The 'Duke' 9'3"

Loosely inspired by the Duke Kahanamoku boards of the 1920's and 30's the 'Duke' model is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Vital statistics:

9'3" by 27" by 2"

Squaretail

Cutaway D fin

Hollow Paulownia construction

Weight 25 pounds

The Baron part 11: sanding, sanding sanding

First rail facets ( all 52 feet of them ) done yesterday, with pauses as the mighty Hitachi 8kg belt sander got so hot that the sawdust ignited . . then four hours of hand sanding today, and half the bottom is done with the first and roughest grit

Helpful tip for wooden surfboard builders

Stainless steel rulers make excellent cabinet scrapers! They are bendy so they are good for rail scraping, and they don't get blunt as quickly as my Sandvik scraper.

#Baron_surfboard part 10

Cutting out the planshape of the Baron Surfboard form the finished lamination.

The Baron 12 foot wooden surfboard project part 9: The final lamination

Today the lid ( or rather the bottom panel) of the 12 foot 'Baron' woody gets laminated on, it's the moment when the new surfboard is born.

A final task before we start is to sand across the frames and blocks with a 40 grit sanding board, so that they all line up nice and fairly.


Ready for the epoxy and paulownia dust glop. The paulownia dust used was produced when sanding the panels.

A ziplock bag with a corner cut out is used to apply resin to the frames. We have to work quickly as the heat of the hands plus hot summer weather is enough to start the resin in the bag heating up and setting prematurely.

Speedy spatula work from the worker with the yellow gloves

Mr blue gloves squeezes accurately and doesn't panic

Still going on resin batch number 5



Nearly ready and the glue is still nice and soft

On with the final panel, which must be placed in the correct position the first time.


Workout time: a pallet load of bricks placed strategically to bend the whole board down on to the rocker jig

Moaning chair inaction, and then a cup of tea.

The 'Bullet' tow in board for Gmac part 1

We're making a quiver of tow in boards for Garrett, this is the first one, called the bullet. It's been interesting to see that after advocating our low centre of gravity parallel profile concept as ideal for big wave guns and tow boards ( as well as longboards ) for the past 16 years, that tow in designers are starting to use it.

Back in 1995 we were building 1.5 inch thick 7 footers. 18 inches wide with a parallel profile. Those early power surfboards were remarkably close to the present day tow in boards. They rode superbly, being thin and twangy with soft constant section round rails, but were a bit low in buoyancy for everyday surfing. Now we are revisiting the small board territory again, with a few changes.

The first board will be a tunnel finned one with the option of small spitfire fin side bites, the next will be a bit longer and will be a dispacemnent tailed pintail single. The designs represent two approaches to speed and control from different ends of the spectrum. Boards three and four will have tunnel plus one and another tunnel plus two setup with a smaller tunnel

Anyway here's the planshape for the Bullet:

Satire from 'Bearded Gimp' on Magic Seaweed

Roy, I salute you. You are now beyond parody...

Wooden board turns the world on its head

Mount Maunganui, NZ

Today the revolution started at the Weightwatchers World Longboarding Championships. All who witnessed it will call this day the Year Zero of surfing's new era. A re-writing of everything we thought we knew about board design no less. And its leader? The unlikely figure of an under-sized elderly hippy rocking a pink romper suit and a home-made wooden board. Welcome to the rest of your surfing life.

Banana

To fully appreciate the impact we have to wind the clock back to 8 am this morning, to a time before this design tsunami hit. A time that may yet become known simply as BS (Before Stewart). Picture the scene, a group of the world's hottest young longboarders checking the heat draw and speculating about the identity of local wildcard Roy Stewart. Then picture them literally crying with laughter as our hero walks down the beach in a pink wetsuit and helmet, barely able to carry a board that's double the length of anything else on the beach, and which appears to have drawn significant design influence from the humble banana.

100 metres, maybe more

Top UK ripper Ben Skinner takes up the tale, "I'd just checked the draw and seen that I had Roy in my first heat. Some of these wildcards can be well dangerous, so it's a massive understatement to say that I was hugely relieved when I first clapped eyes on Roy." But the tears of laughter quickly turned to bitter tears of pain. "It took Roy a bit of time to get that thing out back, by which point I'd caught two or three pretty good rides. One of them was really long - definitely more than 10 metres - and I'd nailed a tricky little shuffle as well. Then Roy catches his first wave. I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing. Ya know those penguins that fall over backwards in the Falklands watching the planes? That's what I was like. He just disappeared! Seriously, he must have ridden for 100 or maybe 150 metres. ON ONE WAVE!! Fark mate, and the speed he was going. It was like a pink blur."

Lambs

On the beach, veteran ASP judge Raimundo Herrera watched open-mouthed at the scene unfolding in front of him. "I'd just given Ben a 9.63 for his massive ride and then Roy gets his first wave. What could we do? It was the best wave I'd seen in my life - one that made our scoring system suddenly irrelevant. In the end we had to start marking him out of 100. Roy's heat total was 197.6 for his two best waves and his nearest competitor scored 16.1. It was carnage out there. Lambs to the slaughter."

