I’ve been playing about with boards between 6’8 and 7’6 for a while and love how versatile they can be!
Latest has been a pintail and it’s really opened my eyes. I plan to build two more, one lower rockered eggy railed single fin, and a Twin with some kind of channels.
Where should those twin fins be placed, are they placed similar too a fish or a little further up to balance the length?
Secondly, I’ve been running 4 1/4 too 5 inch. Kse rocker, 1.75 too 2.5 inch tail rocker. I feel like they could be flatter in the nose but don’t want too loose the wave range. What sort of nose rockers are you all running in these lengths and can I get away with say, 3 3/4 nose.
I see a lot of the older boards had relatively flat entry rocker
What kinds of conditions are you surfing, and how do you surf? That’s always the starting point.
In those lengths you can easily surf a head high wave like Trestles or Swamis with a 3.3/4 nose rocker, whereas a dumping beach break at head high will require more rocker. Thrusters work better with more tail rocker whereas a twin or single works better with a relatively flat tail rocker.
I’m surfing cornish beach breaks, thigh high to head plus. Lots of shifting banks and big tides! I like big fade turns, full cutbacks and using the legs and rail for some down the line style. I Allways joke that the mid lengths get my jazz hands going! Kind of upright stance with a little step forward for speed
My most recent mid was running 4 3/8 nose and 2 3/8 tail, was a double ender pin tail with double concave between your feet. At 7’6 it turned really well but I prefer a little less length.
For those types of conditions I think it’s hard to go wrong with a moderate 4/2 rocker in maybe 6-10 or 7-0 length. Small enough for an adult male to duckdive and will fit the shape of a waist high wave but with enough length and rail line to get reduce the drama factor on an overhead drop and generate some additional mojo on your bottom turns. If you surf with an upright/close stance then I think that might point more toward a single or 2+1 setup than a quad or thruster. Maybe mount the fin cluster a little further forward than normal so you won’t have to move around as much between trim vs turn.
IMO, if you can get your waves on a 7-6 then you’re not going to lose that much by going to a 7-0. Either way, you have to start off in the right position and have some paddling going for you in order to catch the wave. You can’t rely on being able to run the wave down from a distance.
This is the outline I have been riding Gdaddy. Pulled nose and tail left no issues in the steeper stuff. Sadly we get a lot of close outs on bigger days, but If I know its a get in get out wave I usually take a shorter twin out.
I think your right, single would be most suitable. My old 7’2 was 2+1 and I preferred it as a singlel, more drawn out and reliant on rail work.
Like you say the conditions do dictate sitting closer to the break, sadly I don’t have the skill to navigate a big board out o out biggest days, but maybe that slightly lower rocker would ease the entry whilst the shorter length helps the paddle out.
On the rail side, I have been using 50:50, 60:40 and fuller down rails. I have been contemplating a more egg shaped rail. Pinched but without any belly in the bottom other than the nose. I haven’t found nose concave beneficial myself. Would something like skips style of pinched rail work with the shortish length and flat roxker
I think longer boards are a pain in the ass in beachbreak conditions, particularly when the tides drop and the waves are breaking in shallower conditions. You end up with less margin for error in your positioning and timing. To a certain extent I think the shorter lengths are actually easier and more forgiving.
I like singlefin midlengths and I always keep at least one on hand, but I never surf them in our local beachbreak conditions unless the tide is fat. FOR ME it’s simply easier to go with the shorter multi-fin designs in those conditions. They’re much faster off the line, don’t require a bottom turn to develop speed and I don’t run out of energy when I’m doing a top turn.
A couple years back one of my sons needed a midlength travel board for use at one of the waveparks. He normalls surfs traditional longboards like a 9-6 pig and his beachbreak board is an 8-0 simmons (what a beast that thing is). Anyway, he has that close stance and he tends to stand forward of where a fin cluster would normally hit. So I did a 6-10 length and foiled it to trim and turn from where I thought he would stand, and I used a twin-biased quad setup with a more forward position that would put the center of effort right under his rear foot. Basically, I designed and built the board for his stature, stance and style. And it works great for his particular combination. It wouldn’t work as well for most other people.
That was kind of you to say, Bill. I am humbled. But by way of disclosure, I appropriated almost every element of the board and fins setup from others. This thing is a mashup.
Gdaddy, I like your forward thinking on that board. Being able to dial it in for the riders style is greeat, especially when you compare it to off the rack shapes, which are obviously more universal.
