can someone describe how these fin arrangements will differ affect the ride:
Twin-Keel
Quad
Canard-fin Quad
Twinzer
I’ve noticed the canard quads loosen up my fishes a bit, but with a loss of some drive. The canard quads also seem to work better in poorer, more choppy conditions than the keels. I think I get more drive and speed with the keels in clean, lined up conditions. I have not used any other quad set-up other the the Pavel quads. Mike
…hello,
the ride will be affected depends on what you re looking for
so, there are lot of things to say regarding multifins, clusters, sizes, etc
also, do you ask for differences in the same type of shape?
fish in this case?
-some Headlines:
Twin keel is “antique” to say something
Twin fin is more “modern” to say something
Quads work pretty good with “rocket” fish
Pavel s quads are 2 fins in reality but splitted in 4 pieces and works perfectly fine in a modern fish (those who you see a few…) and enhance and boost the design of a retro fish, like backsiding
Twinzer is a twin fin boosted, with all the pro s and cons of that
all the set ups enhance the ride of an ántique´keel fin
Thanks for the replies.
yep, my question was how those fin arrangments would feel on the same board – particularly a retro fish ( wider nose, parallel rails).
rgds,
j
Twin keels give heaps of drive and down the line speed by just pointing the board the right direction, and being on the right place on the wave face. Can feel “skatey” if your back foot is right over the fins, but most often this fin setup is for speed. Makes big, powerful, open turns when combined with flatter rockers and deep fish tails.
Canard quads loosen up the ride, make tighter turns, but cost you significantly in drive. My least favorite option. If I don’t want the twin keel feeling, I go right for the…
Quad setup - more speed and drive than a thruster, with less stalling effect on hard, tight turns. Carries more speed through the turn than a thruster, and can be pushed a lot harder without the tail breaking free. Can ride a higher, fast line, and holds better in steeper sections. Can sometimes be too fast, outrunning tube sections, so you have to adjust your timing and get used to stalling to get deep in the barrel.
Twinzer… I’m not authority here, brother.
Think in terms of “tracking” when discussing the fin options. Keels track the most and so will drive harder. From there you go to twinzer, to dialer then to quad. For fuller nosed and strait hipped “classic,” not antique fishes, the keels set without cant or toe go like a bat outa hell when surfed from the front foot (mostly), however the cutbacks have a longer arc and feel like your on rails- so the tendency to grab rail and stay low through the turn. When going to the backhand we all tend to weight the back foot and pivot which will cause a keeler to do weird shit. As you move through the fin options toward the quad, the above becomes less true. It’s all give and take but it really boils down to front foot vs back I think. I will say though that the rounder or more modern hips with a quad will be a more natural fit, with the same said for the strait hipped (and short) fishes with keels or twinzers.
Very well put!
You’d be surprised what you can squeeze out of a keel finned classic outline. Try some single foiled fins with some cant but no toe-in. Unreal drive and good trim but can get pretty vertical if you go into the flats a hair longer than normal on your bottom turn.
makes it more of a twinnie feel? Damn, now I really wanna surf.
The twinzer continues to be somewhat of a mystery for me.
What sort of conditions do they excel in and when don’t they perform well?
I had a little Twinzer shaped by Gary McNabb that just hauled ass. It was my first fish though so I spent a lot of time working out the bugs ( in terms of my own style issues). The board was very Liss in outline with a pretty substantial amt. of single to dbbl concave. I found it to work best in the conditions that I now find my keeler to work best in - steeper / rounder reefs… drag racing. I did find the twinzer a bit more forgiving to back hand maybe, but certainly less so than my quads. I’m a really front footed guy with a narrow stance - works for me cause I’m tall, to me tall dudes look funny when their stances are all spread. No offense to the tall spreaders. Also that kind of touches on my comment about the rail grab cutties above, I tend to cutback standing tall as I exit (single fin hold-over) which stalls the keels and the twinzer to less a degree. Will cant effect this? Toby P told me that the dialers relieved a lot of the stall qualities as well one time but I confess to not having tried a dialer for more than a couple of waves and it felt just like a twinzer to me… we so split hairs in this sport, kills me.
before I describe the twinzer, I first need to explain the twin-fin. By twin fin I mean the design popularised by surfers such as Mark Richards and not the keeled fish.
