You bet.
Bernie, I’m not at all interested in surfing like a pro. But I’m a little surprised you’d be the one to ask, oh my brother of the bad knees. 
Look, I’ve got one knee that’s been cut on 3 times already, and is currently healing from a 4th injury. And I like the feel of surfing big ol’ noseriders with single fins. A 10’ board with a big wide fin produces all kinds of torque that just plain hurts my knee. Anything in the ‘old tech’ that feels right is 22, 24lb+.
So, what do I do? Go smaller? No, I really don’t like the ride as much. I’m a Lincoln Continental kind of guy, I guess - rather take a cruise down I5 with plenty of legroom than a couple hotlaps around the track in a 5-point harness & stiff suspension.
So for a longboard… do I go to a “performance” pu/pe shape? No, I don’t like the drag of the sidebites in trim, and I can’t abide by the lousy lifespan of a 10’ board with 4 oz glass.
Do I go to a Surftech because its light? No, the corky feeling & overstiff response don’t provide the glide, and the rigid tails don’t hold well on noserides.
So I started building myself some compsands. Light, durable, responsive; and also flexible (where I want them to be) and engaging.
But as you know, they take a while to build. And sometimes, the results are unpredictable. 
So I started this thread to try to find out if I’d missed another cheaper, easier option along the way.
I think, a lot of the time, you’re on the same path for some similar reasons, my friend. Not necessarily the equipment preference, but pretty much everything else.
CompSand construction is a valid pursuit even if the the end result only equals the class of boards with which it is trying to compete. As long as it is more durable.
Durablity can be quantified.
In terms of flex, if a CompSand can complete more flex cycles than a competing construction method than it is worth pursuing. Strength to weight ratios that’s worth pursing. If the technology leads us to the next level of surfing it will be in such small increments we’ll only be able to tell by looking at the old surf movies.
By the way, I can’t prove it but I liked the idea someone on this thread proposed, that concaves are really a flex tuning characteristic. I had a board in the 90’s that had rail grooves in the deck and it was really stiff.
As far as competion surfing is concerned I have never had any problem with all the guys on tour riding the same equipment. As nascar is a class of racing, let the tri-fin short board be a class of surfing. If a more marketable class of surfboard competion comes around we’ll know by how many beer sponsors are on the grand stand.
Ride what you like, surf how you like…
But can anyone here
quantifiably and prove statistically
that any of the new tech stuff
can actually make someone surf much better
than they could
with just a well crafted and properly designed surfboard made from standard raw materials
for the individual in the first place for where they surf?
Bern,
I like the question and proposal cuz Ive already experienced this myself first hand.
To me its very simple. I like light boards. Most modern progressive shortboarders do too. Just a one pound drop in board weight makes a heck of a difference. Two pounds and youre freakin. You can make superlight boards out of most pop materials, but a composite will perform better out of the gate and more importantly, long term. And if you make a majic compsand you want it to last. It does.
Ultralight pupe goes great at first then goes dead in weeks, with salad plate sized deck dents and all. Lighter and stronger with slower fatigue is no doubt better IMO.
Now say YOU like very light boards. Say you can make a well designed and built 5 pound compsand. Ride it. Then attach a one or two pound weight somewhere in the center of gravity. Ride it. I guarantee youll have a different result.
Notice I didnt say worse result. Its different, thats all. I just know for my own personal use, that difference is very noticeable. For me here in FL, lighter boards are preferable. For guys in HI, they might prefer a little more weight.
I know this too; I’d rather have the option of adding some weight than not having the option of dropping weight.
I know youve made some nice light boards…if they have good designs and proper finning, maybe you should try some small weights ala Loehr.
One thing certain…while its occasionally frustrating, its mostly fun trying to find that majic bullet. If it werent, we wouldnt be here talking about it. HTH.
One thing I have noticed is a similarity in the shapes I’m seeing coming out independantly from all the compsand guys like dave, paul, josh, mike and others… and they seem to be having the most success. there’s a certain profile developing a certain contour flow in the thickness and curves… The lines seem pulled further back and a little curvier than before. Maybe it’s my imagination but I’d really like to see more discussion on design than on materials or construction cause it seems to me like that’s where the biggest payback is in the long run… And even if I don’t build my own, understanding the design component makes me a better customer for the folks I pay to build them for me…
Oh yeah about this…you gotta have good design. Its paramount. Im on my 8th or 9th iteration of the same design. Width varies from 19.25 to 20.5. Settling on 19.75. Rocker from 4.0-5.25N and 1.8-2.5T, settling on 4.5N and 2.1T. I really dont have the time and patience to make a wide variety of designs either. Your bro has told you stick to one board or two and get to know them well…thats sage advice brother. On my way to making a 10th with some Blue.
