More biomimetics and fin tubercule theory. . .

Given that the tubercules give an efficiency advantage, it's like money in the bank which can be 'spent' in various ways.

For example the advantage could be used entirely to increase the angle of attack capability. Alternatively it could be used just to reduce drag, or to increase lift.

Adding the tubercules to an existing fin should give some of each of the three advantages, but by altering the fin size or thickness the fin can be tweaked to weight the tubercule gain towards one or two of the parameters more than the other(s).

As an example if one just wanted to reduce drag then the fin could be made thinner with tubercules, because the tubercules give back the aoa capability lost by making the fin thinner. Also the fin can be made 5 percent or so smaller because that's the gain in lift given by the tubercules. . . if we give it back by reducing fin size we also reduce drag.

Biomimetics in practice:

Leading edge tubercules for the 7-8 'Jet's' spitfire cutaway fin

Leading edge tubercules for the 7-8  'Jet's' spitfire cutaway fin being roughed out today.

These strange nodules promise a  big improvement in the lift/drag ratio, and the ability to handle greater angles of attack without stalling. Stalling also becomes less abrupt.

The appalling state of mainstream surfing longboard design

FirstPointEric wrote: Roy-   And, in all seriousness, why can Skip Frye turn a 13+ foot, 40+ pound board so effortlessly and it seems that you go more or less straight in line with the wave?   I know you say you "turn" but stalling and releasing that stall isn't turning.  I've seen several of your vids and I've yet to see a real turn, other than a sort of bottom turn.   Eric

You are out of your tree Eric.

Those so called turns you see on 12 foot mals are stall turns or tail pivots, not rail turns.

They make me cringe because they are so inefficient, and inefficient equals ugly.

The problem with the longer mals ( over 12 feet )   is that the tail pivot/stall turn requires lifting the nose while standing way back on the tail , this becomes increasingly difficult as the board gets longer due to the leverage exerted.

Thye only cure for this is to make the board lighter in order to overcome the design fault, but it's a poor cure as the lightness causes other problems.

Twelve foot boards can still get away with a malibu ice cream stick shape, but only just. Once the boards reach 14 to 16 feet the bad design can no longer be overcome by rider effort or ultra light weight. . . . the result is a board which can neither tail pivot nor rail turn. . . .  in other words a dysfunctional POS.

The same problems occur at 9 feet, but are overcome by bodily gyrations, the appreciation of which is a classic case of making a virtue of an unnecessary necessity.

My boards are a vast improvement on the icecream stick malibu shape, as they are able to rail turn and carve with ease at any length with minimal rider effort or movement.  The keys to this are shapes which have a more central riding position in order to cut down on nose leverage and swing weight, and a sweet spot from which turning and trmming occur simultaneously.

Here's a video of a 13 foot 35 pound board which turns with the greatest of ease, its
 sinuous lines and elongated proportions, create a lithe, teardrop shaped whole which has a snake like turning ability. This was the first session on the board and my first surf for three months, just a taste.

If anyone has video of Harry Frye surfing a 13 footer then please post it up.



Future Primitive 13 foot wooden surfboard from Roy stewart on Vimeo.
The Future Primitive 13 foot wooden surfboard being ridden for the first time, at Omanu, Mount Maunganui New Zealand.

The 'Duke' and the 'Chieftain' wooden surfboards

The Duke and the Chieftain luxury wooden surfboards are based on the same hull shape. At 9'7" the Chieftain tunnel fin equipped crescent tailed longboard  is 4 inches longer than the 9'3" Duke with single cutaway 'D' fin.

Price for the pair US$36,048

A few of our favourite things

Three of our favourite things: Future Primitive 12, Makaha 12-9, Baron 12

Luxury Toys Olo surfboard quivers: A collection of 12 footers

Twelve footers may well be called the Universal Surfboards. When asked recently what board length he would choose if he could only have one  surfboard, Laird Hamilton replied that he would take his 12 footer. We agree as 12 feet  is such a  versatile length, but do prefer a full quiver!.

