the one not sounding smart here. First of all, your definition...gaff flat out said in his post that you quoted. A ratio between body weight and volume. Then you bring back up a 3 year old tread to act like an ass? Damn. Flipping people these days. Where's barry to call this guy a moron