The thing about design tho its very subjective like you said. But when it comes to my own boards Im an eternal optimist…I always find something good about each. It just requires finding the sweet surf to mesh with. Some days the boards light up, some days they dont.
WAVES…the most important factor of all.
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One thing I have noticed is a similarity in the shapes I'm seeing coming out independantly from all the compsand guys like dave, paul, josh, mike and others.. and they seem to be having the most success. there's a certain profile developing a certain contour flow in the thickness and curves.. The lines seem pulled further back and a little curvier than before. Maybe it's my imagination but I'd really like to see more discussion on design than on materials or construction cause it seems to me like that's where the biggest payback is in the long run.. And even if I don't build my own, understanding the design component makes me a better customer for the folks I pay to build them for me..
Bernie, I do believe that, to a man, the guys you listed above are both larger, more mature, and more skilled than the ‘industry’ average 24 year-old 5’9", 155 lb shortboard surfer. (Or whatever “he” is, it was real close to that, at least as researched by transworldsurfbiz where I read it. “He” also buys 2.1 boards per year.) So with more size, more experience, and more skill, I would bet that if that same list of guys were ordering pu/pe boards they would also venture outside the ‘normal’ narrow, skinny, overrockered confines of your off-the-rack 6’2". I think that’s most of what you’re noticing - the skill & maturity to go against the grain. That said, its another chicken/egg question - did these guys turn to making their own compsands because it was too hard to find the boards they wanted; or did these guys find the boards they wanted by making themselves a few compsands… ?
BTW, you fit that same description as well. When’s the last time you wanted a board just like Kelly’s?
boy this is some really interesting stuff…debating the big why.
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Cause everything has just been comparing apples to oranges to pears to kumquats..
I’m a photographer. I do stuff like interiors and architecture and product. we go to multi million dollar houses, pull the rich people’s crap out into the garage or something, move all our crap in, arrange it just so, bounce shafts of sunlight in, arrange spot-strobes, hot lights, scrims, flags, arms, gobos, cookies, cutters, and silks in order to make all that shit look Good, then we take some snaps, the art director is blown away, we confirm the shot, and break it all down,
up to ten times a day
for weeks at a time.
and yet, on not a single one of those shoots, did some judge come up and give us a 9.8 or whatever. nor did a team of scientists come and measure every shadow and light-amount and angle and color and intensity and luminosity, and give us a super comparator dossier, which ranked and analyzed our shot compared to the worldwide average shots going on right then.
A stunning photograph can be remarkably similar to utter crap, if you look at it objectively and analytically. Take Linda Evangelista, shoot two shots, one with her stunning eyes on you, penetrating, pouring sex appeal into your very soul, while another, she’s just started to blink, and the look becomes a dumb drunken leer, awkward and embarrasing. Tabloid fodder.
measure the percent change in the numbers and colors of the pixels of the two shots. the difference would be measured in the billionths of a percent, if you stack it up against what’s possible in an 8x10 frame. yet anyone who wasn’t born last week knows the difference in half a second. I bet that if kids of all ages were asked to point to the better photo, they would become remarkably accurate, at a shockingly young age.
how then do we possibly do it? how does photography ever accomplish anything, with so many variables, and so much to compare? how do we “get better”? how can anyone in their right mind reallistically hire us BASED ON A FEW PICTURES THEY SAW IN A PORTFOLIO WE SENT THEM ??? They didn’t even ask for any cost value analyses or profit-maximization curves! WHAT ARE THEY? FRIGGEN NUTS???
point is, just because something is subjective doesn’t mean you can throw it out the window. I earn my bread and butter every day striving to better myself in a trade that is utterly and completely subjective. My product is as real as the ether that 19th century scientists thought carried light waves through space (for those not following me, my product doesn’t exist). We recently delivered nearly $30,000 of photography to a client on an iPod. Did it weigh more when we sent it in? nope.