i've invested a fair bit of time in twin fins, used to ride them at the time when Mark Richards, Derek Hynd and Martin Potter were my idols. I worked in a small surf shop in my summer holidays (early 1980s) and I remember that one of the main surfing mags had published the fin positions of some of the top pros - it was like we had found gold and the page from the mag got pinned up on the wall of the shaping room. I can't remember the various measurements, but they did form the basis for my personal boards and I can remember the measurements I used to use. All my good boards got their twin fins 10 1/2 up from the tail. All my tails were 14 1/2" wide or 14 3/4" wide, if i remember correctly this was reprasentative of some of the pros boards at that time. Board length about 5' 10". Fin base smaller than keels but bigger than thruster. I continued to ride twins well into the eighties and was slow to adopt the thruster due to early thrusters IMHO being bad (at least in the UK where I used to live), and I supposed i liked the way twin fins worked too.
I have made twin-fins with very little toe in and they worked fine and didn't track.
this is how they worked for me. They are loose, looser than thrusters. I am not a fish expert and for that reason enjoyed reading the posts on this thread. I did not get on with my brief experience with a borrowed fish, but i can say twinnies are different from fish - the narrow tail means the tail can be sunk easily if necessary. The normal width (< 20") mean they can be tipped on edge and rail buried if necessary. Another feature of the twinnie only became evident to me when switching back and forth between thrusters and twinnies - when going into a cutback there is a slight and controllable sideways drift - this is nice. They top turn with a spinning rather than powerful re-entry motion. In the right situation they are fast - this situation is coming down from an unweighted top turn and pointing the board down the line in a straight diagonal line from the lip to the bottom at some point down the line. this "fall line" can be achieved in an effortless manner. this sounds great but thats the only sitation in which they are fast. Compared to a thruster drive from the tail is poor. Instead a more effective way of maintaining speed at the bottom of the wave is to use even footed pressure and keep the front end of the board down and the board skating more flat. What they don't like is staying high in the pocket and they want to find their way to the bottom of the wave. Attempts to stay high will result in a skidding on the tail feeling, rather than engaging the power of the wave. Due to the way they work best with even footed pressure rather than rear foot pressure a lower rocker than thruster is needed. Skating along with even footed pressure on low rocker means these boards are suited to slop.
although the 80s was a long time ago my memory of how they worked got refreshed in 2003 when i built myself a twinnie and used to have fun in the windswell of Ocean Beach San Francisco. Even windswell can be lined up and gutsy in OBSF and the board flew in the manner described above. However for the reasons mentioned above nothing beats the thruster for me and when all wave riding situations are taken into consideration overall the thruster is faster.
and now on to the question of how is a twinzer different from a twinnie.
this is my Blob model, rounded pin with Gary McNab Future twin fins set in the twinnie setup as opposed to fish setup. It has 5 Future boxes, to allow configuration for twin, 2 + 1 (aka 2 1/2 - the future twin fin set comes with a trailer), twinzer, or 5 fin - due to the twin fin boxes being set a bit further back than a thruster it was not designed to be ridden as thruster. Although the the front boxes are set more than half way forward of the twin boxes, they were designed to hold longboard sidebites which are short based and set more rearwards thus giving the standard twinzer setup of front fins overlapping rear fins at the fron fin mid base point. Rear fins then got swapped for thruster side fins - the larger Gary McNab fins in a twinzer setup was way overfinned. Somewhere in the archives pre-2004 is a detailed report of how the different fin configurations worked, but from memory this is what twinzer did to the board:
just pushing the board along with my hands in waist deep water I could feel the extra drag of the twinzer setup although it was not that obvious when paddling I believe that there was more drag when paddling too. On my first wave or so I was able to stay high in the pocket and feel the power of the wave and I thought it could be a faster board in the same way a thruster is, however this was just an illusion - the twinzer was slower on the fall line and although it did have more drive from the tail than the twinnie, it did not have as much tail drive as the thruster. I therefore had no use for the twinzer and prefer either pure twinnie or thruster.
When coming off a thruster and on to a twinnie with many years of absence from the twinnie, the twinnie feels fairly awful until the surfing technique is adjusted. I therefore suspect that someone coming off a thruster might get on with a twinzer better, even though I prefer the twinnie.
Check out this promo that Oldy made for Valla Surfboards has some nice explanations of different fish with footage to back up the talk.
Cheers
Mooneemick