I thought that RSL’s opbservation in the FW thread could do with further discussion…
Apparently there were lead weights in the nose of the board…anyone confirm…offer theories as to potential benefits? My thinking is that they were there to increase drive…GL “- theory of pitch”?
When i first heard it i dismissed it strait away … i’ve heard so many stories about lead weights in tow boards, and how they do this and that… these stories have always annoyed me … ive heard so many contradicting arguments.
Then i got told that they were near the nose of the board, and i thought wow thats unusual… something to do with flex and resonance perhaps. And apparently it really worked… completely changed the performance of the board i hear
Hi RSL,
Check this out: Surfboard Weight Bias
If they’re pushing the envelope of compsand tech for Taj, I’m sure they’re getting extreme lightweight boards (less than 5lb) which isn’t hard to do. A typical glass on fin will have a huge impact on the weight distribution of that board. A 1lb weight increase in the tail would be 1/5 of the board’s weight! Maybe they’re balancing the center of gravity more toward the center for snappier turns and easier wave entry. makes sense on a super lightweight board.
Cheers,
Rio
I always thought of Taj as a kind of nerveous twitchy type of surfer.
Anything to smooth that boy out would be a plus IMO.
Esp in some bumby Bells beach.
Making them light then adding weights would allow some fine tuning to the wave/surface conditions I suppose.
Making them heavy wouldnt allow for that.
GregL and BillB have mentioned adding weights to tune…I know this…it wouldnt take much…proly just a couple/few ounces.
If you watch this : http://www.ifilm.com/video/2651541
Around 22-30 seconds in, you can see 2 finbox (long) slots on the deck of Parsons’ board, up near the nose. When I saw that, I figured they were used to screw down some weights that could also be moved fore & aft a little bit. Wouldn’t hurt in strong offshores, and it would probably help stiffen up the nose of the board to deal with the chop they get in tow-in waves (cross chop that’s as big as the whole waves I usually surf).
Anyone else have a better idea what those finboxes are for? Or anyone know for sure?
Mike Hynson made some chambered boards with internal tubes containing water. A change in the angle of attack shifted the water fore and aft to cause the nose to drop in easier, reduce swing weight, etc - all automatically. They made funny gurgling noises when you picked them up and turned them on end.
With lead, the idea of balancing the weight of the fins in the tail certainly makes sense.
I think all of the discussion about weight distribution makes sense, but the key element left out is the rider. Your board can be super light, “off balanced” by fins, but what happens when you put a surfer on the board that applies pressure to the deck of the board? It’s only my opinion, but I think a competent rider can offset just about any weight imbalances in a “normal” surfboard with slight weight adjustments of the body.
Now tow-ins, that’s a different animal…
Much like a beginners skateboard, that is where the handle goes until they learn to balance through the chop without it.
Ok…seriously now.
Both water and snowskiis and towboards have used weights,brakes and/or adjustable dampers/stiffeners for quite a while now. As craftee alluded to, a little adjustment goes a long way. It wouldn’t just change the swing weight, but the “harmonics” of vibration/flex. I don’t desire to get in any debate of the science, but I can say these small changes absolutely alter the feel. If that feel makes you comfortable launching off a ledge or putting ski / board on a rail, it is a force multiplier for your confidence.
Gil
Ben
That is the best sequence in the film, esp when the camera pans out and you get the scale of the beast!!
Those boxes could also be used for a camera mount.
A change in the angle of attack shifted the water fore and aft to cause the nose to drop in easier, reduce swing weight, etc - all automatically.
Didn’t Hollow W.A.V.E.'s do that when they got a ding? 
That’s a neat concept.
As far as adding weight to the nose, what’s the container, or is it just a weighted item glassed in? Seems like the idea would be to be able to adjust the weight for a different feel, or for heavy offshores.
" Mike Hynson made some chambered boards with internal tubes containing water. A change in the angle of attack shifted the water fore and aft to cause the nose to drop in easier, reduce swing weight, etc - all automatically. They made funny gurgling noises when you picked them up and turned them on end."
This sounds similar to the effect that my first surfboard unintentilly had. It was a 10’ hollow ply board, and used to leak. While it had a wine cork to let the water out every few waves, the weight of the water would effect trimming as it moved along inside the board. The weight at the front of the nose was something that Hynson also worked with, but in the shaping. His premise being that it was like sand knotted at the end of a sock. As you swung it, the front would pull the tail around because of it’s heavier weight. Nat told me that this was also the main principle for his own boards from the 70’s, influenced directly by Hynson.
Could a simpler reason be that it’s to balance it in flight? It’d make a lot of sense if a lot of the weight’s at the back to move the centre of gravity towards the centre of the board.
Heavy boards have more drive and penetration, as has been mentioned approximately a billion times on this forum.
Also, when using boards with horizontal fin area (like the thruster) the pitch angle is important and is more easily controlled with greater nose weight.
…Just patch the nose.
FWIW my computer protection program lit up when I clicked that link…
Look up a site report: Go
x-road.co.kr may cause a breach of browser security.
Back to previous page [/url]How to overrride the security warning for x-road.co.kr:A trick that I’ve used for over 30 years. Hynson first did this back in the 60’s. Now, do you think this could be used by pros to tune their boards to different conditions? Superlight is always what you want … then use weight to tune. On a heavy board your stuck with what you have.
On the glider mentioned earlier, why not just make the thing out of oak? Why on earth make it light and then add weight? Because adding the weight to a light glider WORKS BETTER!
It seems funny to me that there will be threads on here that talk about rocker endlessly. When’s the last time you saw a scale at a surf shop? Or in a factory? They’ll measure the outline to 1/32nd of an inch but not know the weight. Doesn’t weight count? Are the pros even aware of what their weight is?
“Dude, I want it light …” How light? For what conditions?
Personally, I don’t want a 5 lb board at Sunset. I don’t want a 7 lb board at Sebastian Inlet.
Think about it …
As far as Taj’s board, I can’t say exactly what was done but he’s now won two in a row and is ranked #1. FW is pulling out the stops to advance the art. Some of stuff mentioned here that went on in the past was DEAD ON TARGET! Some of what is being suggested in reference to things like pitch angle and fin design are damn close to right.
Believe it or not, with the right knowledge surfboards can be engineered. Most aspects can be quantified and most important all aspects can be related to one another. This where magic ends and science takes over.
It’s not about weight, or rocker, or flex, or shape, or buoyancy … it’s about all of the above and how they relate to each other.
Hi Greg,
I agree with you up to a point, and I can see that is a possible advantage to making a light board and then weighting the nose (apart from the post construction tuning you are talking about) namely the fact that usually, making a board heavier will make it stiffer, whereas adding weights will not.
Nevertheless, designing a heavy wooden longboard which feels right is an art in itself, and the result is not necessarily inferior simply because we are not adding weights to tune the thing… . . we build from past experience and tune the board prior to building it by altering ther parameters… . . and that is EXACTLY the process of engineering you are talking about. . . we do it with wood all the time.
Pro level shortboards are a different story though, you have a lot packed into a small board, and small differences are going to have a bigger result. . .
Longboards are more forgiving all round, and with longboards it is much easier for a rider to adjust to big differences in weight, flex etc than it is with shortboards.
Hopefully you guys can let us have a chuckle at the irony of Taj adding lead weights to his board after all the light vesus heavy controversy and see the egg on the faces of those who swore blind that light is always better for shortboard performance !
Cheers.
Mike Hynson made some chambered boards with internal tubes containing water. A change in the angle of attack shifted the water fore and aft to cause the nose to drop in easier, reduce swing weight, etc - all automatically. They made funny gurgling noises when you picked them up and turned them on end.
With lead, the idea of balancing the weight of the fins in the tail certainly makes sense.
Rats! Preempted again! At least it was by a first class designer :-> If you do the calculations, the amount of weight that you can add with water is sort of disappointing. Enough to affect balance in a way noticeable to a pro, sure, but probably not enough to change fundamental behavior. Take a cylinder with 1-3/4" inside diameter (probably about as large as practical) You get roughly 1 pound of water per foot of length. I’m skeptical that it is feasible to add more than 2 pounds using water. And at that volume, the tube will need to be pretty much centered, so you don’t gain much “tunability” either. There is also the problem of accurately visualizing how much weight you have added if you partially fill the tube. The idea of Zen weight shifting by allowing the water to find its own level doesn’t do a lot for me either. Until I did my weight calculations, I was thinking of some primitive pump mechanism similar to these http://www.nrsweb.com/shop/assets/prod_img/2790f.jpg so that you could add or purge water during a session. Taping lead weights to the nose or some close equivalent is probably practical, but there has to be a more elegant way to accomplish this. If you could model something on the loading/ejecting mechanism for a tubular magazine shotgun, and find a material for “slugs” that is dense enough and corrosion proof (a tungsten compound, perhaps), you could have a mechanism that is (more or less) open to the outside but sealed off from the interior of the board. In fact, you could install multiple mechanisms “pointed” in opposite directions. That gives you some ability to fine tune by changing both aggregate weight and center of balance. Monitoring weight added is done by simply counting “slugs”.
-Samiam
Anyone who has ever surfed a hollow wooden board with water inside it will know that it’s a really bad idea to have water moving fore and aft as the board changes its trim angle. . . … it just slows down the trimming response and makes it impossible to accurately control the trim angle… . . and it stuffs up the sweet spot so you have to move around the board either chasing the water or having it chase you !
By the way I have been saying for years (here on swaylocks) that the main issue with using a lot of horizontal fin area on shortboards is the fact that there is insufficient nose weight to keep the trim angle low, thus making control difficult . . . . it looks like Taj is discovering the same thing (thrusters have horizontal fin area). . . weight in the nose gives easier control of the trim angle and a more self tending board, this equals more drive and penetration, as well as more speed due to the extra weight.
Well, I hate to break up your guys little party- but I think that you are totally wrong about what those two fin boxes in the nose are for. I’d bet they were put there to allow somewhere to mount the camera for the cut that you see about :32 into the film… seems crazy for such a short bit of film, but how else you gunna mount that camera? Bungee cords? Those cameras are pretty expensive! 
-Carl