I don’t toss up my hands and say “gosh, no one has shot me with a radar gun to see how fast I’m doing the photography, and no one has really proven to me that all this crap I haul around and all the daffy shit I do with it in people’s houses withother people’s furniture is GOOD, so oh well what the hell, might as well shoot passport photos”. If i did, i might be shooting passport photos. or something.
you guys with your rates and measures need to get in touch with the subjective, it’s got more power than you’ll ever know. poo-pooing subjective discussion is definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
it’s all about what resonates. (if you want to expand your knowledge of the power of resonation, study Nikola Tesla and his inventions)
Yeah, I know, sounds new age and spacey, but most photographers are very grounded in the hard scinence of their enterprise. we have to know pretty advanced mathematical and optical principles in a very real world practical setting. Take the typical F-stop scale for example.
1 1.4 2 2.8 4 5.6 8 11 16 22 32 45 64 90 128
these numbers correspond roughly to the ratio between a lense’s effctive diameter and it’s focal length. One move up the scale doubles or halves the light reaching the film plane, yet it takes two moves up the scale to double the F-stop number. Why? because the film plane is area, while the ratio is in single dimension only. square all the numbers above, and they will be doubles. (almost, since it’s abbreviated for simplicity)
we devote years of training and experience to learn the principles that run the gear we use to make the pictures we make, so that by the time we’re working, it just happens, no thought. only then can we begin to work on the subjective.
that’s when the magic begins, when you know the state of the art of materials and technology so well that you are doing stuff that can’t be quantified, but that people still KNOW, deep down, that it’s good.
An amature photographer can gird himself with all the latest tools tips and techniques, but until he or she teches themselves to see the difference between good and bad, it’s all crap, and whatever’s not crap is luck.
Quality.
to get it, understand it and use it, you must learn what it is in something that resonates. Sways is a great tool, because you have a sea of resonations, a treasure trove of subjective data just waiting to be tapped…
Oneula, if you think that the vast supply of subjective material on sways is meaningless,
and Roy, if you think that the measure of greatness in a surfboard can be read off a radar gun,
then you have just started the journey.
dammit, I drank three beers writing this, and I’m now too drunk to mark out the rails on my latest compsand, screw you guys, I’m going home.
Nice rave Wells I agree with everything you have said, let’s just say that when driving a great car some drivers might want to look at the speedometer occasionally !
Really I was just responding to Oneula’s idea that the performance of a surfboard can be proven or quantified by competition results. . . I’m just saying that if you ARE going to go the measurement route, measure something other than vibe. . . like speed… . . I didn’t say that it is necessary to do so
And yes I am just at the beggining of the journey, or near it.
.
"And yes I am just at the beggining of the journey, or near it. "
yes, I think once one loses sight of that, they are lost. judging from your website, you’re way ahead of me ; )
nothing personal please, i was going to puke on my plate, regardless of who i was seated with.: )
so what’s the difference between speed and quickness, and which is a more important quality in a surfboard?
how would you measure quickness?
With a quickometer, obviously
or a quickar gun…
From Bert on a thread earlier this year:
"also appart from static design , this particular board has a little more flex built in , this means at low speeds with the rider on the nose and the water on the tail , it flattens out and you stil get good carry in softer waves , this gives the board a slightly better range , but of coarse having static design tailored for the condidtions is still the first priority … "
My completely uneducated guess is that by the time you get the static design figured out well enough to start fiddling with materials (Benny, from your posts above, you already know what you like, so you have already reached this point), you are reaching diminishing returns (performance-wise), returns which require much more effort and expense to get those last few percentage points you are craving. There are exceptions to this, as craftee pointed out the preference for light weight in Florida, and for Benny because of previous injury. In those cases, the returns are greater, as well as the increased durability.
