I realized my chines are very wide (3-3.5") and wondering if I should widen my single concave out?
Attached a picture showing how far inside the chine comes in reference to the fin… is this purely aesthetics or should the inside base of the fin butt up to the chine?
I don’t want to mess with it and potentially mess it up if I don’t need to
gdaddy - thanks for the reference. Since my base is longer then pushing it further up off the tail should be correct right?
Your chines look fine to me the way you have them. They’re there to add control and some smoothness to the your transitions but without getting into as much drag as using belly. I’ve never used double foiled fins or keels at the rail. My understanding of it is that when using those you want zero toe-in. As for placement, your own stance on this board will dictate that; you normally need the center of effort for the fins to be under your rear foot. If you naturally gravitated to (lets say) 5" forward of the tail block for this type of board then that’s about where you would have the most leverage over your keels.
Remember what I said about the kids adapting their stance to put their rear foot slightly behind the trailing edge of the keels in order to overpower the fat ass. Thay modified their stance to fit the board. If you’re amenable to doing the same then you can use that example. If you don’t want to have to think about it as much then you might choose differently.
As for taking your current bottom contours further…
The temptation for shapers using a new-to-them design feature is to go to excess. “If a little works then adding more should work better”, when it’s more common for “a little goes a long way”. Your current bottom setup already fits in with what other builders have done, so for your first iteration you may have already hit the sweet spot. If it were my board I’d just go with what you already have. But it’s not my board. It’s your board, your vision and how you want to surf so on that basis I think you should do what you want. That’s the whole point of built-not-bought.
I always try and keep that mindset while shaping - a little goes a long way… nothing extreme, but sometimes my perfectionist side gets the better of me and I keep taking down etc… and go too far.
Im not a good surfer by any means and not experienced enough to know yet “how I surf”… what I’ve found I’m enjoying most and do better with is 7’ single with tiny sides. Hull entry to tri plane hull exit with moderate rocker. I don’t do cutbacks etc… I enjoy connecting with the wave and smooth drawn out speed and letting the wave do its thing
I have been reading a lot on split keels.
what’s the major difference in keels, split keels and twins in a board like this?
You already have the round keels, right? You can just use those if you want. You’ve already mentioned that this is your first swing at the Simmons design. You gotta start somewhere with your combos otherwise you’ll have nothing to compare to. One way to look at build-your-own is to consider trial and error process to be part of the fun of it all. Enjoy the ride, so to speak.
I ran a set of split keels (Speed Dialer) on a speed dialer shape some years ago and they ran okay except I thought they were a little undersized. However the reason for that is because of rider stature, not the design itself. IMO most riders who weigh more than 190# or so (which is most of my riders) need more fin area to push against, especially on the boards that have a lot of surace area in the tail. However, if you’re at 180# or less then a regular sized set of split keels could work for you.
Also, Robin Mair (Hanalei Fins) sells some inveresting split keel designs. He likes narrow base + more area at the tip. And then McDing posted a thread a couple days ago about the virtues of using sets of smaller 3.75" fins for quads to reduce the drag, so that’s obviously working for him.
You can still do a split keel if you want, you’ll just need to make your own or order custom and go larger. You can make a pair of plywood keels for $10 or less. It you screw up the first one then try again.