Here's a trio of luxury toy tails from a Roy Stewart 12 foot Olo collection

From left to right: Future Primitive 12, Makaha 12-9, Baron 12

Price for the quiver of three:  US$67,994

Oneula from Hawaii speaks on expensive surfboards

Here's Oneula from Hawaii writing about the price of Roy Stewart's 12 foot Baron: 


Personally I don't see the difference between this guy charging $10,000 for one of his handshapes and what Roy's trying to maket himself as.

http://www.hawaiibc.com/surf.htm

but you don't see anyone on any surfing webisites making jokes about what he's doing or charging for his wood slabs


What these guys are doing is defining whatever market they want to serve and setting the bar on price then waiting to see the reaction.

its all subjective as to what people will pay for something. Its perceived versus actual value.

The fact that Roy gets all this free publicity among the masses(Engaget is propably read by folks like Gates, Wozniak and others like them) who are not stuck in this closed off private world of "being cool" surfdom means that there's probably someone out there buying these things for some other purpose than using them how such certain groups think they should be used.

Hell all Roy has to do is sell a couple of these collector items a year and he's beaten out 80% of surfdomnites who think they know how to make them better than Roy.

Actually artist Marc Newson auctioned off a nickle plated Brewer shaped 5' tow-in board at Sotheby's for $220,000.00 so he's got roy well beat at $44,000 a board foot versus Roy's $2083 a board foot. So Roy's board is a steal!

http://most-expensive.net/surfboard


I know folks who wouldn't blink to bid $25,000 in an auction for a rare bottle of port or cognac and then throw a $50,000 celebration for select friends just to drink it all. These are the same folks who have no qualms of spending $35,000-$50,000 every 5-10 years buying the latest top of the line Mercedes, BMW, Audi or what ever for no really good reason other than to have one. Same folks who'll pay $25,000 for a custom wood door from this company: http://www.haleiwasurfboards.com/doorswindows.html for their multimillion dollar mansions on the ridge at Hawaii Loa or Diamondhead or Portlock.

or how about those geeks that flew halfway around the world to Silicon valley to get the chance to own the first all electric $100,000 supercar(Tesla)

Actually I believe there's a guy here in Hawaii building a $38,000 surfboard made from some super rare, sacred, and exotic New Zealand Kauri root burl root wood.

http://forum.surfermag.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=UBB4&Number=1763545&Searchpage=1&Main=1763517&Words=+heelnipstr&topic=&Search=true

 "The Ancient Kauri logs being extracted from the north island of New Zealand today are radiocarbon dated at 45 to 50,000 years old - and older. At 50,000 years old, this wood pre-dates the migration of Neanderthals, the arrival of Homo Sapiens, the hunt for mammoths and all the cave paintings in Europe. These trees were already buried for 30,000 years before the onset of the Earth's last Ice Age! The Ancient Kauri logs are typically extracted from areas that were at one time bogs, but are now firmer and drier.  The scientific name for Kauri is Agathis Australis. This species belongs to the Araucariaceae plant family, which means the trees are Conifers (soft wood), so they produce cones instead of flowers for reproduction. The oldest fossil of New Zealand Kauri has been dated to 175 million years old, making Kauri among the largest and largest species of trees in the world. Kauri trees do still grow in New Zealand today, but these living, growing  behemoths are now protect4ed by law."

As an hobbiest penturner I can tell you that a 3/4"x5" pen blank of Ancient Kauri might run you up to $40 if you can get it. So if you glued enough of those little chucks of wood togethor to shape one of roy's 12'x3"x22" monsters it would run you around $65,000 just for all the little Kauri wood pen blanks to glue up into a blank.

Meanwhile a 5" piece of exotic wood finished with another $40 worth of a high end fountain pen kit could get you close to $250-$500 from a person who collects pens. And it all would take you about a 30 - 60 minutes to complete.

so how about a $425.00 Pen?

http://www.pianki.com/Caran-dAche-Varius-Metwood-Silver-Plated-Rhodium-Coated-Pens_p_983.html

or a $23,000.00 Pen?

http://www.pianki.com/Aurora-85th-Anniversary-Limited-Edition-Mother-of-Pearl-Fountain-Pen_p_2622.html

or a $42,000.00 Pen?

http://www.powerfulpens.com/visconti-hrh-divine-proportion.html


Again somethings value is all relative and subjective

Live Aloha Always...
What is it?
http://culturalkapolei.honadvblogs.com/2009/04/01/oneula-hau-bush/
Where is it?
http://www.inter-island.com/eva.html

