[quote="$1"]
But how do YOU determine where you're entry rocker finishes and your exit rocker begins?
[/quote]
If I follow the logic being proposed I see three possibilities:
1. rocker "apex" has nothing to do with entry or exit rocker,
or
2. entry rocker ends somewhere between the front half of the board and dead center
or
3. Silverback asked the question based on the assumption that "apex" is the same thing as the transition point where entry ends and exit begins, but his assumption is wrong.
Aloha Crafty
If you are suggesting that my diagram should have a horizontal, 5th line of a different color, drawn through it somewhere that is labeled… “Level”. I have no problem with that suggestion. It is not unreasonable.
I didn’t include such a line for 2 reasons.
#1 I didn’t want to clutter the diagram with too much initially. (Trust me, I have many other things that could be added to this diagram) It is always hard to determine when enough is enough or maybe too much.
#2 I presumed (incorrectly in your case) that the observer would understand level to be square to their computer screen or the framed borders of the diagram.
So… even though an independent horizontal level line wasn’t included… level in the diagram still exists and 2 of the lines in the drawing still lay exactly parallel with that level. If I ever get around to redrawing the diagram, I will include a “Level” line to help.
Bill, if you are under the impression that I am the only one confused by your drawing, then I suggest that you not waste your time updating it for me.
I already know the answer to Silverback's question.
But others here may not so have at it if you wish.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the drawing is confusing.
[quote="$1"]
Seems as if there are two camps.
1. One camp sees it as an interaction between the blank and the shaper.
2. The other camp sees it as an interaction between the board and the water.
#1 is infinitely easier for shapers to digest and use to make better boards.
But I prefer #2 myself. Just my opinion. Whatever floats your board.
[/quote] I belong to both camps (and then some). Thereason for this is primarily how I evolved while building racing sailboards. It goes back to the planing profile conciousness that I developed in order to build (at the time) the 2nd fastest sailboard recorded by radar at the California Speedcheck which included 308 sponsored racers competing on 2 courses at San Luis Reservoir in Los Banos (central California). Fred Haywood (THE Man of the day) was the only one that bested us on one of Jimmy Lewis' designs.
Anyway, the planing profile thing started to really impact me as a designer far beyond my previous history of being a self proclaimed 'rocker freak' with surfboards. With sailboards, they were moving at such a higher speed I had to take many other aspects into consideration. The totality of the designs became very apparent during this rich period of design (1980-1989). I was shaping double triple and quad concaves, planing rails, chined rails, hooked half pipe rails, three part planing rockers, panel vee, and later a thing i called 'Y Bottoms", pretty much on a daily basis.
The envisioning line thing that BB talks about is a very intimate relationship, in fact IMO, the most intimate relationship a designer has with the stuff we do. The distinction between shapers and designers is sometimes overlooked... actually frequently overlooked. Just ask Bill, Eric (Arakawa), Renny, and other guys that design blanks most shapers use.
As far as you observation about the two camps, I agree. More than once I have heard a novice shaper asking Yater for shaping insight(s), to which he would reply "just follow the blank and you wll turn out all right". We all know that the close tolerance approach attracted many more novices into the fray; it actually detracted from those of us that read foam and reconstruct blanks versus CAD and the new approaches being developed. No value judgment there, but this is just to give you the nod for belonging to, as you describe, "the 2nd camp". That's the challenging camp to be part of.... most aren't!
The pitch (as GL has elaborated), and I have descibed, starts to migrate to other terms that people rarely see mentioned on Sway's. I mentioned "pitch" and "yawl" awhile back, and it went right past everyone. It's then, and times like this, that you realize the vast majority of Swaylockians are hobbyists.
The foil thing became huge for me through those 'sailboard years'. The demands involved the need for me to race and surfsail at a pretty high level to really understand what I was building. Where some surfboard shapers thought they could cash in on the sailboard thing, they were just shaping 'big surfboards' that the rockers were placed in the wrong spot. So going back to 'apex', it wasn't until I was camping at Jalama and Matt Schweitzer and I were talking around the campfire, that he turned my light bulb on. After that, things became much easier, very consistent, and very successful.
There were very few guys that were on the same wavelength and I recall a team rider coming back from Baja saying "I met Steve Seebold and he looked at my board and said "your shaper sails, doesn't he"? The othe guys clued in were Bruce Jones, Bob Miller, and Randy French. Also Ed Angulo, Craig Maisonville, Steve Coletta, Eric Voight, and a few other surfer shapers that got into the sport.
For speed boards the rail and overall foils starting deviating hugely from anything a surfer could ever grasp. My nose rockers dropped and the decks had VEE on them because at 38 MPH you are dealing with a lot of AIR resistance. I developed designs based on what I termed "windage"...... which meant, the optimized bottom lift created from concave and rocker had a deck design that governed the board into a distinct planing profile versus overlift thereby slowing the boards down. They were carefully designed pegs splitting the air powered by any number of different drafts that sail designers were creating like Borne & Spannier at Neil Pride, and the guys at Gaastra. I had to study, ride, and know what they were making for my boards to work in optimum fashion with those constantly evolving foils. I learned about 'center of effort', 'angle of attack' the dynamics of "broad reaches, tacking, pinching off and footing in'........ all Greek to surfers!
