Deep Design: Daniel Thomson on Surfboards, Physics and Simmons

General Discussion
1

Interesting article…

Innovative surfboard designer Daniel Thomson of Tomo Surfboards talks about his cutting edge design, the influence of Bob Simmons and new surfboard materials for enhanced performance.

Link

Daniel Thomson of Tomo Surboards is a young and innovative surfer who is part of a core group of San Diego shapers pushing the edge of design and development to move surfing to the next level. He has been affiliated with Richard Kenvin’s Hydrodynamica project that is based on the influence and theories of San Diego’s legendary surfing innovator Bob Simmons.

**Serge Dedina: **Why did you starting shaping surfboards? And what is it about creating surfboards that you love?

**Daniel Thomson: **I was fortunate enough to grow up in a surfing family so I pretty much have been surfing since I can remember. My dad (Mark Thomson) is a respected shaper in Australia so ever since he made me my first board, I was involved in the shaping process. As I evolved as a surfer, my desire to shape more specialized equipment became apparent so I continued to follow my passion for exploring the connection between creative art specialized for performance surfing.

**Dedina: **Who are your shaping and surfing influences?

**Thomson: **My dad obviously. George Greenough was a family friend during my younger years so his work definitely made an imprint on me.  More recently the work of Bob Simmons uncovered by the research of Richard Kenvin has been inspiring. Also, I like to look outside of surfing for inspiration: modern aviation, quantum physics and the universe challenge the mind to think deeper for new ideas.

Dedina: How did you end up shaping and surfing in San Diego?

Thomson: After making a few trips out to San Diego from 2004-2010, I realized that the market for progressive designs was stronger in California. Also, I was ready for a change of pace in my life.

**Dedina: **Your boards have been associated with the hydrodynamic theory and movement espoused by Richard Kenvin that was directly influenced by the design of Bob Simmons? How did you interest in the legacy of Simmons and the partnership with Kenvin occur?

**Thomson: **Richard was visiting in Australia back in 2003 on one of his first Hydrodynamica missions. He was looking to connect with Dave Rastovich. In hope that he would be able to film him riding some of the keel fin fish boards he had brought over, Richard tracked down my dad as a support filmer and naturally my dad suggested to Richard that ‘I give these fishes a go.’ A few sessions later, we had some awesome footage of Rasta and me riding these boards. After that I kept in close contact with RK and continued my natural progression in refining the fish design.

**Dedina: **What are the types of surfboards you are shaping now and specifically what are the designs that you see working best in Southern California?

Thomson: Generally all my boards are fairly suited to California because of the straighter curves and wider tails. The boards that I am currently most excited about are my new Next Generation Modern Planing Hulls (MPH). They are basically 21st century adaptations of the original Bob Simmons plaining hulls mixed with wakeboards technology. They seem to be very functional designs with a whole bunch of potential to be seen as an apex high performance design in the future.

**Dedina: **Explain what the hydrodynamic principle means for surfboard design and surfing in general?

**Thomson: **Broadly speaking, you can apply some sort of hydrodynamic principle to any surfboard. More specially describing a hydrodynamic planning hull is a board designed to minimize drag through several different streamlining methods including utilizing a parallel rail line from nose to tail with a wider nose tail profile and straight-line fin placements

Dedina: What materials are you working with right now? 

Thomson: I have always been a firm believer in epoxy resin for its strength, durabilty and flex memory. I am currently working with XTR (closed cell styrofoam) Epoxy and several applications of vacuum bag carbon fiber.

Dedina: You are shaping boards for WQS surfer Stu Kennedy. How did that relationship come about and how do you work with him in terms of giving and receiving feedback?

Thomson: Stu has been a close friend from my hometown of Lennox Head so I have shaped for him quite a bit in the past. When I was home visiting in March, I showed Stu some of the latest boards. He was pretty blown away on how they surfed, and he has barely set foot on a regular short board since he tried one. Since I shaped him a new quiver of the MPH’s he has been dedicated to riding them in high-level completion as he feels he can achieve his best performances on these boards. He recently placed 9th in the 6 star WQS in England and a 17th in the U.S Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach.

Dedina: Are most pro surfers too conservative with the boards they are riding? 

Thomson: Most definitely. The cutthroat nature of competition doesn’t nurture experimentation. Most elite surfers have grown up there whole lives riding one style of design and is not confident riding something unorthodox. Most are jaded to the fact that there could be a left field design out there capable of performing better, so they tend not to have faith in something new. Things are changing though.

