Olo of the Sun: deck planking continued .. .

Planking continues today.

The deck is 8mm thick, using paulownia wood of moderate density, lower density wood will be used for the internal panels.

The approximate volume of this 19 foot pintailed surfboard is 170 litres at 2.5 inches thick.

Olo of the Sun: Planking the deck

The first planks for the 19 foot 'Olo of the Sun' were edge glued today.

Here's the tail in planshape:

Planking is started in the middle of the panel and proceeds fore and aft. The picture is taken from the nose, and the person in the photo is standing at the tail.

The target weight range for this board is 60 to 70 pounds.

Roger Hall on surfboard weight at the Gold Coast surf museum .

Here Roger speaks on surfboard weight at the Gold Coast surf museum wooden surfboard night :

"Seventeen years ago I went to the  Oxbow longboard contest in Hawaii, and I decided to make a state of the art , high performance, super light weight progressive longboard to see what I could do and ..ah.. I didn't do well in the contest, but the board was the best board I had ever made. it was my favourite board and just a fantastic board and that was really good.

That was 1993 and I sort of had this idea of making a wooden board for quite a long time and I had been collecting Agave stalks for quite a while, and I had a little bit of a stash and I thought: "Well I am going to make this wooden board", and just as a little bit of an experiment, to give the board the project a bit of direction, I decided to copy this super light weight foam board that I really liked out of  Agave wood.

 But it was a lot heavier than the super light , high performance longboard that I had been riding. I was absolutely blown away at how well this board went, in so many ways. It surprised me in ways I would never have dreamt.

The first thing was: I didn't know if the board would even float, so I made the thing and nervously took it to the beach,  and wood floats, but hey you should have seen my woodwork projects at school. My mother reminded me the other day that at the end of school, I used to bring home my woodwork projects and sneak them in the house and hide them in the wardrobe so my dad wouldn't see them... I haven't always been a woodworker.

Well anyway this board did float and it paddled great. And first thing I noticed is that it duckdived better than my foam board. I kind of thought "Maybe that's a quirky flukey thing" you know. It just seemed that every time I went under a wave it just duckdived better than my foam board. And I thought: "What's going on here" and I put it down to the fact that it didn't have the same corky buoyancy as a polyurethane foam blank. It seemed to sit under the wave out of the turbulence for just that little bit longer and then it popped up.

So that was something I never would have dreamt. The next thing I found was that paddling into waves the board just seemed to have more motor. And it had this really nice surefooted kind of feel to it as you dropped down the wave. It was always there for you at the bottom.

So right from paddling the board to my first takeoff I was discovering things like just "Bang, bang , bang". That really surprised me and I found out all kinds of things. I rode that board for two years non stop, and in the end I just had to get off it, because as a shaper I was no longer experimenting anymore. I didn't need another board. So I had to stop riding it.

The other thing I did at that time was I was so intrigued by the weight. How could this board be so fast and lively compared to the foam board that I had copied?
So the next board I made, I deliberately made it considerably heavier. I made it out of Balsawood, but what I did is I put hardwood rails on it. Like really heavy hardwood rails. The board was heavy. But it was a very progressive shape. It had a lot of rocker in it. What I found was: OK you drop into a wave; you lay it on rail to do a bottom turn; and what the board did was it just flipped onto its rail really quickly because the weight was in the rail, and then it held a really nice line. And then when you wanted to go on the other rail it just flipped onto the other rail. I used the word 'flip' but it was really smooth but really quick.

From that time on I never bothered about making another lightweight surfboard again. Even when I make my foam boards.

I've just found that weight is really a powerful design ingredient, it started disappearing from surfboards in the 50's, and we've pretty much been on this one way track of getting the weight out of surfboards and out of surfing, and we've had to bring it back for tow boards, and for recreating old school noseriders and stuff.  I've found that weight is a very very potent design element and  I think the road ahead is going to see weight come back into surfing, and this wooden board thing that's happening is going to really help to turn a lot of people on to that.

 

Roger Hall at the surf museum, gold coast.


http://olosurfer-woodensurfboardsatpipeline.blogspot.com/2010/06/surfing-physics-mass-and-power.html

http://woodensurfboards.blogspot.com/2010/08/couple-of-innovative-guys.html
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More tunnel fin observations

The tunnel fin  has several interesting attributes. One is that it provides lift in the same plane as the surfboard hull, just as a winged fin does. It does so much more efficiently than a winged fin however, and with better control.  By adding a lifting foil under the hull, we get a similar effect to having a wider tail but get to keep a narrower tail for control.

With a wide tailed board control becomes an issue at speed due to the fact that planing  lift increases exponentially as speed increases, and  this makes the rail of the wide tailed board  harder to sink into turns due to the leverage required. Using a narrow tailed board with a tunnel to produce the same amount of lift as the wide tailed board, rail to rail rolling remains easy even as speed increases, due to the shape of the tunnel which does not resist such movement. The result is ease of control and predictable handling characteristics.

With a wide tailed board and a big tunnel, a massive amount of lift is produced in the tail area, which is useful for smaller waves.

The tunnel is completely neutral in its handling as it has almost zero resistance to rail to rail roll. It's also a very low drag fin, due to the absence of tip drag ( no fin tip) and because the lift is produced at low pressure ( the tunnel uses a large volume of water at low pressure rather than a low volume at high pressure as planar finds tend to do. This reduces drag. There's also a subtle  spiral vortex produced through the tunnel when the board turns, this also reduces drag in a similar way to the tubercules on the main fin. 