So line upon line upon line became studied and measured, then familiar, then finally intimate, that, as Bill has stated, they just look like lines in space that you become a friend with some, and soul mates to others.
As far as your question about where does my entry point end: those numbers that I adhere to depend directly upon the length and type of design I'm doing. And obviously what the rider is doing. All that stuff is real personal...... like, from being raised in Santa Barbara, my approach to a noserider is a real long flat curve in the forward section of the board.... the "apex" is way aft with accelerated curve where the rider has a lever to wheel the thing around... everything else spins off of that preference. I don't like last 2nd kicked noses..... I want classic old school max trim about two feet back from the nose, and you have to have skill to ride the nose versus the 'idiot proofed' nosriders I make for kooks to think they are better than they are. But that's just making commersh crap like pop music. Entry point critical locations for menehune under 6 ft.) that I evolve the forward curve off of is about 18" back. In the over 6 ft. to under 7'6" = 24" back, 8'ft = 30" back, and so on. Those spots on the board for each ength is a 'signpost' of sorts for what I know works in my designs. From there the curve surrounds that number at that locaton on said board. However, this is stating only one key point of the forward section taken completely out of context of everything else going on with that board........... and YOU JUST CAN'T DO THAT these days with concave(s) being so prevalent in design. Those numbers make sense for blank designers like Bill, but once guys start hacking up those blanks, anything can happen. Most blanks are 'idiot proofed' these days for the masses, and then you have the CNC files that simply don't give a shit.
accidental 2nd post
Thanks for that insightfull post DS.
Great freakin’ stuff here… I still love this place!
You're welcome. You have to realize by now, I'm kinda nutz.
I concluded a long time ago that true creativity is exceedingly rare............. that most of it stems from some kind of madness?
Dali?
Van Gogh?
Hitler?
Hawking?
Arthur Brown?
Simmons?
Greenough?
Solomonson?
ambrose curry III?
Learned a lot from your post DS, thx.
"cnc don't give a shit"....... to clarify my statement, all I'm saying is that the difference between handshaping with a planer and machining with cnc is that the chronology of cuts using a planer and the physiology of the planer and hand tools themselves inherently have limitations during the process of shaping that is not apparent in the machining process.
That is not to say the two cannot arrive upon the same end result, but the cnc will create the file regardless of many obstacles the hand shaper may face while re/de constructing any one blank design during the process. The planer has a huge cutting head compared to the cnc cutting head. If a handshaper shaped with an equivalent cutting head to the cnc.......... well, you can imagine how difficult that would be, and most would consider it impossible to begin to approach the precision of the cnc.
If you doubt that, just try shaping an entire surfboard with your router. Profiling machines approach this to some degree, but for the most part have been met with limited success.
…hell o DS,
I always saw the wsurf boards as small vessells
they re dominated mostly by the wind at superior speed in relation with surfboards, plus, the lingo is like the crew guys…
so the intended overall design is pretty different I guess
by the way, what happened with al that 80s wsurf craze? are guzzled by the machine? Bic, etc?
Small vessels................ correct to a degree. The speed & slalom boards were much like that. Haywood and Richard Johnson (my teamrider) hit their top end speeds, they claimed the fastest times ever recorded by a wind powered "vessel". Faster than catamarans, America's cup stuff, even I14's (eye 14's) that are wicked fast liitle boats. In fact if you ever rent Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Wind" it's all about The America's Cup, and illustrates how closely related sailing is to aviation. There is a little I14 featured in the movie that was my former polisher, Dave Berntsen's boat, that they borrowed/rented for the movie.
Small world.
Initially as a sailboard designer, I was dissed by big boat owners (which I found rather curious), until we began impacting the sailing world in a big wave. In a conversation with a former America's Cup winner, I was told "we look to you guys for leading edge direction". It wasn't until after this, that the Santa Barbara Yacht Club asked Glenn Dubock to do a multi slide projector presentation (which prominently featured my boards) during the "O.B.E" - Olympic Boardsailing Exhiibtion, which was a precursor to the sport being accepted as an Olympic sport.
What a lot of surfers don't realize is that windsurfing has a number of different 'disciplines', and the board designs vary greatly from one discipline to another: course racing, freestyle, speedsailing, slalom, wavesailing.
I guess the only parallel you can make in surfing would be shortboard, longboard, and big wave surfing.
The 80's was when I learned more about board design than at any other time. I still cross over stuff I learned then to surfboards now, and many surfboard features that are commonly found today came directly from that period.
The speed sailing was a very attractive endeavor for me as a designer because I could quantify a design in contrast to how subjective surfing was, and still remains. It wasn't a bad deal to come over the hill at Jalama knowing it was blown to shit mast high surf, and instead of bumming out, being stoked. Just call it expanded horizons or new opportunity realized.
By 1990 the world economy went soft. Windsurfing along with many other industries that depended upon disposable income went right into the crapper. That was also the year after coming back from surfing the North Shore, that I wrapped myself around a tree and was given less than a 1% survival rate. But that's another story for another time.
