Hey Lee V. ~ These are yours ~

General Discussion
1

Hey Lee,

These are yours mate.

They’re for this board –

http://www.swaylocks.com/resources/detail_page.cgi?ID=859

Right? Well, don’t be afraid to move them around mate.

They’re carbon/glass/Resin Research flex epoxy Panels with 3 layers of 5.8oz carbon in both center and rail fins lay-ups.

Center 5.5 inch Driftless template: very thin 80/20 foil.

Rails 4.875 inch CiK template: Rail fins are torsioned in the direction of laminar flow, The undercamber begins immediately after a fully double foiled leading edge and runs the full height and width of high pressure side of the fin ,Overcamber on lower pressure side is foiled 80/20.

USPS Priority Monday mate.

Enjoy!

Mahalo, Rich

2

WOW!

3

very nice !

I’d love to do some carbon ‘inlays’ … roughly how much would you pay per foot for carbon fibre in America please, Rich ?

[just so I have a comparison / rough guide what I would fork out in Oz]

thanks !

ben

p.s. - the tint on the board looks nice, too …did you make the board as well ?

4

Hey Ben,

The carbon cloth I use is 5.8oz. It’s about 45 inches wide or so and it costs $35.00 or more a yard. I get it at Fiberglass Hawaii.

It wets out great with Resin Research epoxy and the weave is pretty showy. I figure I may as well use the best materials I can get my hands on.

Sure wish I could get my hands on a piece of G-10 to test my stock against for strength, flexiblity and response speed.

The board the fins are in is an 8’3"x21.75 Natural Curves. It’s a custom shape that Steve Coletta did for me. It’s a tri plane hull.

Ralph Hedrick (New Beginnings Glass Works) here in Santa Cruz did the glass work. They’re both great guys and do some of the finest work around these parts. Ralph does all John Mel’s glass work and some of Michel Junod’s along with a few other shapers He’s set-up at the Freeline Factory. The board is a blue resin tint and is done with polyester.

Hope this helps.

Share the stoke, Rich

5

Rich,

Have you seen this? Fin design software, exports IGES, so in theory could be used with CNC router.

http://cetic.swan.ac.uk/surfs/products/finXP/index.asp

6

Hey Pinhead,

I emailed the guy in the link you posted. No answer.

Guess he’s busy.

Impossibly I had Shark’s cove all to myself for an hour and half this evening. Three wave sets every 10 mins. chest high waves 70 to 120 yard super racey rides. Oh yeah! Talked to Doug Haut when I got out of the water this evening. He had a sweet new 9’5" he was surfin’ ~ showed him LeeV’s fins, his comment was, "Those are trippy. We both laughed and agreed how tough it is be the test rider and how somebody has to do it so we’ll just have to suffer on.

My heart, brain, and intuition all tell me to make the fins I do. I always have some no idea cookin’ on the back burner. I visualize what I want and make the jigs to do the lay-ups

then set after the foiling process. All the digital programs in the world aren’t going to build fins unless someone creates a foiling machine that will produce whatever a fin designer can dream up. Molding is the other approach but building a mold for what I’m making would be damn tough and you have to build so many of them it just wouldn’t be practical. Until then I’m John Henry waitin’ for the steam hammer to bury me.

Thanks for the link. I’ll put in my bookmarks and check in there. I’ll let you know if anything happens. Generally if I send someone an email and I don’t get a courtesy response I write it off.

Mahalo, Rich

7

Rich,

Those are the best sessions. I did get a reply to my e-mail - but not much more info than what is on the site, see attached.

8

Wow, those foils look damn slick. What are you using to do the actuall shaping? dremels? by hand? I want to try some foil ideas… Are those EPS, Carbon, epoxy?

9

Hey TurboJets,

I use 4 inch high speed grinders to do the rough foiling. The rest of the work is done by hand with an 8" half round bastard file and sanding blocks with a variety of sandpaper grits.

Once you learn which tool to use when and how to best move the material off the fin plug things go along pretty smoothly.

The fabrication schedule is in the first post.

Mahalo, Rich

10

Beautiful, Rich. I haven’t given you any feedback on mine due to a severe surf drought over here.

11

Again, NICE work Rich… i hope to test it soon again ;).

By the way today i tried the Flaco on my CI 6’9’’ singlefin on a overhead long right hander with fast sections, and the board was flying, and i made sections i thought i wouldn’t. The best part: the fin ALWAYS hold and i never loose any speed when drawing long arcs or bottom turns. I’m amazed (sincerely), it’s like having a new board.

Thank mate.

12

Thanks for the kind words and the sterling report mate.

Hope you get some more good surf there today.

Coque’s Flaco is the center fin in the attachments.

For the record it’s a rigid high density foam core fin with a nice round leading edge, and it floats and I recall it’s about 8.25" deep.

Fins may make a bigger difference than one thinks and one that suits the rider often goes from board to board and strangely is quite often the right choice.

Sharin’ the stoke, Rich


13

Photo that started the thread:

Simply unique! Lee we’ll need a full report.

