Just finished making myself a set of fins for my 9’1" mal, I made them out of a combination of balsa and Q-cell. It took me about a week of dicken around to get them the way I want. The question that i found myself asking(myself) was WHY??? Why do I bother??? I could easily go and buy a set from the surf shop and get them for wholesale ( because I know the crew that own it)What drives us to want to make something different from the next guy? Quite often I think of giving up because of the way the industry is going but the next day I find myself trying to think outside the square again. Can you give me some examples of your drive and your reasoning of WHY? so that I dont have to pay some phsyco to tell me that I’m a nutter and maybe make some sense of it all. KR http://groups.msn.com/MyKRSurf/surfboards.msnw?Page=10
my drive is firstly to see what makes things tic, trying to see what make what work, why it does it, how it will affect other things etc etc etc. i love to learn! making surfboards has no limitations for the gaining of knowledge. secondly i want to pass on the knowledge i gain to others, the more minds exposed to a idea or thought process the further things can advance! great friends were helpful enough to teach me how to think and also to shape. the negative side to our world is that its difficult to make a good living, so at times human nature and survival instincts cloud our best intentions. http://www.feraldave.com/history.htm
KR- Those are sweet fins, very orginal. I was wondering where you used the Q-cell? Just as a glue? -Carl
The pigmented Q-cell is in the swirls Carl. Glad you liked the fins. The bummer about being a photog is that you dont get many pics of yourself surfing, but surely you’ve got a couple of pics of yourself surfing all those exotic places Dave, would like to see but you have’nt got any on your site. KR
hello KR, great info on your website, I like your belief in open source production. By making the methods of production available to all, greater advances in the product and method of production will occur. I don’t have what it takes to make a living from board building, instead programming puters is my job. But I can build boards for fun and benefit from the knowledge published on swaylocks, In the puter world LINUX is the equivalent of swaylocks, it is an operating system built by a mixture of enthusiasts and professionals spread all over the world. The method of production is open source and freely downloadable. Similarly its not necessary to make a living from puters to have fun. I understand that Mike Paler’s background was not from the type of engineering necessary to produce the Swaylock’s BB, he did it partly for enjoyment I believe. to those who don’t like the principle open source, its not true that it spells the end to employment. My next job and income will come from working on a product based on LINUX. All board builders use some widely published methods of production too. Not everyone can make a living from their favoured production method, thats the harsh reality. But trying to protect our income with secrets or criticising alternative methods will not advance the product. Instead we should protect our income by improving our skills and improving our knowledge of the methods of production. (in fact I downloaded a heap of open source Perl language and mysql database over the holiday period in a desparate effort to protect my skills, its not easy hanging on to a tech job since the downturn and I’ve delayed my planned return to Oz as the software job market still isn’t good there) Hats off to the professionals like yourself and Dave Verrall who are prepared to make available their techniques.
No MrJ, my hat goes off to people like yourself who can not only see but appreciate the style of open source production that dedicated people out there are offering. The info that I have on my site is aimed towards people that have a pure interest in learning the basics (and thats what the info is) of surfboard design and production. You would not believe how many people that I have done boards for that dont even know the increments within an inch (kids in Oz learn metric at school but boards are still imperial so they dont fully understand when you rattle off imperial measurements of surboard design)So if these kids are our future designers they need to get a grip of the basics as we know it and from there make up their own minds of the direction for advancements. When I did my apprentiship as a cabinet maker I was lucky enough to be put with the best tradesman in the factory, this guy could make a cabinet look like it was carved out of a single piece of timber(no joins)He was always keen to pass on his little secrets of how too’s when some of the less skilled tradesmen would not even talk to you. What I felt that the master tradesmans lesson was “I will teach you how to do what I have learned but it takes more than this knowledge to become better than me” I realised and appreciated that he atleast gave me the opportunity to try and could sense that he was hoping that one day i was worthy of passing on his craft. Thanks Carl KR
kudos lads carry on…ambrose