I’m thinking about my next board and I recently came across a series of photos I’ve never seen before. They are of an Aviso Dick Van hydro hull that Rasta made popular. I had an idea for a while about of channel bottom contours that were inline with the fins, but more like flat planes and then having the chines in the rails. Kind of taking what Tomo is doing, and what Yorky is doing, and blending that into a more traditional hydro plane like bottom like what Jeff Alexander did with his Gemini. Then I see these pics and I’m thinking this is pretty close to what I had in my head.
I’d like to put this bottom on board with a reversed Omni outline. Slightly pulled in nose and wider rounded tail, or a rounded diamond/square. I don’t want the wider nose. My last couple of boards have wide rounder noses, and I want to get back to less width up front. Looking at something about 6’ x 20" x 2.5", probably have to make it a quad because I’m not fond of twins, maybe a 3 fins across like the Griffin hovercraft. I’m having fun with that.
Does anyone have experience riding one of these, have any comments?
What are the fin placement your doing on that tri in a line board (from tail to trailing edge of fin)? Also what size fins you using? And how do you like it always been interested in that.
It’s an interesting design, but with no experience riding it, or boards without the bell and whistle bottoms, but have that general planshape, I will withhold my opinions.
I am interested in why your yellow hovercraft uses a rail probox in the center with a 0 degree insert, and the rail proboxes are center proboxes which allow for no cant, and are not really designed to be installed in the board canted
When I made that Hovercraft I was experimenting with different ideas. This one was carved out of a single piece of 3" thick XPS, so there’s a lot of differences in the rocker and the outline is different too. I think I only had the boxes in the image and may have decided to place them based on “looks”. Unlike most people I tend to prefer upright fins versus canted, and I use very little tow. I eventually converted that board to Grif’s 5 fin design after a while, but it’s been wrapped up and stored with my out of rotation boards for now. My “real” Griffin boards are his original 5 fin fish design and they are really good. The real Hovercraft boards are also very good. Griffin is a master.
I use the center boxes on the rail on many of my boards and I’ve found that for me it works. One of my magic boards has center fins in a thruster configuration, using the H2 fins.