14

Rob, i ordered a set up (and some more fins) with an inside foil on the rail fins close to those ones, i’m sure they’ll be an “step up” because i tried the difference between an “of the rack” fin for a single fin and a custom fin from Halcyon.

So Lee, as Rob said: “we’ll need a full report!”.

15

After two sessions, I thought I’d report the preliminary results…ooooooo baby. I rode my 6’8" Borjorquez Pescado in shin to head high glassey, lined up reef surf. Slopey bottom but steep enough to bash about. They came alive in the bigger waves; chest to head high. I didn’t notice any difference in paddleing or catching waves but they trim out almost as well as a single. You can drop into the trough and square a turn nicely whereas the usual cluster set up will hang or bog unless you release one of the side fins. Reduced frontal area?

On smaller waves they worked better by subtle toe or heel pressure rather than banking them hard. On the bigger waves, though, they have all the drive you could need. I tried pumping up speed but they seem to like a lighter touch or highline trim. So far they are speedy enough and run so well that I haven’t really needed to pump.

The part I liked the best was that I could stand up on the hull portion of the board and they would rail turn just fine. My other set up wouldn’t hold the tail down so the fore/aft balance you need for railers just wasn’t there. These fins let me use the board’s design the way Steve, Kirk and Scott envisioned.

My impression is that I am just starting to unlock the power in these buggas. Wish I had them earlier in the winter…Rich, they work perfect with the Pescado shape and I’m thinking they would be killer in semi to full guns. Can’t wait to put them on my edge and see how they work there.

16

Hey Lee,

Thanks for the input and the postive energy.

Lee, I will try and discribe what you are feeling in order to get you up to warp 7 or so. The fins I’ve made for you don’t interfere with the way the board performs rather they allow it to shift with very little obstruction. Deceleration is minumized by the fin foil pattern, cant, and outline. The drive they deliver is in a power curve that is intended to approach the power curve of that available in the wave face. Speed is the constant that affects this curve. Fin power and board speed are intended to somewhat mirror eachother. This sort of perfromance curve allows the surfer to get in the sweet spot on the board and seek the most potentially powerful part of the wave face. When you hit on where these fins work best on the Pescado, the Edge or what ever board they happen to light up take a photo for us mate. It’ll help more than just you and I see how fin set-ups can be placed to max out performance.

Note: Consider that the reason surfers have to pump for speed is because some fins in use today obstruct the maximum trim speed of a board – thus a surfer has the illusion that he is making more progress than he really is. (God forbide that the marketing realm would pull wool over the eyes of the consumer) With each pump the board squirts forward only to begin decelerating the moment one of the rail fins isn’t engaged and “paddling” the board forward. During each rail change the board decelerates. Watch someone surfing on a modern shortboard and tell me if the board isn’t descelerating or accelerating constantly. Move the wide point back on a board and this performance picture is accentuated.

If fins are balanced to the way a board performs best they well let the surfer reach the limits of speed and board performance in given set of conditions. They will allow the surfer to seek what ever part of the wave face is choosen more freely because less deceleration occurs and one is more able to drive toward limits of a board’s performance peak at speed.

Go faster, drive harder ~ I.E. more power available – more fin lift available – more acceleration available, and when going slower, drive less ~ I.E. less power, less fin lift amd seek as much trim speed as possible.

Fins and boards that are more effecient take less effort to make them accelerate and the hold their speed better too. Sharp round house cutbacks are done much more easily when fins loosen up as the board slows down and it’s great to be able to cut back without massive deceleration. One can always stall a board by moving off the sweet spot. It doesn’t make any difference whether you move forward (classic longboard noseriding) or rock back (modern shortboard technique) the board will slow down either way.

What I’m attempting to engineer into fin set-ups are ones that allow surfers to reach the top end of a board performance range. Board configuration posssibilities are infinite; fins must follow. IMHO the best way to generate more speed is with rail fin drive. Boards with out rail fins don’t generate speed as well as those that have them. There is a trend with us at present the speaks to amplifying rail fin power with twinzer and quad set-ups that has significant merit. It works on boards of lengths up to 9.6" very well because taking the center fin out reduces drag. I’ve seen many boards in action and ones with minimal center fins or without any at all seem to trim the fastest. I believe this is why we are seeing more fish type shapes. These kind of set-ups have evolved from the tradional fish which IMHO was truely one of the greatest advancements in performance surfing.

If you haven’t ridden one take a Skip Fry, Rich Pavel, John Mel, Ward Coffey, Hap Jacobs, or Carl Olson traditional fish creation for a spin. They sure are fun, are quite fast and real smoooooth to.

Looks like we have a little south and some northwest swell on the way.

Share the Stoke, Rich

17

good stuff rich!!!

18

Had 'em in power today…They RIP. Absolutely the best cluster fin set up I have ever ridden.

19

Lee are the fins on your edge board or another?

20

I’m resurrecting this one as there were 4 guys asking about these fins today. This was the only way to turn them on to Rich…Again, these fins are flat out amazing. Think PRODUCTION Rich…