JSS
great stuff guys, but well off topic
tunning flex
basically the easiest and most predictable way is by core thickness/density and skin thickness/density
then foil
then dome
everything else is secondary
if you want to alter flex
thats where your attention should be
once we can agree that these things are the stuff flex is made of, then we can move on to
what goes where and for why
pupe is limited by a mimimum thickness of core and minimum thickness of skin so its changeable parameters are limited
basically all you can do is make the board thicker and add more glass or do some channels in the blank or dome the deck
all these changes are difficult to control and monitor effects in any way
adding glass does very little to flex and its added weight can be considered undesirable in a flicky,tricky shortboard
stringers add weight and have limited application
with composite you can do everything the same way using weighed out resin
same vac
same shape
then just make the deck skin thicker in increments of one mm
and you can see the flex change dramatically
or keep the thickness the same and increase the density incrementally
etc etc etc
simple and measurable
once you got understands the basics and what is desirable for you
then you can fine tune it with variable thicknesses and densitys
thats basically it my friends
i personally like my boards stiff under chest
so they dont flex when im jumping up to my feet
i like the tail to flex when i pump the board rail to rail
i like the FEEL of it flexing in and then popping back.
so i like my tails to be more springy then under chest
luckily the foil achieves that
though i can alter the flex of the tail by using thinner skin
or lower density wood
i dont really care about the nose to much
as far as tunning deck and bottom flex relatively
now thats something i wanna understand
everything else rings pretty clear
now if your getting into compsands the first thing you should do is build a thin one (2 inches)
then a thick one (2 3/16) exactly the same skins glass, resin, plainshape, rail etc
i wish i did
then i wouldnt have spent a year chasing my tail
wondering what does what
thin and wide
thin and wide
thin and wide
to answer bernies question
there wasnt any 2 inch thick 6 2 by 20 wide with a 15 tail and big fins
in any shop
anywhere ive been in the last 10 years
so does it make me surf better then when i was riding 6 6 by 2 1/2 by 18 1/2 by 13 1/2
HELL YES
and your right
its 90 percent design
but compsand is the only board that allows those dimension and not snap/dent on the first surf
so yes the materials make a massive difference to my surfing personally
or i could do what everyone else my age and weight is doing
and surf
hack coff hack
funboards and big fish
I tell you what. How about I throw something basic out there just for discussion purposes. I’m not saying this is true, accurate, or even functional, so you have to use a little imagination.
Let’s take a basic single concave of 1/4" depth located where ever you would put a single concave on a board. – If it had soft blended edges around the perimeter of the concave, would it create a flex area from the slight absence of foam and stringer? If it had hard edges would it create a stiff area?
but in the end if it’s just personal preference then none of “this works better than that” discussion really matters does it?
How can something be labeled as better if what’s a good picture to me is a grabage to the actual “artist”?
It’s really comes down to just how strong someones sales pitch is and whether it has legs to make them a buck.
Cause I guarantee you that no one here pushing all these ideas isn’t in it to make a couple dollars because of it.
I say just lay it on the table that your selling such services before the infomercial starts that’s all…
If most of us had searched high and low through all the possible board designers out there in the world who can create these works of art and couldn’t gain some form of satisfaction I could understand the need to move on. But in reality the industry itself has really held down the true ingenuity of the designers by determining the artificial design limit based on what currently is selling which we all know is the global sales pitch of the media since the 50’s when it all broke out.
There’s some amazing stuff out there that some of these builders have been holding back on that probably has been only experienced by less than .001% of the surfing community. Why not see what’s out there before blanketly stating that they had it all wrong from day one and still have it wrong. Just look at Garrett’s woodies, Van Stralen’s carbonfibers… It’s all wrong if you believe the current construction hype…
That was the beauty of simmons
cause he didn’t give a rat’s a** and just built them anyway
there’s a bunch more out there like him Mackey, Petersen, Morey to name a few
they just get ignored by the mainstream
like Bert was before he developed his army
of which I must admit I’m still a buck private.
is it really about surfing?
or is it just about some sales profits for the next crew on the horizon?
that’s all…
flex is good
what that means
I have no idea (because no one really has explained it yet)
other than it’s like the new “green” phenomena
just a new way to sell something
No magic bullets here. From my own trial and error I can shape a twin tip kiteboard out of Corecell and get a ball park control of flex that I personally like that is durable enough to take vicious abuse and not break. The questions that I ask and the information that I share is to better understand some of the variables in surfboards that I’m having a hard time grasping. I’m basically trying to take what I know and get it to work in a surfboard. Yes shaping is super fun and working on something that has length and thickness is a nice for a change but I want to be able to have controlled flex areas through purposeful design, not just guessing.
To answer your question there are several ways you can influence stiffness through concaves. If you run the concave edge to edge and dome the deck then the more pronounced you produce the curves then the more resistant the form will be to flexing along its length. If you have a softened or flat area before the edge you reduce the effect.
