Roy's Gun project: Old Faithful 9'5" pintail

As you can see the board isn't even finished yet, after the first 4 or 5 shapes have been finished and ridden we'll be sending one or two to Western Australia for big wave testing.

 

Of course it works, I've been using these shapes since 1994.

Conventional Gun designs have serious control issues which can be seen during every session and which lead to unnecessary wipeout disasters.

Improved design always looks different.

 

I'm keeping the solutions to myself at present, although a bit of digging will find some info on my blog.

The control issues are obvious when observing big wave sessions with a clinical mind set. We tend to look at big wave riding with understandable awe and with great respect for the riders, which is all good but prevents clear observation of what's going on.

Typical problems are: being unable to turn at speed in the upper part of the wave and sometimes at the bottom; instability during turns and when hitting chop, and takeoff problems including pearling and sudden braking of the board at speed.

Some improvements which I've been advocating for years have been seen in big wave gun design recently, namely greater width and more nose thickness, but the serious issues with tail shape, nose shape and rail shape remain.

Regarding my own experience I'm often mocked for only riding small waves, but did most of my bigger wave surfing before the internet and it wasn't recorded. Size wise i regularly rode what most would call 10 to 12 feet but which is in reality 20 to 24 feet in actual height... not huge but big enough to know what's going on at the higher speeds involved.

During my last session a fellow paddled over to say that he remembered me riding 'massive' waves at Raglan in the late '80's. He said that he and his friend saw me pulling in casually to 10 foot plus barrels on a small single finned pintail. Needless to say it was nice to hear.

 

You ought to pay attention... this thread is devoted to boards which I'm making from EPS/glass/epoxy... the burning of which is not good for the environment.

The handling problems mentioned with regard to mainstream boards I cured 20 years ago, I'm making them in EPS so that I can make them faster and for a couple of other reasons, including price.

 

An astute comment... 3d glass is very challenging to use and requires a lot of fairing post lamination... all of which I do by hand. Fortunately after decades of shaping wood I'm up to the task.

 

Yet you have never ridden one of my boards and are just joining in the troll fest.