I saw this wood board at the expo, made by doublefourhigh (www.44high.jp). It was beautiful, but had unusual rails. They said "hard down rails", but it wasn't anything like what I call hard down rails. The rails were square, but rounded at the edges. At first I thought, these guys don't actually surf, and just got it wrong. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really don't know. So I thought I'd ask, to see what others thought. Anyone ever see or try surfing rails like this?
The old time "kook boxes" and many old solid boards had rails even more square then what you've shown and while not high performance they worked fine. On a very narrow rail like an alaia, square rails works great.
I made a board with boxy rails, and it works really well. This is the set of cross sectional ribs, on the HWS that I showed you earlier this month at the SHF. The board is 6' 8" long. The ribs for the tail are on the left, and the nose on the right.
The boxes that I drew around each rib allows you to see how the curves transition from about 60-40 in the nose down to about 70-30 in the tail.
I don't have a good picture of the finished product. I'll have to post one later.
Would my board surf even better if the rails were more rounded? It is possible, but maybe not. I just wanted to put it out there that boxy rails do work as long as the proportions are correct.
yes. I made a diamond tail twin fin, my favorite board. 22 wide mid, six’ and a li’l long. 3/8" bump about 12" up from tail. From the ‘wings’ back to the tail, square as a deck of cards. Can’t say if THAT by itself makes the board my favorite, but it flies. Yer right. Don’t assume anything. My theory is this. I’ve only been surfing for 12 years. In that time I’ve only owned 15 or 17 ‘bought’ boards. They’ve all been sold, broke, traded, burned in a van fire, pawned for money to get from south oregon to portland, yada ya…so, without access to dozens of different styles of boards to try, and never gonna buy 20 different types of boards to try, this leaves me with: make all kinds of different boards to try. And it has been interesting. They all go, some better than others. Building things is a personal voyage, as you know. I am about to discover myself what others have either liked or shunned. I re-cut the nose and tail of an already shaped board. The tail, square, I am confident I will like. The 18" up front will also now be square. That is uncharted territory for me. If it sucks I will have learned something. If it flies, I will have learned even more. My hunch is that the front 2 feet of a board’s rail don’t matter much, unless you’re talking a nose riding longboard. I’ll let you know but it won’t be for a little while. Oh yeah- I thought I was a habitual poster! Yer makin’ me look aright… I collected for 4 weeks. Back on the books a week ago. EMPIRES FALL WHEN THEY SPREAD THEIR RESOURCES TOO THIN!
Hey huckleberry, i had a homemade twin keel fish ( board number2), that had rails basically like that, but i hit the corners with shaping screen, so they were a bit more like "rounded square" rail. From nose to tail, with some tuck added in from just in front of the fins, to the tail.
I loved that board, and in the time i had it, i bought, but then sold 3 professionaly shaped boards, purely because i always ended up surfing my homemade, crude, but unreal keel fish.
I stupidly stripped and reshaped it, because it had a heavy glass job, and after 2 years pretty much surfing only it, i started to want to throw it around, but couldn't because of the heftiness of it. Dumb thing to do, but live and learn hey!? Wish i still had it :(
I got my hands on a Sunova Nitro model… the rails were thin and square-er than usual. I’m sure Bert has done that by design, not by accident or error. I’d like to hear what he has to say. My theory is that a square rail lends a bit more stiffness to the board along the rail. Combined with the “springer” design, which apparently acts like a leaf spring, rather than a regular stringer, you get a very different feel - the trampoline effect - flexy middle inside a stiffer frame. I also believe the vertical surface of the apex may help prevent the thinner rail from digging too deeply, as it provides more lateral resistance than a rounder or knifey-er rail profile.
Keep in mind this is all my theoretical gobbly-gook.
A friend made a few mid length boards with very square rails in the back 1/3.. i never tried them but his reason was based from some kind of boat and was that they stopped water curling over the back of the board and sucking the tail in causing drag .. he reckoned it made the board noticably faster.
Your friend is correct as long as “sucking the tail in” is interpreted as “sucking the tail down” (note: this topic has been extensively discussed in this forum in the past). An extreme case of “hard rails” (aka as “hard chines”) in race boat parlance) is shown in the attached figure–the red area running around the perimeter of the board is sheet glass approximately 3/32"
thick. (It was built in 1971 for a specific wave breaking condition at Blacks).
Although certainly a possibility, I never experienced either. On the other hand, on two occasions I thought I was going to break my wrist, so I changed the rail shape to provide an effective thumb grip instead on nearly all my subsequent knee and paipo boards.
I’m thinking that there is an effect that changes through the continueum (I looked up that spelling!) from a pure semicircle to a pure rectangle. In my mind it’s something to do with lift (but maybe this effect ends at the beginning of the undertuck) and the migration to a rail during turns.
I have a vertical sections of 1/4 to 1/2" along about 3/4 of the rail on one of my current boards, but haven’t picked up on anything that I can say can’t be attributed to the thin rails and sub 5lb weight.
Maybe the effect of square rails is more noticeable when the rails are thick and the board is long?
red-boards, sorry but I’m guessing thats the back 3/4 of the board? or where. I wanted to be hopeful about someone not noticing any difference in rail shape in the front quarter of the board. But at least one person cant differentiate between semi-square rails and the otherwise ‘normal’ reactions of a thin-railed, light board.
Yea… it’s the rail shape vs. volume thing. You can change one without changing the other. A circle is a circle no matter how big. 15 cubic cm is 15 cubic cm, no matter what shape. If you’re after a particular flex pattern in the board, particularly a complicated one, like the Sunovas are after, you may need to think about both shape and volume, and their multiple effects. Burying a thin rail is easier than a thicker one, and buring a soft, round rail is easier than burying a square one. On top of that, both effect how the board flexes… at least that’s my theory.
Ive seen this kind of rails in a 6'0'' high performance shortboard .... looks really agressive....Couldnt take some measurements but it had a shalow single concave, good overall volume and quite low rocker.
whats the idea behind this rail design? ...this board didn´t seemed anything old scholl...
Here is a photo to show the rough ideia of the rails I saw. Weird angle of the cut, made the deck part more pronounced than the botton part..... Ive heard this is kind of hawaiian rails....but have no ideia about the ideia behind it.
Just wondering if a blessed soul could put some light here...
Welll fellas just reporting my learnings here…As a begginer shaper I didn know that this kind of rails are called LOW BOXY and just thought it was called squared…but they dont, the rails I saw were LOW BOXY…high apex…Now i’m trying to figure out what they do…what part of the game they play…
maybe less sensitive rails for a more power surfer, as the apex is real up?