A letter from an olosurfer friend

 Here is part of a letter from an olosurfer  friend in Spain, which he has kindly allowed us to publish:

Hello Roy

It feels good to have finally run into an aristocrat of surfing, a welcome relief from nothing but blind, deaf and dum herding around such egregious activity.  I appreciate your courage to question and distill the spirit of surfing and understand it as the source of your work.  "What is essential to surfing?" is a question you, no doubt, ask yourself constantly.  Flight, maximum speed, an aspiration to perfect efficiency and unity with the energy of the wave is what your work tells me you're after, and that, to resucitate from defilement an important word so ruthlessly raped and rendered meaningless by the surfing world, is radical--that is: pertaining to the root.

Your boards are beautiful because they are true organic works.  And organic here means, as you well know, that an object's purpose, apearance, structure, material, method of construction, performance and even symbollic potential are tightly woven into a cohesive but infinitely flexible whole, conceived after great analytical and synthetic effort of the imagination in an attemp to create, however modestly a man is able to, as nature does.

I've learned a great deal from your blog and the interesting links you've included in it (the Hummingbird one is fantastic) and enjoyed its clarity and conceptual cohesion.  It was long overdue, for example, to hear someone talk about rocker for the first time in the concrete, systematic way you do, dealing with rates of curvature and defining it as circular, elliptical, or conforming to a segment of a foil section, making its apex always coincide with the template's widest point.  I think the approach of your boards is, as far as I'm able to understand it, very elegant.  The use of foil sections for templates, having considerable area with significant rocker forward, creating an optimum configuration to get up and planing as soon as possible, and a narrow tail for maximum control and rail to rail ease that works mostly in displacement, and whose limited displacement lift is suplemented by the much more efficiently generated lift from your fins is a brilliant balance of the best of many worlds: the tunnel as slave foil, at the same angle of attack as the bottom, lifting smoothly as needed without resisting roll and thus not affecting rail to rail movement; the deep elliptical fins generating upward lift as soon as they're not perpendicular to the horizon--which is most of the time the board is in the wave...  It's so nourishing to see your true dynamic, three dimensional understanding of the elements involved in wave riding, as oposed to the usual resorting to convenient abstractions a la "wider tail/less rocker is always faster" that ring so much like fundamentalist praying and show no understanding of wave dynamics.  I thought, for example, that your analysis of the so called "Maverick's suction zone" was absolutely surgical; it baffles me how hard it is for surfers to understand things as basic as the fact that a canted fin has "horizontal fin area" which will generate upward lift, the fact that one can never go straight in a wave (except, as you have recently pointed out in one of your entries, if one travels in a direction perpendicular to the wall of the wave), or that the faster rockers and templates will be the ones that conform more closely to the wave's curve.

I think your construction method definitely approaches, as you say, haiku depth, once you've assumed constant rail section--this is a point I still haven't adecuately grasped, but I'm working on it--and opens up amazing flexibility and resonance potential.  I really enjoyed the video where one can see the different waves go through one of your boards after you hit it, and can only imagen how much life that introduces into surfing--I thought the analysis where one of your readers compared the performance of your boards to the loading and unloading through turns of giant slalom skies was rigth on target (weighting and unweighting, with arms shoulder width appart, swinging forward is, by the way, an exact description of my movement when pumping the airborne hydrofoil), and found the footage you made with an onboard camera showing the constant dance of subtle pressure and position adjustments of you feet during the ride very interesting, as well as the forward facing position.  It's so superior, isn't it?, if you're interested in flight and being one with the wave.  I've quickly been drawn to it by the hydrofoil.  There are many things in your work that intrigue me and I don't understand well, like that incredible "Bullet" tow board with a totally parallel outline and tunnel fin for Garrett McNamara, but I'm looking forward to learning more.  I find "The Baron", with its tunnel/flex fin combination, fascinating, as well as "The Squidfish"--it's hard to decide, but this could very well be my personal favorite--with its subtly channeled tunnel, an object that is, in its own right, absolutely out of this world.

Regards etc

Team olosurfer past present and future !