Dedina: There’s a photo with Kelly Slater and you when you were a grom and more recently Kelly commented on the boards you shape for Kennedy. How has Kelly’s surfing and his own departure from pro surfing surfboard orthodoxy influenced your own career as a shaper and a surfer?

Thomson: I have always been experimental in nature with my equipment so I haven’t so much been following Kelly design wise. However his surfing is what inspires me most to figure out ways to improve my design to allow me to surf at higher levels.

Dedina: Where do you see yourself going with your shaping career? Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Thomson: I would obviously like to be successful. I am more of a surfer/designer than a ‘shaper’ so hopefully I will be surfing more and not be a slave to the shaping room. I have always done it for the love of surfing and a healthy creative outlet. So as long as I am doing that, I will be happy.

Serge Dedina is executive director of WiLDCOAST, an international conservation team that conserves coastal and marine ecosystems and the author of Wild Sea.

About this column: Serge Dedina’s take on the waves and the people who ride them from a world class surf town in the most southwestern corner of the continental United States.

Related Topics: Bob Simmons, Daniel Thomson, Dave Rastovitch, Kelly Slater, Lennox Head, Richard Kenvin, Stuart Kennedy, Tomo Surfboards, expoxy, and hydrodynamic

2

cutting edge Idea,

scrub that machine shape like a technician

machine shapes are accurate,until the scrubbing begins

opt for tha 128 passes per side than the 80 passes.

shuzki san good luck getting

the catalyst measurement right

on board number two .

 

cutting edge Idea.

surf where the surfers

are smarter than th

e 

tire bumpersin 

in the parking lot

3

Here’s a thought

float like a butterfly in the wind

then maybe you will see tha

t the tires on the kangaroo were un-necessary. 

Design is about the jabberwokie, 

Open your mind so the butterfly can

come home.

 

 

 

Seriously I don’t even know what the hell you’re saying anymore

4

cutting edge.

Sam Reid said to Lunchmeat more than once,

" There ain’t nothing new,it’s just new to you."

and lunch has told it to me enough

to make me wanna pass it on to you.

better builders than me or you

were long dead before we had a clue.

If I have a clue its up to every and shushka

to figure out the riddle only if they 

wanna.If you dont wanna

then do what you do for ever

thinking you are right.

…ambrose…

photo (24).JPGdata is god?

cash is king?

get a glassing machine

for board #2

5

lewis caroll forgives you.

as do I.

…ambrose… 

 

6

Not to be confused with Benjamin Thompson PhD in Structural Engineering at UCSD. 

I wonder if the two have ever met to exchange ideas???

7

Always amazing to see so many hip and happening shapers do a squared  nose and cite “Greenough” and “Quantum Physics” but not bodyboards or any number of wooden board designs from decades ago with squared noses. Chuck in a kooky tail shape and youre a world leader in design innovation.

8

In dutch there is a saying:

In the land of the blind, the guy with one eye is king.

 

The weird thing in the surfing world is that the people with two eyes aren’t able to convince the blind.

9

So, what’s the concensus, that Thomson’s shapes being a bit different than the norm is more BS than revolutionary? I’ve been lurking around here for some years but it’s hard to get a feel on the pulse of whether his designs are generally admired here or discounted. 

Personally, I am an engineering fan and enjoy principals and thought processes put into application. I am also skeptical of the effectiveness in surfing due to the sheer variety of conditions and the relatively slow speeds of a board in relation to the water it is affecting, but I really enjoy the technology of it nonetheless. I can appreciate that Tomo boards are trying different things, if the end result is nothing more than a wider tail with a funky shape, then so be it, in my opinion, at least someone is trying and I do like that there is at the very least, reasoning as to why the shapes end up as they do. Well, reasoning beyond, well, brand x has a HPSB, so must I.

As far as credit goes, I see influence is being hugely dependent on the perception of those claiming to be influenced. I don’t know much about Thomson, but I take it he is on the younger side so it’s natural that his influences would not span too much further back than his own childhood. People find influence all over, even it those influences aren’t traced back to the absolute source for the given technology or principal in question. 

10

I dig his trip.

IMO he’s the only one I’ve seen who has been able to translate off the wall design to boards that people are actually ripping on… Sure the ideas that he draws from have been around for a long time and others have put some of them together before but, folks are raving about his boards and pros are riding them. All without a ton of money backing him… hmmm

11

Right idea, right person, right place, right time, some combination thereof.

Better that somebody busts out of the pack to make room for others to chase and eventually surpass than for the pack to chew’em up.

12

 

That’s certainly not what I meant.

Actually I’m quite happy that there are people that try to take it to a higher level instead of doing things like it’s done for decades.

Thanks for posting it!

