Since it's Summer....

looks pretty. nice work.

 

Sick board!

 

What kinda dim's she got? just looking for length width and thickness. My fish is damn near flat too, I bet that sucker paddles like a dream.

 

Sweeet! Looks pretty, and I'll bet she goes real fast.

 

Nice Mike.

RIDE REPORT! RIDE REPORT! RIDE REPORT! RIDE REPORT!

 

That's 'cause she's so flat, and... at least from the pics... it looks like there's a lot of volume in the rails. Wide boards with full rails and flat rockers are harder to turn, especially on your backside, but they go super fast down the line, which is a trademark of all fish. One thing you can do shape-wise... and you see it a lot... is add a wing, or two, to bump down the tail width at the fins. This keeps your rail line straighter, like you want it, but frees up tail.

I think you're also right about foot placement... once you get a feel for it, you'll be moving your back foot around all the time mid ride.

 

F r e e h a n d f r e e m i n d...

 

great quote

 

sweet. tell us more about her. dims/vol/contours/materials/timeframe

 

6'0 x 21 1/4 x 2 5/8... 16" nose and tail... 4"/2" rocker... modern, medium down rails... deep single to double barrel out the back. A little panel vee in the entry. EPS/Epoxy. Traditional glassed on marine ply fins, but single foiled with 1/8" toe and 6 degrees cant. Super light, but super strong with 6/6 deck, 6 bottom. Double pinline (black and orange). The deck is a tinted inlay, the bottom and rails are opaque brown and blue resin swirl. Took a few weeks to build, because color and pinlines, glass-ons, etc take a long time... plus epoxy is a one or two steps a day type of construction.

 

how did you come by 6 degrees? I'm actually curious about the math in all of this. is it dependent on the length/width?

 

This is boring surfboard talk, but... think about a single foiled fin and how it creates lift. Two smaller rail fins, like on a thruster, have a given area, and the product of that area and the fin's foil creates an amount of lift you can calculate. On boards designed for small waves, you might use as much as 9 degrees of cant, which creates a considerable amount of lift... which is what you want in small, weak, slow surf. Quads, with twice the fin area, typically need less cant, because they have double the fin area. 6 and 4 work well... and that's a lot of lift.

Now think about a large, single foiled keel fin. In order to create the same amount of lift in similar surf (fish like small waves) you still need some cant, but not as much as you'd need with smaller fins. So 6 degrees is about right. If you're running symmetrical, double foiled fins, you really don't need much cant at all... 2-4 degrees is good. You could even go straight ahead and straight up and down (no toe in or cant), because double foiled fins like that don't create much lift. Old, OLD school fish had double foiled fins, straight up and no toe, and right out on the rail. Super fast, but minimal performance. Simply using single foiled fins, with some toe and cant, combined with modern bottom contours and rails, turn the retro fish into a performance groveler with effortless drive, blazing down-the-line speed, and a wide open performance envelope.

 

By double you mean like a 50/50 foil vs single being flat on one side?

I see how this is similar to camber and caster settings on a suspension, with hydrodynamics in mind. That being said, wouldnt a little "inside" foil on the rail fins create a nice scoope and catch on a little firmer? At the expense of flex, I'm assuming, but you could play with thickness there.

 

Yes... I shouldn't say "double foiled"... too vague. I mean 50/50 symmetrically convex fins. The fins I've used are single foiled, meaning flat on one side and convex on the other.

When you suggest some inside foil, are you suggesting concave or convex? Fin designers have used both with great success. Personally, I've found that a little concave on the inside of the fin has some advantages, but I really only notice a difference in better surf, at higher speeds. That could be just me, though. In small waves, flat inside foils seem to work just fine. I will say, though, that I do give the leading edge a bit of foil on the inside, and slightly round the leading edge where the two foils meet, too. This reduces drag and maintains lift through a wider range of angles of attack. If you see that clear glass halo around the wooden core of the fin (the fin has not yet been sanded in the pic)... I put that there to have something to work with to both seal the fin better, and give me something to foil and round off. I'll ride it like that first, and continue to refine the fin until it does what I'm looking for it to do.

 

Yeah I was talking about like a convex on the leading edge with a slight concave on the inside closer to the trailing one. Kind of like... You still have that classic drop shape (wider front and smoothed out toward the back) but with a slight scoop. Either way you'd definitely only feel the difference at higher speeds where the water pressure is more noticeable, but in theory the trailing inside scoop should push back with a little more force, which would allow to dig the rail deeper and turn sharper.... In theory haha

 

That theory sounds reasonable... and is probably the theory that fin companies use to design those kinds of fins for performance shortboards and big wave boards.

I think the limiting factors determining how sharp a turn a fish like this would be able to do, however, would be rocker and planshape. Keel fins... with their long bases and low aspect ratios... are all about speed and drive. Flat rockered boards, especially with wide tails and straight rail lines like the retro fish, have a very wide turning radius regardless of the size and shape of the fins used. You can loosen them up with smaller fins or breaking the keel into two fins and make them a quad (think Speed Dialer or other "split keel" quad sets), but you lose that classic drivey feel of a twin keel fish. The deep swallow provides some relief, but for the most part these boards are carvers.

 

LBC you never disappoint me

That's one sexy fish

Can you shape me up something ye Ol' Surf Scholar and teacher of the childrens