Bill, Thank you for teaching Merrick your system of rocker measurement. In my opinion this probably gave him an edge over most shapers, not taking anything away from his dedicated work ethic, and more than a few great surfers to help him quantify and translate the information he was receiving from them. It is almost ineffable to describe how, why and where transitions begin and end without it. Your understanding gave way to a systematic repeatable method of duplicating bottom contours which unarguably factor critically into a boards overall performance. I am sure he would agree.
Aloha Ghettorat
Thanks for the compliments. I was happy to share what I knew with friends and others. Still am. Some, haven’t been very gracious regarding where they learned it. Par for the course in the surfing world it appears.
BB is very modest in respects to the knowledge he has acquired and continues to acquire along his journey.
....spheres of influence rubbing off on one another as we travel our individual paths.
Wow, thanks Bruce....... I think that is the first time I have ever been called "modest"!
Most find me way to brash to qualify in the modest category. :-)
There is a distinction between being immodest and confidence.
Being given credit for developing the rocker stick HAS to be one of the most fundamentally important developments for the modern day surfboard!
If I am correct, you originally came from Oregon? At least that is what I seemed to recall from John Kelsey and Bob Krause, who moved into The Underground as my 2nd shaper. It was BK that turned me onto the rocker stick, and he had shaped early day production for Al. So by no stretch of the imagination do I doubt that YOUR sharing migrated from Al to BK to me!
The rocker stick is of little significance unless a shaper has the disicipline to use it as the TOOL that it is. And where Ozzy stated earlier in this thread that an experienced eye is sometimes more important, while I agree to some degree, I also disagree. You and I may look at rocker curves (both bottom and DECK mind you) as intimately as we do planshapes, but the numbers are the quantifying data that make these abstracts measurable and relevant for later reference.
The brain records everything, but storage of data of such stuff is better stored on a computer (or at least a hard copy/diagram... you should see my scribblings) that can be retrieved.
To be honest, I still develop designs better by using battens and flexible foam slices to draw out actual size lines on butcher paper like I did designing EPS hotwired blanks versus looking at a screen. Just personal preference and perhaps viewed as dinosauraus by some. But this method works for me, just as masking tape works for modifying or evolving planshapes.
Going back briefly to the windsurfing thing, the interesting difference was how rocker was measured altogether differently. I alluded to Matt Schweitzer and I talking, and also other dignitaries of the day (like Dennis Connor - America's Cup winner).
With sailboards, the rocker stick measurement at center would not have helped for what we were doing. The reason being that what was critically different was the rocker stemmed from the mast position! This was not only true in slalom boards but wave boards as well, and once I learned that, my study and application of rockers for the different disciplines took on a whole new world. Use of the rocker stick was used by placing the stick on the tail of a straight plane thereby determining the angle (pitch) and overall measurement of nose to the tanget line projected. Measurement from center, like a surfboard, would not have told the story.
How significant was this?
Very....... as it enabled me to design boards that would plane up in very speciic wind conditions. This resulted in an ability to create quivers for windsurfers that wanted boards to plane and excel in 12-18 knots, 16-25 knots or other ranges like 18-30 knots...... all while performing in optimum fashion for the discipline they were doing. From designing broad range wind spectrum to small window high end sprectrum, learning, recording, and having control over this info contributed greatly to my success.
I mentioned earlier "three part rockers" and although this may sound like a foreign concept to surfboard shapers. but sailboards are a different animal, particularly slalom & raceboards, so itwould be easier to think of those three part rockers as gears in a car. it is an application that I also incorporated into surfboards, to some degree, through use of "induced straight planes" in conjunction with specific rail to rail bottom configurations to provide increased manuverability, which could also be termed as 'instability'). Those combinations use a straight plane to give the design projection. I don't really wish to elaborate much on that as I still use the design today in certain models. Geoff McCoy might know what I'm getting at, but I doubt it is a common approach. I'd have to go look at a Nugget to confirm?
Bill's gift of the rocker stick gave us quantifiable measurement for centerline bottom rocker, and that in itself is a huge step forward to spin both simple and complex designs from. Ozzy mentioned the import of rails, outlines, and all the other criteria that goes into making a desired design, but I have to say that if the rocker is wrong, the rail nor the planshape is going to save that board........ or at the very least it may offer up an okay board that might have been a great one.
Finally suffice to say, that if you are NOT using a rocker stick, you are either following the blanks you get or shooting at a target in the dark. Your success will be spotty, no matter how good you think your eye is. If you use templates, why would you NOT use a rocker stick? You need a flashlight on a moonless night...
Where does it go from here? Bill knows, along with a very small segment of others. It goes back to that foil thing. And if it seems that I'm harping on that, you need to go back and look at his diagram, and think about what I said about planing profiles.
…so what s exactly the problem to find middle of the board and put an aluminun stick then take measurements?
if some always do this to all the boards I imagine that the person will have consistent measurements and a “method”; wrong or right all the meas will start the same way…
difficult for me to translate the idea.
thanks DS for answering previous comment