That performance was enough for the rest of the field. As Herrera confirms, "Pretty much straight after Roy's first ride 17 competitors withdrew with injury and the rest of them followed suit, citing a variety of reasons. Nobody came out and said it, but we all knew that Roy would simply make them look stupid. Only Phil Rajzman was prepared to put his reputation on the line so we arranged a final for the two of them. Fair play to Phil, he gave it a go but Roy absolutely roasted him. He came in with tears in his eyes. Said it was a privilege to be out there in the presence of genius."

Modest

The unusually modest Mr Stewart was typically self-effacing afterwards, saying he'd only entered the contest for a laugh - and to pay off some parking fines - and that the last thing he wanted was loads of publicity or to create a design revolution. Amazingly, he revealed that for years he'd built his boards anonymously to try to focus people's attention on the design rather than himself. Well, that looks all set to change now with every surf brand worth its salt rushing to jump onto the bandwagon and the world's surf media hungry to anoint a new saviour.

Copy

As every small-time shaper knows, large board-building companies are usually all too quick to steal new ideas and pass them off as their own but it appears that this time round things might be different. As one top shaper, who asked not to be identified, revealed, "Normally, yeah we 'borrow' the odd design, give it a fancy name and market it as our own concept. It works a treat to be honest, I haven't had to innovate for twenty years. But this thing of Roy's, it's uncopiable. It's phenomenally advanced and may even include alien technology. Seriously."

Range deleted

And it's not just longboarding that's been affected by the arrival of Mr Stewart's design. Almost overnight demand for shortboards in many countries has fallen off a cliff, so profound is the impact of the 17 footer. Many surf shops have simply deleted their entire range of boards - both long and short - and now offer solely a choice of different "Roys".

If unconfirmed rumours coming out of Cocoa Beach, Florida are to be believed King Kelly has taken an axe to his entire quiver on seeing video of Roy's exploits and now refers to his record-breaking nine world titles as "the wasteland years". Frankly, who can blame him?

Thanks Roy

To sum up, we are truly blessed to be alive in the same era as this leviathan of the waves. This giant among men. This legend. I actually think that these designs could finally bring peace to the Middle East. On a personal note, I've named my first-born after you. And she's a girl.

May the Roy be with you!

Are flatter boards faster ?

The answer is Yes, No, and Maybe. The unspohisticated rocker 101 theory says that flatter rocker is faster as flatter rocker reduces drag

There are a few ifs buts and maybes which should be kept in mind however regarding the flatter is faster idea:

1) Rocker is relative to wave curve. If the rocker is the same as the wave curve, then the rocker is effectively zero. If the rocker is LESS than the wave curve, the board will nosedive, pearl, or have its control compromised ( unless the board is rolled on to the rail in order to present the planshape curve instead of the rocker )

2) Less rocker means less lift, which can entail less acceleration on takeoff. The lift produced per square inch of wetted surface area is proprtional to speed. More rocker ( particularly in the nose ) thus gives the advantage of much greater lift at low paddle in to takeoff speeds, and this can give vastly superior acceleration during those crucial moments. Gains made at the moment of takeoff can pay big dividends later in the ride.This also applies to re entry from the lip during the ride.

3) Less rocker can reduce control with some planshapes and in very long boards.

4) More rockered designs gain speed partly through their ability ( if designed correctly ) to have such good control and ease of turning that they can have near perfect wave positioning. Thus they can fit into more curvaceous parts of the wave ( high lines for speed often entail this ). Ideal wave positioning is a great boon and often enables more rockered boards to leave the flatter boards in their wakes. Having said that, it's true that shorter flatter boards are at no positioning and control disadvantage if well designed.

5) The control and leverage advantage which more rocker can give, allows ( at least in my designs) the board to be used to present fin or fins at the most beneficial angles for lift. In short the fin(s) can be used to supplement the upwards lift provided by the surfboard hull, ( even with vertical planar fins ) thus reducing the load on the hull ( and therefore drag ) as a result. This is a somewhat esoteric subject, but the success of the concept has led to our use of very large single fins on very narrow tails. . . a combination which is a mystery to those who subscribe to the conventional wisdom that fins are only used to hold the tail in !

Regarding rocker and fins, when horizontal fins are used ( wings and tunnels for example) the effective tail rocker can be determined by the angle of the wing or fin rather thanby the bottom of the board.

6) Highly rockered boards are more easily able to reduce wetted surface area as speed increases ( lifting the nose out of the water ), thus although they can have higher drag per square inch of surface area, they are able to reduce drag by reducing surface area.

Here's an efficient rocker type with a higher nose curve and flatter tail curve which has most usually only been used on shortboards, it's a very good longboard rocker also: