I would just take the 7S board(or your photo/drawing) into the shaper of your choice and have him make the board. You mentioned in another post you like ACE's mini-simms approach. He's in San Diego, can shape anything you like including a board that is unique and will surf great. He has been making alternative boards much longer than the current trend.
Who do you think fat boxy rails track(resist directional changes)? I think tracking has more to do with rail line, Fin placement/shape, bottom contours and a multitude of other considerations including the type of wave in which the board is being. Mike
I gotta agree w/Mike - I’ve made several variations on that deck-rail combo. I call it the turtle shell myself, and thought it up out of my own goofy brain, but have seen similar stuff since.
Anyway - the point is, it depends on what you want to do, and how you approach wave riding, and all the other hydrodynamic features of a board. For me, thicker rounder rails facilitate going on edge better/easier than the more extreme thinner railed versions I’ve made, and my hypothesis is: It goes back to the simple action of the bigger soft round curve “sucking” into the water - thus going “on edge” - better for me than what I thought the reduction in volume would do…
We could talk about all the subtleties of rail design forever, and it would be fun because I know I would learn a lot from you shapers, but my instincts, and my experience, has told me that if you combine a thick board WITH thick boxy rails WITH a super wide board WITH a super wide tail (like many fishes and the mini simms for example) that you will probably be dealing with some tracking issues when trying to pull certain maneuvers like maybe a backside bottom turn. I haven’t ridden a mini simms yet, but it seems that a tracking issue would be lessened as the board gets a lot smaller of course.
A case in point: I was having a blast riding my Joe Blair 5’-10", 3" thick, 23" wide double winged quad last Saturday in Del Mar. I love that board, but sometimes that extra meat in the overall thickness of the board, combined with its major width (at least 23") gets in my way and won’t allow me to crank certain maneuvers as much as I’d like to because I know if I pushed it a little farther that it would track on me. You know what I mean? So my thinking is that the concave rail thingy shown in the previous photos would be one way to get the best of both worlds - an old farts short board that paddles well, with a highly responsive rail.
I totally agree with you Taylor but I don’t want an “extreme thinner railed” board. What I want would be a nice clean round rail that is merely a slightly scaled down version of the rail I would normally get with a thicker board.