I came across this on the Walden website. Has anyone seen one of these, everything seems like a radical design change on this board.
Explaining THAT one is going to be a challenge for the industry apologists and defenders of the faith.
It looks like it has a central concave that rounds off half way along the fin-box?
Those straight lines around the nose are not the same length on each side.
That thing is a joke. A bad one.
That would be for noseriding right handers…
yeah
Sabs built a compsand shortboard stealth board about 8 months ago
was pretty damn cool
It’s just wrong.
sabs/mikes one goes real good
it 6 2 or something with chine rails as well
You serious? It works? Man, I always lived in the assumption that straight lines in outlines were no-no’s, continuous curves were needed to ensure flow… bizarre…
No baa-ing here mate, I ams erious when I say that straight lines don’t make sense to me. But hey, enlighten us all if you will, I don’t abscond the different, I am just surprised that it is supposed to work. Everywhere you look in surfboardland it its all about mainting curves, no straight bits, no flat spots and here comes this black and red angly thing and, too say the least, some of us are surprised.
There are some uncanny sounds and smells developing in this thread. I am pretty sure I detect a whiff of the rank “mock what you don’t understand” odor, and that seems to be baa-ing I hear in the distance…
-Samiam
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You serious? It works? Man, I always lived in the assumption that straight lines in outlines were no-no’s, continuous curves were needed to ensure flow… bizarre…
No baa-ing here mate, I ams erious when I say that straight lines don’t make sense to me. But hey, enlighten us all if you will, I don’t abscond the different, I am just surprised that it is supposed to work. Everywhere you look in surfboardland it its all about mainting curves, no straight bits, no flat spots and here comes this black and red angly thing and, too say the least, some of us are surprised.
That “black and red angly thing” has been around for several years. Walden had more information about his shapes on his old, non-Flash web site - too bad. There is a tiny bit of additional information on this January, 2005 archive of his site:
I don’t pretend to know whether it works or exactly how, but it does makes some sense to me - not all of the outline of a board interacts with a wave simultaneously. Conventional design wisdom seems to be that straighter lines give speed and curvier bits yield selective drag and control. If that is true it’s pretty obvious where the speed in this design comes from, the mystery would be the nature and location of the drag elements. Sponges are nearly rectilinear, and they seem to go OK. Also, keep in mind that regarding manmade objects, a curve is an abstraction: under sufficient magnification, the outline of any board shaped from foam is going to be a series of lines and flats. So maybe the question isn’t one of straight lines, maybe it is merely one of scale… To me, the history of the commercial surfboard industry seems largely to be one of hyping minor changes as revolutionary, while scoffing at any really innovative approach to design (until and unless by some quirk the innovation becomes popular, at which time it is passionately embraced by the “gurus”). I was poking some fun as an attempt at a gentle reminder that members of a design forum would be well advised to keep an open mind about odd ideas…
-Samiam
Quote:
There are some uncanny sounds and smells developing in this thread. I am pretty sure I detect a whiff of the rank “mock what you don’t understand” odor, and that seems to be baa-ing I hear in the distance…
-Samiam
I’m not mocking anything. I just say this is ugly and (at least it appears on the photo) both sides are not the same. Is that a subtlety of the design that I might not have “understood”?
What about an ironing board? Too much curves, maybe?
LOL! I can only imagine that the “design” phase must have been serendipitous…
“whoa there, use a template when you cut an outline”
If this is a glimpse of things to come, then I guess we can all burn our templates! Just saw and go…save some time.
Well, there is this:
When this design first came out, there was a short blurb from a surfer in one of the ads who surfed one in a contest and liked it.
Aside from the fact that the design goes against everything most shapers strive for: pleasing curves and flow, I gotta hand it to Walden.
He shook up people’s perceptions about surfboard design. At least enough to make us think that perhaps we don’t know everything yet.
And there is that pesky Stealth Bomber. How many of us, if we saw that thing sitting on the ground, would say, “No way that thing can fly.”
But it does.
And there are square tails on current surfboards.
I agree with some who say that the Walden board is kind of ugly, but apparently it does work.
Doug
Funny you bring up the aircraft…
That thing has such horrible aerodynamics that a human cannot control it. It is 100% fly by wire and needs serious computer power to keep it in the air, if the computers fail, it magically transforms into the worlds most expensive brick.
http://www.aeronautics.ru/f117a.htm
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Needless to say that the geometrical requirements for minimizing the RCS established by “Echo 1” program had little place for considerations of aerodynamics. The resulting aircraft had the aerodynamics of a flying coffin (some of the modern anti-stealth radars take advantage of F-117A’s poor aerodynamics and target the aircraft by detecting the considerable trail of turbulent air left by the aircraft’s boxy airframe.)
http://www.f117reunion.org/f117_history.htm
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One of the disadvantages involved in the use of faceting on aerodynamic surfaces was that it tended to produce an aircraft which was inherently unstable about all three axes - pitch, roll, and yaw…
It’s a good point.
couple things about the surfboard…
1, the thing as shown above is chopped out of a webpage–no offense, but pretty clumsily
EDIT: sorry, I see that Walden is responsible for how badly chopped out it is
2, the breaks and angle appear to only be in the outline, and drastic in the chopped out pic
Breaks and angles in the outline would be critical to have in the right spots and there would be a criticalness for the rider to deal with them that curves don’t demand–curves are more forgiving–there’s a lot bigger place to lever effectively on a curving outline
But all that said, if they were perfectly placed, like the apex of a curve…, and it must work for those guys…, and the breaks seem like they would confer advantages in rail penetration and leverage.
shrug
Seems like it was an exercise for Walden to prove it knows how surfboards work and where those points are
.02
Personally, and this has nothing to do with aesthetics, I don’t like straight lines or sharp corners on boards. Never have. My motto is, “all soft edges.” Even hard edges in the tail areas so common on today’s boards a dulled on my boards. Water has no corners. Turns have no corners. Why should surfboards? Hard edges are for skis and snowboards where you’re trying to work AGAINST the medium you move OVER. To me, I like the idea that surfboards move WITH the medium they are emmersed INTO. (Sorry, I haven’t figured out to use the italic yet)
So a straight lines (and subsequent corners) in a planshape that run in any direction other than parallel to the motion of the board would create more resistance than a curve. And any edge that’s not softened pushes water away from the board, relative to a rounded edge, which pulls water around it.
Look at fins. No straight lines and no razor edges. And they’re the most hydrodynamically designed element of a surfboard.
On edges, it’s about entry, penetration, and release, and the bottom planing over water is more efficient than displacing water by moving through it. See: hydroplanes and modern surfboards, ref: Parmenter