Hello to all. I finished shaping my first board. Yeah, i’m stoked!! It isn’t perfect but all in all it came out alright. It might not surf very well but that really wasn’t the point. I have 2 factory boards for that. Anyway…as far as the fin set up these are my dimensions; 3.5" in from tail to trailing edge of center fin and 11.75" to trailing edge of side fins with 3 degree cant.(how i’ll figure that out I don’t know). Any advice??? Thanks to all.
By the way the board is 7’8" 21.75" wide hybrid/funboard.
you do have the side fins toed in, and not parallel to the stringer right? if not it may tend to track alot. but besides that it sounds about right
go to a drugstore and buy a 99 cent protractor. they sell them in school supplies. 3 or 4 degrees isn’t much off of vertical but it matters enough to measure it.
wherever you put em You can change em if you wanna you made the beautiful magnificent glorious creation and what could be more perfect than to customize it to your own taste maybe one fin should have more tweek and twang cause you J a m more left gouges and lip slide more rights… is someone else righter or if you goof their precision recomendations is it not still rideable?,…GO DADDY…van GOUGH …paint your masterpiece ride it tomorrow ZOOOOOOOOOM …ambrose…I couldnt ride my first one as well as kevin …I sold him the board and he blew my mind
Personally i would move the trailing fin up to 3 3/4 or 4 in from the tail
im with jason i was gonna say the same thing but he already said it…in comparison to your front fins 3.75 is about average 4 will make it a little loser… regards BERT
Go grab yourself a sliding bevel, and measure out your cant next to your sliding protractor - I’d lean more towards the 4-5 degree mark. Better yet, if one of your production boards is of similar shape, go ‘steal’ the angle off that. 
I have no idea what a sliding protractor is… 99 cent protractor.
Thanks for all the useful information. I was planning on glassing this weekend with u.v. resin but the sun just disapeared here and it’s raining!!! But the surf is gooood. By the way Ambrose you were right on when you told me not to stare at that tree because then I would hit it(cutting my outline). Same goes with riding my mountain bike down hill “don’t look at that rock or you will hit it for sure… both wheels!!” Then as you’re flying through the air you remember the words of the prophet, “look where you want to go not where you’ve been.” Keep surfing all, and remember the ocean is mighty big and we’re just passing through.
is that what that tool in the picture is called, a sliding bevel? I have one that I use for setting fins, just couldn’t remember its name. They cost $8 or $9. Anyway, if you have one, use your 99 cent protractor to set the bevel angle to 4 degrees (or whatver you like) and you’re set. (well, flip it around to set the OTHER fin or you’ll have a board that works really weird). Or, skip the protractor and use the bevel to copy the fin cant angle off a similar board that you know works well. If you don’t have the bevel tool, (but you still plan on making more than one board) use the protractor to make a block of wood with a 4 degree (or whatever) angle, then use the block to set the fins.
Howzit Rook, I think I’ve seen a sliding protractor and it’s just a protractor that has a bar that can be set at a degree, but stay with the 99 cent model, also what you call a sliding bevel is a sliding bevel square. Aloha, Kokua
Home depot sells an angle guage for about 4 bucks. You can set it for whatever degree you want. It makes setting fin cant simple. Look in the hand tool section
O.K. I have the adjustable bevel square from some previous woodworking project to set the cant. But how about side fin toe-in? What am I looking for there?
Measure out the location of the rear tip of one of the side fins, i.e. 11.75 up from the tail and 1.125" off the rail. Put a dot or some sort of mark there. Then measure the distance from that point straight to the stringer (use your square) - we’ll call that number X. Make the distance from the stringer to the front tip of the fin equal to X - 0.xxx O.xxx is your toe-in.
Thanks Rook for the help but I’m not sure I understand. Let’s say x=8. Then from my stringer to the leading edge of the fin would be 8 minus 0.8?
there are at least two ways to set toe-in for fins, one is to measure the distance between the fins at the leading and trailing edges (the distance between them will be shorter at the leading edge). The other is to draw a line on the board pointing basically from the trailing edge of the fin to somewhere right up around the nose of the board (often 1 inch or so to the side of the tip of the board, on the same side as the fin you are setting). Imagine you’re drawing a huge triangle on the board, the base of the triangle is a line connecting the back of the fins and the point is just ahead of the nose of your surfboard. The method described in the earlier post is the “measuring the delta” method (although using the stringer as a reference point, it’s the same thing effectively, you’re still trying to get the leading edges closer than the trailing edges by a measured amount). My suggestion is that you try BOTH when you set fins the first time. Use a long straightedge (tape measure if you have nothing else) and draw your fin placements. Then measure them, see if they are equal distance from stringer (and rails, assuming your rails are symmetrical), and see if the leading edges of the fin placement lines are closer together by the right amount as compared to the trailing edges (typically 1/4 inch or so). If the measurements or placement marks seem off, scrub them and try again. Also, tack or tape the fins on the board and then eyeball them before you drill holes or glass them on. If they look wrong, they probably are.
Sorry Richard, I hesitated on using 0.xxx instead of a Y, shoulda went with Y. I was just trying to show that your toe-in is a fraction of an inch. Usually your toe is roughly between an eighth and a quarter of an inch, could be more or less, depending on the board. Let’s say you toe a quarter, you said X = 8 (probably a bit much), the front point should be at 7.75”. Basically, we measure the trailing edge of the fin because it’s easy. We measure off the rail, because that way the fin placement is relevant to the width of the tail. You can’t do that for the front of the fin because the rail doesn’t run parallel with the stringer.