I was going to post this in the fin theory thread but it is so far ahead of this topic I decided to post it seperately. I’m not a fin expert so this is just to supply an image of the slot fin FYI.
John
Cool pic. Wonder how they ride. BTW, I thought Loehr didn’t like the football fins (could be mistaken); funny to see them on the same board.
Slotted fins like that were all the rage in windsurf boards in '85 to '88. Found lots of drag, clog with weeds, base cracks, very slow not only top speeds, but also getting onto a plane.
Plus’s are…lots of drag, slow, does alleviate certain kinds of spinouts…maybe by going so slow you can’t possibly spinout at such slow speeds.
Rolliges-I should clarify, the slot fins are a Loehr design. The surfboard itself was shaped by Robert Strickland. I put the football fin in just to try it out.As you supect it did’nt work too well. With the other two large fins it had too much drag and was twitchy handling. I replaced it with a 3" trailer fin and the performance improved dramaticly.
LeeDD- I experienced none of the problems you described. On the contrary it was probably the fastest board I ever owned. It was also stable handling and pretty responsive for an 8 ft. board. You might notice in the photo that it had deep bonzer concaves. Additionally it had very flat rocker. So I cant’ say whether it’s performance was due to the fins or the concaves. But IMO the fins had excellent holding power in critical sections. I never experienced any spinout with them.
You read my post, but you DON’T comprehend it’s meaning.
Slotted fins are a 1985 idea. Slow, don’t spinout.
Surfing small waves is SLOW. Your board, a bonzer, flat rockered, is fast for a surfboard. So you put SLOW fins on your fast surfboard, and it’s OK.
Any good shaper can easily make a faster board than yours. Just because you think your board is the “fastest I’ve ever ridden”…doesn’t mean anything! Maybe you always ride slow boards!