I don’t know what your beach breaks are like, but here we have such large tides, therefore the banks are constantly moving which makes things unpredictable. If I get in at high tide, I allway reach for something short and twin finned. I haven’t really enjoyed quad setups, Allways found them to stiff and slow off the mark, as has been said before the foot position has to be just right over a cluster, which has lead to moments of magic and frustration. I find the twin fins, even in dumpy conditions allow that quick, off the mark speed and allow a turn during the entry. Singles aren’t for everyone, but I have enjoyed even shoulder to head close outs on the larger lengths.
I went window shopping a few days back, looked over some mid lengths from Russel surfboards, christenson, bing, vouch just to name a few. Got some food for thought.
I’m really intrigued by the pinched rails on the flat tracker and the rolled bottom on a slim Jim. Both these boards had foils which have a longer taper than what I have been shaping for my self and slightly fuller nose and tails.
I’ll pick up some blanks this next week and perhaps turn this into a dual build thread. I think I’ll take your advice, go for a single at 7.0, maybe 7’2, with the 4/2 rocker, and let the foil and rails add some performance. I’ll also shape my original 7’2 egg outline, but with an updated bottom and twin fins.
Quad setups are notoriously sensitive to sizing and placement and there are lots of variations. The ones I like the least are the ones that the retail fin sets use. The spread of the cluster is a factor, as is the position of the rear relative to the rail.
If you like a twin but you want more control (especially backside) then adding a small canard up front or small trailers in the rear could do that for you. For fish shapes I like to use a small keel + canard. (Bing and Larry Allison of Fiberglas Fin Co popularized that combo). You get the drive of a keel plus just enough hold and control to take all the drama out of going backside on a fish.
For the 6-10 that I was talking about above I did a 6.25" main with 3.5" rears, clustered close and a little more inboard of the mains to add back the control (that rider is 260#, so that’s why the board and fins are so big). I stole that fin combo and the foil I used for the board from Neal Purchase Jr (his Quattro) I also moved that cluster a couple inches forward of the normal position; I got that design element off of Joe Blair’s designs because he does boards for big guys.
Personally, I normally waffle between singlefins (on the longer boards) and twin-biased quads on the shorter lengths except that i use a 2+1 with moderate nose rocker for head high and overhead conditions. Then again, I’m old and I’m not trying to do the hpsb thing at all. Here’s a 5-10 I did a couple years back that I use in waist-shoulder beach conditions. Part Mini-Simmons, part McCoy Zot, part me. I made those fins, too; I resized the Future WCT to 5.25" (front" and 4" (rear). That board is really easy to surf in average conditions, but it’s not hi-performance and doesn’t have much top-end. .
WRT the above shape, it looks fat-boi and it is fat boi. But the curve of the template isn’t excessive or particularly slow. Here’s an overlay of a 6’1" x 18.5" hpsb. Take 3" off the nose and egg it, and the remainder of template curve - which is what engages with the wave - parallels that of the hpsb.
The point I’m trying to make is to start with what you’re trying to do and work backward off of that. If you’re surfing conditions where there are big tidal swings and lots of water moving around then you need more length and paddling speed. If you’ve got the length then you can use the rail line to drive off of and you don’t have as much need for a lot of fin area out at the rail to drive off of. Wider boards are quick but harder to control, narrow boards are easier to control but not as naturally quick.
And whatever you do, set your design up first and THEN figure out which blank and rocker you need to make it work. Better to wait for a bit for a custom rocker than to try to make do with what they have on stock. Ask me how I know.
Gdaddy I like your angle on this subject. Thst quad looks like it’s well thought out. I may revisit one of my quads and adjust fins for bigger days.
I went back to the drawing board and had a moment! This 7’6 I posted above was a great board, but it was very stable and predictable. My love of twin fins and 2 strokes requires something with a little… Character.
I took an old egg template and flipped it round, to make a wide point aft mid, with a rounded nose and a fat pin tail. Think the tail may be a little wide but I like what I see so far. This will be single, no side bites. Pinched 50/50 rails, rolled bottom to flat with a double concave between the feet and v aft. I’ll move the rocker apex to the wide point and foil the nose back to the front foot. Tail will be hard edge from the fin box and flat right at the tip.
I rebuilt a fish a while back with the idea of building the board around my stance, wide point at front foot, concave between feet, volume in centre at rear foot and accentuated rocker after, worked out really good.