13

 

I wasn’t singling you out, my apologies if it seemed that way. I’m just trying to judge the temperature towards Thomson…I guess also reacting to surffoils statements about credit and kooky tail shapes. Either way, I like his direction and like that he’s chosing his direction based on scientific theory, wrongly or right applied, as opposed to more arbitrary reasons. I thought it was an interesting article that certainly had a place here.

14

…in my opinion is like the other guys here say

I can add that those are not cutting edge designs and we (shapers) do not led most of the design towards that because most know that something “square” or rectangular to fit (to perform radical tricks in the pocket, etc) in a wave should be small if not you have the glide and feeling of a longboard; so, the smaller boards just in the few last years came to life massively; now most shortboards are under 5 10 and the kids normally use under 5 6 so that and the “right stickers” niches are the markets

not due that we did not in the know or never imagined those forms.

So, the MAIN thing with these boards is that HE s got lots of publicity due to:

-live in California (in the right beach with the right contacts)

-his surfing is super radical (the best to have kids in mind)

 

If he was a real shaper (and not a designer as he mentioned) so not time and money to surfing around the world in every day basis (that s the way he achieved such good surfing skills) and stacked in Aussie land, well those boards only appeared in a local beach like a different factor whacky stuff

15

What’s “the next level” anyway?

 

 

16

Uhmmm- if I may be forgiven for taking this on piecemeal…

Never seen anything of his before and the photos don’t really tell me a lot. But…

Actually, proper marine engineering principles have a large place in surfing…just that with the exception of a very few, they haven’t been used at all. Or used in what I’ll call a ‘handwaving’ way. My favorite ( satirically said) bit of handwaving is the common use in surfing of the term ‘displacement hull’…which no, repeat no surfcraft is. The things described as ‘displacement hulls’ are in fact planing hulls with slightly convex planing surfaces. Rant rage snarl. Anyhow…

Surfing takes place in a very wide set of conditions, yes. Lots of different angles of attack used by the planing hull in X, Y and Z axes, very different variable weighting, steering by moving the cargo, direction of travel being non-collinear with the centerline of said planing hull, the list goes on. Which makes it more complex than the design, testing and so forth of the relatively simple planing hulls used on most boats. By at least one order of magnitude. Likely more.

Whether Thomson is in fact applying hydrodynamics and the relevant engineering principles remains to be seen. From the cited interview;

Now, I can’t tell whether or not Thomson is in the position of a man trying to explain calculus to an orangutan or what here.

Dedina referring to ‘the hydrodynamic principle’ as being the one and only one hydrodynamic principle rather than one among many kinda betrays his lack of understanding where Thomson’s attempt to explain suggests he does know what he’s talking about. But…I haven’t spoken to him myself, nor is it likely I will, so I can’t say I really know one way or the other.

Well, yes, exactly. Simmons, for instance, studied at Caltech, worked in engineering and had studied Lindsay Lord on planing hulls which ( to my admittedly limited knowledge) is still as good a text on planing hulls as there is. And Simmons could do the math. Let’s say he was influenced by what we’ll call primary sources. He studied them at the university level.

Now, studying Simmons leads to some dilution of those primary sources and of less perfect understanding of 'em. Studying him and his notes, lets say, gives you secondary sources, with interpretations that may be incorrect. Studying someone who studied Simmons, now it’s at the tertiary level and just how close those are to the underlying primary sources is chancy. See where I’m going here?

Nowadays, somebody saying that a board is ‘Simmons influenced’ is prolly no more or less accurate than saying it relies on design principles that come from Leonardo DaVinci. Depends a lot on how well the guy that did the board understands what Simmons was really into …or, for that matter, what DaVinci was into.

But the primary sources Simmons used are most definitely available, indeed improved some; see Search | MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials and look through the courses with particular attention to the ones like Hydrodynamics (13.012). What happened is MIT merged the Mechanical Engineering ( 2.xxx courses) school with the Ocean Engineering school ( 13.xxx courses ) so the ones formerly offered by the Ocean Engineering department tend to have that (13.xxx) hung on 'em…

And Lindsay Lord’s work on planing hulls can be found, used. It’s how I got mine, as my father’s copy kinda disappeared after he went paddles up.

The thing is, I dunno if there’s anyone who, having won a large lottery, would go to MIT or an equivalent, study Marine Engineering and then subject himself to the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune building and testing well engineered boards…or of surfers who have less understanding of the engineering than a well brought up orangutan.

Greenough, in a way, did win the lottery…but he didn’t get formal training. Had he done so, or had Simmons lived longer, or if we paid more attention to another gent who sometimes posts here, we’d be way ahead of where we are now.

