Those seem to be overscored in the current criteria system. What designs would help in this case?
Should the tail be more stuck/fixed (round) or more realeasing (swallow,square)?
Supposing I want to keep the same volume. Would be better to cut lenght, width or thickness? A wide/short board would be better than a narrow/bigger, or any combination including thickness?
Grouped fins + increased toe angle. It will reduce your turning radius, but adding too much toe will also increase your drag’… compromise is the thing.
@ 0:37, it’s more the huge pivot he gets by putting most weight on his rear foot which produce the sharp turn than a his fin placement or tail shape.
A round pintail should do the job.
To get the shortest urning radius, finless board can also be an option: alaia guys turn on the spot, u can’t beat that radius !
Back in my youth I watched that video over and over!
The more rail angle you have in the final 1/4 the easier you should be able to do tight radius turns, at the expense of hold and drive in bigger surf, just a generalisation as everything has to work in sync with rocker contours etc. Bumps hips and wings can also help in the right situations.
if your contours and rocker are not working together you can say goodbye to a board that turns well no matter how good the rail outline is
Don’t go too mad with tail rocker, again, generally more tail rocker will increase turning ability at the expense of drive and feeling.
Push it too far with too much of a flip in the tail and you will get a board where you cant get enough rail length in the water while turning off the back foot, the result being a board that wont cutback properly as you don’t have enough to push off, bottom turns on steep drops can also have a severe lack of feel too.
After 5 years that board is still sitting at the back of my shed, I hope that it never sees the light of day again.
Seriously, the rear of the board provides a stable platform to rotate the board on without any loss of energy. The design also provides side cut, which any skier/snowboarder knows is the way to shorten the radius of the turn. A distinct advantage for taller surfers as well as your typical contest “height disadvantaged” ones. Meyerhoffer chased sidecut IMHO but probably failed by putting the sidecut in the middle rather down towards the tail where the rail action happens. The board also has minimum nose or tail rocker, that may also influence the options as to how it can be ridden. Everything on that board flys in the face of what is already know and practiced from a shapers perspective. The vid is probably offensive to some, however any outside the box thinker should see the possibilities afforded by the design, albeit in a refined non-phallic, well not so obvious phallic shape. Maybe the P2 model.