Just gota get a new planer now as my good old black and decker has failed numerous times
I like that template a lot, but then again I’ve always been a sucker for the Transition Era shapes where they were cutting the tails off of longboard blanks and surfing them off the tail. Keyo, Gordon Woods, Bob McTavish and the rest. I never got tired of watching clips of Wayne Lynch and Midget Farrelly and the others. I wanted to surf those conditions like that. I always thought the AUS shapers were on the right track with their early midlengths, and that most of the mainland US surfers should have gone in that direction instead of the boards the Hawaiians were building for their conditions. .
10 years ago (10/2010, as a matter of fact) I did a real similar setup except at 7-0. And for what I was using it for, it was the the best singlefin midlength I ever surfed. Flat rocker, semi-hull bottom but with an edge in the tail, finbox a little forward (I should have gone even further forward). Fat ass with a huge Velzy Classic or similar fin with some flex. Stringerless EPS, HD PU rails, bamboo deck and bottom. It came out too light at first, so I went back and added another layer of 4oz to bring the weight up and get a little more glide.
One caution about wide point + flat rockers is that they’re more touchy about your paddling position and they’re less forgiving when it comes to your timing and transition from paddling to surfing. If you’re out of position you can bury the nose even while paddling it, and if you’re timing is off the wave can run right over you (fat ass picks the wave up very abruptly). So it’s more approrpiate for a surfer of intermediate or better skills than for a novice.
This board was not suitable for a broad range of conditions, but for the conditions I was aiming for it was great. Swamis or Church or (sometimes) the fat high tide beachies it was good. when you want to stay with the wave and surf it from top to bottom. But in quick dumping waves it was too much of a hassle, and it was too slow.
I got older and decided I needed to transition toward longboards so I built a longer version, blunted the tail and bumped the nose rocker to 4". 7-10 length. It works, and it’s fun and it’s easy to surf, but it’s way more board than I need or enjoy at this point. I should have gone with 7-4 or so, and more similar to the 7-0.
I love those outlines. What sort of rocker did you run in the super flat one. And nose tail widths?
I love what lovelace did with the v. Bowls but I can’t really see it working as well with my conditions as it does for his!
One thing I’ve found with the wide point forward boards is you can’t just throw it under the lip like you may on a twin during take off. I’m hoping rh wide point and apex of outline will allow some more radical moves, and add that little excitement that can often be missed at this length.
Alot of the local shapers here are aiming there mid boards at the begginer/Inter level. There more shrunk down minimal than performance orientated. Great if you at that stage.
When we look at West Coast U.S boards over here they are Allways finely foiled, thinner rails and flatter rockers.
Hopefully this next few boards I shape will bridge the gap. I really enjoy throwing a mid legnth round and it Allways leaves me feeling inspired
If I recall, Lovelace started doing his v.bowls a month of two after I finished the 7-0. Now half of the longboard shapers are doing wide-point-back midlengths. I think everyone was all watching the same things and working separate but parallel design tracks. At the same time I had also been watching McCoy and his nugget design he had been doing for so long.
With the 7-0 it wasn’t THAT flat (at or just under 3.5"), but flat enough for the length. For the 7-10 I was watching what Broian Hilbers of Fineline was doing with his Hot Generation and the round tail variant, his Puerto Rico; except I widened the tail and tweaked the nose a bit by adding another control point for the nose so I could get that trash can lid shape. But between the length and the widths, that’s why the rails on the 7-10 are more parallel. Longer lengths with the same widths = less curve.
I think the dimensions on the 7-0 were 17" nose, 22" wide, and 18" tail. Oh, and I almost forgot, I did a bit of a rolled vee on that one, not a panel vee. I did a minimal panel vee on the 7-10.
For me, the first wide-point back I did was a reshape of a 6-10 egg I had ridden into oblivion. In that design I was trying to do a McCoy+hull mashup that I could surf off the tail. I did that one as a single fin but later added quad boxes. Due to the length it always rode better for me as a quad. After doing this board, I never did another fish because FOR ME this design out-fished the fish. .
This is the one that started it all for me 6-0 x 20.5 x 2.5", flat rocker, hull entry, McCoy tail and domed vee. 01/2010 Later on I tried other fin setups and settled on a quad set of Reverse-D fins, similar to Takayama’s Halo line.
Excellent input gdaddy and thanks for helping in my thread. I follow this thread too, very interesting!
Do you use BoardCAD to design your outlines?
I use it for my current projects now and I wonder if people are using control points at the 1’ mark from nose and tail. Until now I only used the control points for the wide point and for the tail block.
Yeah, that’s how I did both of the end curves; added an additional control point at both ends. That way you can tweak the curves at the ends more independently of the main curve off the wide point.