Adam Sandler
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Andre 3000
Angie harmon
Anna Nicole Smith
Anthony Anderson
Avril Lavigne
Benjamin McKenzie
Bernal Garcia
Beyonce Knowles
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Ellen Degeneres
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George Lopez
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Hugh Hefner and Playboy Bunnies
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Jamie Foxx
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Jennifer Love Hewiitt
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Jessica Biel
Jim Belushi
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JR Reidel
Juliette Lewis
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Kelise Reidel
Kelsey Carlson
Kelsey Grammar
Keri Walsh
Kirk Hammett
Lance Bass
Latoya Jackson
Lauren Hill
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Mark Ruffalo
Meredith Baxter
Michael Chiklis
Michael Clark Duncan
Michael Douglas
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Murphy Lee
Nelly's Dancers
Nick Cannon
Nicole Ritchie
Nikki Ziering
Parminder Nagra
Patti LaBelle
Paula Abdul
Pierce Brosnan
Queen Latifah
Roy Stewart
Clint Eastwood
 Randy Jackson
Raquel Welch

Raven Symone
Rob Cohen
Rob Schneider
Robert Trujillo
Ryan Seacrest
Seth Green
Shania Twain
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Tom Petty
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surf
surfer
surfboard rider

'Jet' 7'8" pintail wooden surfboard

The 7'8" Jet is cut out and ready for shaping

New 'Zorb' tuberculed fin for the Earl 10'6"

Here's the first drawing for a  new 'Zorb'  spitfire  fin planshape with leading edge tubercules, otherwise known as humpback whale fin bumps.

The humpback whale ~Megaptera novaeangliae  is well known among the baleen whales in its
ability to perform acrobatic underwater maneuvers to catch prey. In order to do these
and turning maneuvers, humpback whales use extremely mobile flippers. The humpback whale
fin is unique because of the presence of bumps or tubercules on the leading
edge which gives this surface a frilly baroque scalloped appearance.
The addition of leading-edge tubercles to a scale model of an idealized humpback whale flipper
delays the stall angle by approximately 40%, while increasing lift and decreasing drag



Leading-edge tubercles delay stall on humpback whale „Megaptera novaeangliae… flippers
D. S. Miklosovic


http://pof.aip.org/phfle6/v16/i5/pl39_s1?isAuthorized=no

In sum, we find a 4.8% increase in lift, a 10.9% reduction in induced drag, and a
17.6% increase in lift to drag ratio when compared with the wing shown in Fig. 1.

From:

THE INFLUENCE OF PASSIVE, LEADING EDGE
TUBERCLES ON WING PERFORMANCE
P. Watts
Applied Fluids Engineering, Inc.
Private Mail Box #237, 5710 E. 7th Street, Long Beach, CA, 90803
phil.watts@appliedfluids.com
F. E. Fish
West Chester University
Department of Biology, West Chester, PA,

Tunnel fin plus boomerang flex fin: How does it feel ?

As one  can  imagine when the board starts to turn, or is on the rail at all, the boomerang flex fin does this:




Bending to the flow as the fin does allows the board to roll more easily, which is nice because the tunnel doesn't resist roll at all, and the two fins together offer only a gentle resistance to the board rolling. As the fin bends it stores energy and releases it as flex fins do, so it also helps the board spring back up out of the turn.

The feeling of the flex fin plus tunnel compared with the spitfire fin plus tunnel is a soft slightly twangy response to the rail to rail roll, the tail snakes through the turns, but doesn't crab sideways at all it still sets a true line. It's quite hard to explain. Smooth is a one word description.

Flex fins on their own can lack drive but the big tunnel is so powerful that the board has both drive and a soft forgiving response.

Here's a video of a few waves on the prototype, some with a flex fin plus tunnel ( stiffer flex than the new baron fin ) and some with the original spitfire fin plus tunnel . .. on some of the waves I'm hanging way back and using the tunnel more and on others I'm a bit further forward. I had to stall for the kneelo by the way so that I didn't run him over.

'Jet' 7'8" pintail wooden surfboard: laminating the panels together

Applying epoxx resin thickned with paulownia dust to the deck

The glue is squeezed on to the underneath of the deck where the frames will attach using a ziplock bag with the corner cut off

The first frame and rail panel is lowered into position

The next day the after the bricks which clamp the two panels together have been removed

Here the second frame panel is being clamped down

Adding the strategically placed vertical struts to some of  the frame junctions. This helps the board to resist any internal pressure which might build up due to temperature changes.