The surf industry is happy to spend ridiculous money paying quite a few primates to play around in the pro tour, but to the best of my knowledge has never spent a dime on hiring a marine engineer to really take on the problem. A few well trained people have worked on the ‘surfcraft problem’, as I’ll call it, but didn’t make money from it or get much recognition. More likely ridicule for not being one of the sheep…or orangutans.

Alas…

doc…

17

What I could gather from this article and the description of the MPH here is that boards with wide and straight template, flat rocker, hard edges further forward and fins more parallel to the stringer are faster. And shorter boards are more manouvrable. Who would have known???

18

[quote="$1"]

So, what's the concensus, that Thomson's shapes being a bit different than the norm is more BS than revolutionary? I've been lurking around here for some years but it's hard to get a feel on the pulse of whether his designs are generally admired here or discounted. 

Personally, I am an engineering fan and enjoy principals and thought processes put into application. I am also skeptical of the effectiveness in surfing due to the sheer variety of conditions and the relatively slow speeds of a board in relation to the water it is affecting, but I really enjoy the technology of it nonetheless. I can appreciate that Tomo boards are trying different things, if the end result is nothing more than a wider tail with a funky shape, then so be it, in my opinion, at least someone is trying and I do like that there is at the very least, reasoning as to why the shapes end up as they do. Well, reasoning beyond, well, brand x has a HPSB, so must I.

As far as credit goes, I see influence is being hugely dependent on the perception of those claiming to be influenced. I don't know much about Thomson, but I take it he is on the younger side so it's natural that his influences would not span too much further back than his own childhood. People find influence all over, even it those influences aren't traced back to the absolute source for the given technology or principal in question. 

[/quote]

I can't speak for others, but my opinion follows along the lines you yourself stated:

if the end result is nothing more than a wider tail with a funky shape, then so be it, in my opinion, at least someone is trying and I do like that there is at the very least, reasoning as to why the shapes end up as they do. Well, reasoning beyond, well, brand x has a HPSB, so must I.

I'm not a fan of engineering per se, I am at heart an artist, although I'll acknowledge engineering has its place, and I do think engineering has and will continue to contribute a lot to the advancement of the surfboard.

Nevertheless I tend to be very skeptical of people who claim that they have improved surfing by engineering.  That said, I think the Fat Penguin is the most engineered surfboard out there, and it has been completely rejected by the general surfing populace, although I personally think it looks interesting and viable and I have heard good reports from those who have ridden one, and ridicule only from those who have not.  OK, go ahead and flame me.  =)

I think there are a lot of good ideas out there, creative ideas from intelligent people, and I view progress as multi-directional.  I think the mainstream corporate surf media is a big hindrance to people being open to new ideas and different shapes, because conformity and uniformity goes hand in hand with mass production and controlled product sales. 

I think variety and disagreement are healthy and productive, there is no one right answer or right direction or best shape etc etc.  Tomo gets a lot of credit due to hype and promotion, not saying he doesn't deserve it, just saying there are plenty of other people who deserve it too, but don't have the hype and promotion pushing their name into the public eye, as it were.  Plus, the guy flat out rips on his boards - gotta respect that about him.

As far as the science behind it all - I tend to refer back to the Bonzer, and the "venturi effect" explanation that was given when it first arrived on the scene.  That has since been proven erroneous, but the shape works for a variety of surfers who like it use it and enjoy it.  Why does it work?  I don't know if anyone has fully figured it out, and I guess there are plenty of people who would say it doesn't work that great, so in the end the engineering isn't the final answer, just a stepping stone to a new direction.

19

Ummm.  First, the guy is an excellent surfer and pilot for his boards.  I find the boards(expect his fish which are bitchen) to be asthetically ugly. But honestly, WTF does quantum physics have to do with board design?  A lot of it sounds like a bunch of BS and drivel.  Is Daniel a physicist?  I didn’t see that in his resume.  Greeno and his father’s influence are impressive enough.  Why all the other psuedo-scientific shit?  Marketing? Oh, the funny looking boards appear to work quite well. I hope he sells a bunch and makes some money.  Because I love a happy ending to a story.   Mike

20

In agreement Rooster. In surfing there’s one test tank…and using it regularly in varying conditions ,on different designs , then applying it to get a desired performance  will teach you more than a 100 years of university  degrees…was there a University of Hawaii when they developed the chine and concave design of ancient alaia’s ?..Ive always regarded the science as written explanation of physical experiment…and without the physical experiment , the written science would not even exist…surfing is primal, and it does not rely on the science…as Miles Davis said “written music was invented for people without natural talent , so they could study,and learn how to play”…