I’ve just finished a nice one with a good deal of Sways collaboration.
The Mysterious MrJ, “The Silicon Valley Bagger”, gave me some heady specs for his 6’10", A “step-up” gun for when Bells is a little too heavy for his 6’6"s.
Herb comes into the picture with MrJ and I having borrowed his supercharger concept. Herb graciously sent us some of his glittery little 'chargers, and fortunately I had loads of time to work to my most pernickety standard, installing the reinforced plugs and 4wfs while MrJ recovered from a broken collarbone.
We hope the full adjustability of 4wfs will allow MrJ loads of tinkering time with infinite fin-placement options, and the board is suitable sized for me to borrow, so I’ll perhaps gain a consolidation of fin placement habits. I’m looking forward to the chance, nonetheleast because the swell has been lacking for a while…
MrJ’s JDS :-
6’10 x 11 x 19 1/4 x 13 3/4 x 2 1/2. Pintail, composite Dcell, EPS/epoxy, Cedar/Dcell/Paulownia rails.
Wow again. everysurfer beat me to it. What a nice board. I do believe I met Mr J at a sways campout a few year ago. Hope the shoulder heals up soon for a report on the board. Mike
I will say that on tech-specs and theory, I will stand back when MrJ explains…We have a good rapport going, and he drags me out of the tendency to just shut up and shape.
MrJ won’t mind me saying “Time to hang up the skateboard!”
Friggin’ skateboarding - that’s how i broke my collarbone. Except , i was fourteen , not ? . A quite well known late-40’s surf photog/journalist around here , just broke his elbow skating , too.
Are those superchargers in FCS plugs , or … ? It’s hard to tell. Or did you rout and glue them in ? I’m going to put some on my twin keel.
edit - ok got ot , you said 'reinforced plugs ', presumably FCS.It’s late and i been surfing all afternoon.
The 'chargers are in FCS…with a coreblock. I dont do ANY plugs straight into EPS because gaps can open with shrinkage as much as pressure.
Herb has done the chargers for ages so I went with it, but MrJ waited for weeks for the parcel from California…and these little L.A. disco-glitter sharks’ teeth fell out of an envelope!
The 4wfs has reinforced coreblocks under the skin, but I took time thinking about the charger placement and chose to do them after the shape. Cutting a fine line there with the dual-axis stringers…Did’nt want any cutting into the rail wood.
So…fun with routers…
I’ve really enjoyed taking my time with this one as MrJ recuperated and I’ll definately claim it for a couple of surfs, right on the peak of the best swell of the year!
But as a couple of weeks dull swell loiters, there’s even been talk of little quad fish thingys…GASP…
Are those superchargers in FCS plugs , or … ? It’s hard to tell. Or did you rout and glue them in ? I’m going to put some on my twin keel.
Nuclear, i put some homemade sc’s in my twin keel over a year ago. They’ve never come out. I feel like they help with turning the board a bit sharper. I definately noticed a reduction in drag when paddling also. Fast?, very fast, although it was always fast to start with. I’d be really interested to hear what you think of them. Mine are a single fcs plug, and they are a bit bigger than herb recommends ( mine are 3x3ish ), but keels are much larger than normal fins, so??.
Josh, another sweeeet looking board. Im also keen to hear how it goes with the sc’s
thanks speedy ! THAT looks like a LOT of fun , to me !
herb sent me three sets of the li’l glitterys , too…
i’ve taken some shots of the superchargers , but need to get photos of them on a board now …maybe the ‘bushfire fish’ [?] , as that is the ONLY multi-plugged board i now have …
cheers herb , cheers speedy …i can’t wait to read how that board GOES !!
Hello Rooster, yes we have met at the swaylocks camp at least once - I remember you had a traditional home built fish with you. Shoulder is coming good thanks and I’m back on my surfboard and went for a swim in the Melbourne bay this morning (no waves in the bay the entrance is too narrow for swell to get in), so got to travel on weekends. I’ll definately post ride reports and the fins positions I arrive at although it could be a couple of months or so - its a winter board and its still summer here.
yes Speedy and NuclearFishin I am receptive to suggestions to give away the skateboarding!
Hello everyone, I’m really looking forward to riding it when autumn arrives, we don’t know exactly how it is going to work yet, however a number of steps have been taken to get this design right. Its meant to be my step up board from my AM Flyer2 so I wanted to be able to jump on it and straight away feel some familiarity and be able to control it. So first I got the rocker stick on the flyer and then scaled up the rocker measurements - I learned about scaling rocker from one of Greg Loehr’s posts on this subject somewhere in the archives - (New Length/Old length x rocker at various intervals ) so in my case to go from 6’ 6" to 6’ 10" its
82/78 = 1.051 ie multiply rocker measurments by 1.051
In order to get some confidence that the scaling has produced something sensible I compared it with my silicon valley home built boards - all of them 6’ 9" so only an inch shorter and rocker plotted and reverse engineered from a clark hybrid blank. It can be seen below that the new rocker yielded more nose flip in the last foot but otherwise within a couple of millimetres or so of the main body of the rocker. So extremely similar to my silicon valley hybrids which I liked. Rocker was then plotted onto a piece of masonite on the floor of my apartment - see pic in previous post - I used sailboard battens to produce the curve. Making the template was the only physical part I did! - Josh did the entire build as well as fill in any dimensions I didn’t specify such as the nose width.
Comparison of Rocker specs - Speedy custom on the left (from scaling the flyer measurments) and my silicon valley hybrid in brackets. Measure in distances from Nose and tail:
------ front rocker--------------
N - 151 mm (Hybrid 141)
1’ - 49 mm (Hybrid 48 mm)
1’ 6" - 25 mm (Hybrid ??)
2’ - 12 mm (Hybrid 13 mm)
-------Rear rocker ------
2’ (??) (Hybrid 8)
1’ 6" - 17 mm
1’ - 27 mm ( Hybrid 25)
T - 59 mm ( Hybrid 57)
the other thing I did was take the Flyer2 fin placements. Normally front to rear spread goes up a little as board length goes up, but I kept the same spread and moved it up a total of 8mm to compensate for extra length. But with 4wfs there can be all sorts of variation on that. Supercharger positions exactly as specified by Herb. I’ve used SCs before and also borrowed a magic supercharged personal board of Herb’s at the Swaylocks camp years ago.
Fin positions for the neurtal position in the 4wfs boxes are:
distance from tail, 298mm for front fins and 97mm for rear.
then got Josh to check both the rocker and fin positions, and he said “very sensible”. Naturally I’ve got my own ideas on how to build good compsands and we did have some conversations on this subject, but I left all build decisions up to Josh - he knows what he is doing!