How do I know because it’s easily replicated by the flat paper trick, curve the paper into a concave along its width and then try to bend it lengthwise. You’ll find that the most resistant shape will be a tube or full circle. The other way is that I’ve done it with shaped corecell on a rocker table. You can insert a dome onto the rocker table and then place your flat corecell after it’s been wet out and bagged directly onto the dome. This will create a concave over the whole board edge to edge with a domed deck. Thinning out your material to produce flex along its length is almost fully cancelled out in this type of shape.
This type of shape is great for flat water but once it gets rough it is brutal. I personally prefer the concave in the center with flats before the rails. This way you can still influence tail flex through thinning of the tips and have the suction effect that a concave can produce when it’s on a rail.
Those are some good basic parameters; you’re more of a front foot surfer? Stiff under the chest and a front foot driver. Do you like tail flex before the fins or after? I prefer after, being front footed; but then again my buddy is front footed as well but prefers a flex break in front of the fins. Its too much like jello for me, then again my other buddy is a pure die hard tail rider…he calls it junk. He likes flex way back 3-5’’ aft of fins. Its all orientation, front or rear, then alot of feel…feel riding. AND feel building, each peice of balsa , its grade, density, thickness, grain and location in the skin. Its is like a calculated flower arrangment, however the aesthetics are revealed in performance of the board and the rider.
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Great contribution, DMP. Sounds like you’re talking directionals, not twin tips (based on the tail concave comment)?
I’ve made a couple KB’s. And then Cj3 gave me a couple extra blanks, and, in turn, I gave one to Wells. When I handed it to him, he said, “Wow, I guess this is what a surfboard would look like if we never had to paddle them.” Awfully insightful comment, really. Especially considering it was only 1/2" thick.
On a directional, do you thin both ends? With the ply stringer, are you talking center, perimeters, or spaced about 6"-10" apart to be under the heels & toes? Concaving any decks - and if so, does that make them more or less flexible? Do you wrap your rail glass, or fill the edge & grind it smooth? I’ve found that wrapping the rails is problematic on a rocker table, but filled edges aren’t nearly as stiff. I had to add an extra layer of glass to each side to produce sufficient panel stiffness on the filled-edge board, when I probably could have achieved the same thing with a small strip of glass around the rails.
Thanks.
I was mostly talking about twintips. I’ve been more interested in directionals and surfboards because of the challenge. Using a rocker table and working with high density foam is much easier from a end product standpoint. A surfboard with the floppy foam and all the compound curves takes every ounce of my concentration to have something look functional when I’m done.
“With the ply stringer, are you talking center, perimeters, or spaced about 6”-10" apart to be under the heels & toes?"
Thats why I’m asking. I have 2 stringerless eps Marko blanks waiting on some stringer material to come in. I’ve got one of the blanks drawn out and am thinking of putting the stringers so that they fall under my heel and balls of my feet. I’m going to just forge ahead with my own theories. Start with the minimum thickness that I need for paddling and then just pretend that it is just a huge piece of corecell and go from there. I want it to flex and have a quick snap in the tail. My feeling is that I can get a better riding board with a bit more flex at the tail.
“Do you wrap your rail glass, or fill the edge & grind it smooth?”
I wrap the rails. When its all done I’ll have a total of 40 oz.s of glass over the rail in between the feet, less at the tips. I’ll do a two step process in glassing. That way I can post shape the tuck of the rail after the glassing is done to where I want it. If I’m feeling extra picky I can reshape the rail if I don’t llike how it rides. I also don’t like the rail profile of the abs or filled edge boards, they ride like crap in the surf. I also don’t like the full edge to edge concave. I have a layup that I use in conjunction with the thinning of the blanks where I can set the flex pattern. More at the tip, less in between the feet, less overall, etc. I used to go super stiff with carbon inbetween the feet with flex tips but I’ve been liking the ride better of the ones that have a progressive flex pattern from the center of the board towards the tips. For some of the lighter riders I’ll go with kevlar and e glass instead of carbon and s cloth.
Below are a few boards that I’ve done in the past.
You know what Bern, I tried to expain what Ive experienced in my slow progression.
I tried to explain it as simply as I know how. Its valid.
But you keep going back to your angst against industry ways.
You cannot seem to seperate simple things like surboards from industry.
And you really should try.