Hey guys, I would love to hear your thoughts on a fin customizer.
The goal would be to give options to customize based on your surf style, using rake, foil, height, width, and cant. You could also customize your fins to best suit the conditions of your beach.
I would like to offer this as a service. Producing many fins with slightly different varyiations would be expnsive unless 3D Printed. If a normal short board set costs anywhere from $60-90 would you be willing to pay 175$-250$ for a custom 3D Printed set?
Why so much? Because 3D printers are expensive? Just wondering. For me molded plastic fins are the cheapest. I know 3D isn’t molded, but still some sort of plastic I think. Although I admit ignorance about the specifics of 3D. I can get beautiful, artistic, custom hand foiled fins for less or foil my own for almost nothing. Mike
Naturally they cost a little more than the ones that come over the counter.
Depending on the composite 20 to 40 percent higher than high quaility mass productions.
After laying up my own panels and discussing options and doing my
best to suit templates (many of which are of my own creation) depth, cant and composite
I’ve learned how to do a reasonable job if lighting a given board up with a custom fin set.
With this said, realize that most surfers haven’t a clue how important suiting fins to
their board is. Most all the focus is on the board itself. While some boards are dogs
and always will be others can find a huge boost in performance by something as
simple a more or less flexible trailer on a thruster set-up or a set of 70/30 foiled quad
trailers as examples.
The variables are infinite. Fortunately along the way good surfers have
given me good feed back. Along with finally having the fin shack nice and tight present there’s a new high quality shaping room here and the in house shaper Jon Calivas (Evil Corp Surfboard) who’s very much into R&R.
Ya just never know when the next trend or the next request will provide new performance options.
3D printed fins work well if you glass them afterwards.
Not sure if there is a market for this, I’ve been investigating this, but simply 3D printing fins doesn’t seem like an interesting business model to me.
Are you using finFoil? If not, make sure to check it out!
Edit: To save you some work. I made an online fin editor, it will be online soon.
I’m slowly growing in this business area. So I can tell you the following:
Be prepared to invest a lot of time making very little money, but you’ll only know if it’s worth it, if you try it.
Personally, I justify my time and expenses by the feedback and appreciation I get from the community. If you’re in it for the money, be prepared for dissapointment.
…hello Halcyon, a person cannot rely on his quality work to have economical success…
Is only to see what s going on with the market since post WWII to view my point.
The only way that quality work have success is being friend of the right guys (or to have the right connections) in the right moment and most important; in the case of surfboards, be in California by the sea.
In surfboards, take for example these new shapers that are coming from California; all have these things plus relying on a great crew (glassers, etc and machine; that in reality are the ones that do the job…)
All other is California s surfboard hype; the same guy living in S Africa; Aussie land; NZ; Japan; Brazil; etc cannot have that success even doing all the same way.
Another fine example is these 2 glassers from France that had commercial success after Biolos take it and sell them ass the “ultimate” custom glassing work.