The effect is of much more drive and power, and  improved speed.

Tunnels can be large or small depending upon the width of the tail. With sufficient tail width a large tunnel can be used which works alone without other fins. Even a small 4 inch diameter tunnel has a lot of power once it gains speed. They work best on boards with a long flat tail rocker.

Pressure gradients on planing hulls show  high  lift at the front of the hull, this tapers off dramatically towards the tail, so that the tail more or less trails behind without producing a lot of lift. This gives the typical soft feeling to the tail on boards without horizontal fin area like singlefins. By placing a horizontal foil under the hull near the tail which works in undisturbed water flow, another  high lift area is produced there. This gives the tail more drive and the creation of two lift areas is rather like having two axles on a skateboard rather than one. Other boards with fin based vertical tail lift via horizontal area include all those with canted side fins, as well as star fins and other fins with horizontal wings attached. In my opinion the tunnel is far superior to canted fins, having lower drag and better handling. 

http://olosurfer-woodensurfboardsatpipeline.blogspot.com/2009/03/wonderful-tunnel-fin-celebration.html

The JET tunnel fin setting

Today the tunnel fin for the JET 7-8 was set into place.

  
The angle of attack of the tunnel is at one degree of lift greater than that of the hull adjacent to the fins.

Even though such a low difference in the angle of attack between the annular wing tunnel and the hull means that the tunnel is essentially a slave foil, in practice the effective difference in the angles of attack is greater than one degree, especially at low speeds. This is because the annular wing is a good lift producer at low angles of attack, even at low speed, whereas the surfboard  hull in the fin area is relatively narrow and  soft railed, thus producing very little lift at the low angles of attack in which the annular wing works efficiently. As speed increases the hull and the tunnel work together more harmoniously, partly because the tunnel dominates in the lift department thus taking load off the hull, and partly because the efficiency of the hull increases with greater speed.

The JET 7-8 Fin setting

Today the main tuberculed fin was set into the JET board. The tunnel fin is placed in approximately the correct position, but isn't installed yet.

'Olo of the Sun' @ Piratemyfilm.com

 Olo of the Sun follows the building and riding of a 19 foot wooden olo surfboard, inspired by the ancient Royal Hawaiian art of pure ocean swell gliding. Blending physics and hydrodynamics with conscious Tarot symbolism and sofeggio frequency 852Hz, the Sun board experience transcends the lowly corporate monoculture, reinstating the Sport of Kings to its rightful spiritual eminence. 

 Shares can be reserved in this film at http://www.piratemyfilm.com/projects/189   

So far 61% of the available shares have been reserved, in only 2 days !

Here's Max Kaiser talking about Piratemyfilm.com




Here's some technical information on the Sun board, and a look at the planshape:

http://olosurfer-woodensurfboardsatpipeline.blogspot.com/2010/07/sun-board-19-foot-olo.html

What does 'Olo' mean ?

I've been looking at the term 'Olo' to find out what it means. It certainly has no connection with 'rockerless' 'finless' 'thick'  'narrow' or 'solid' as some people suppose when claiming that the word should not be used for surfboards with fins and rocker, but only for copies of the Hawaiian slab olo board found in the Bishop Museum.

  'Olo' is  an onomatapaeic  term derived from the rhythmic sound and action of sawing, this led to derivative  meanings i.e. a long resounding noise or long surfboard.

So the term has come to refer to long surfboards due to the sound made when sawing, scraping, or rubbing them during construction, which in the case of a very large surfboards is louder, longer, and more resonant than is usual.

Thus I think that any long wooden surfboard can lay claim to the word. I saw and sand my long wooden boards out by hand and they have great resonance. . . so much so that I wear earmuffs when using handtools on them. Hollow paulownia boards have excellent resonance.

Now I know what to chant to myself during the many hours of hand sawing, hand scraping and hand sanding when making Olo boards . . . .  Olo, olo, olo,olo,olo,olo. . . .. .. . 

Olo also means 'hill' so it's possible that there's also a connection to liquid hills. . .

Claiming that Olo can only refer to the ancient type, is in my opinion incorrect as a matter of fact due to the etymology of the word.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NJHPMufp6cMC&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=olo+meaning++dictionary+hawaiian&source=bl&ots=pSnJxAYAD-&sig=xNLVQ26-6mD6IWRYeEPZUyppE48&hl=en&ei=rSNnTKHvOo3msQPe1ei4DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://olosurfer-woodensurfboardsatpipeline.blogspot.com/2010/08/olo-paipo-alaia-duke-whats-in-name.html

Olo, paipo, alaia, Duke. . . what's in a name ?

Regarding Olo boards I just use the term to refer to very large wooden surfboards. Some people object to this on emotional grounds, feeling that it is disrespectful to the ancient hawaiians. On that score I disagree with them as I use the term out of respect for those who pioneered big wooden boards, and I feel strongly that the ancients approve of what we are doing.  If by chance they didn't ( which I very much doubt ) then we'd be sticking to our guns anyway.

Modern Olo. . . Gloria in excelsis deo

The other objection is based on historical accuracy.  Some people are concerned that if the term 'olo' is widened to include modern designs then people will be misled regarding ancient olo designs  and that we are thus spreading misinformation. I think that anyone who is interested in olo surfboards wil be able to discover the difference between our modern designs and the ancient ones within a few minutes on the net. The word 'olo' is lovely and deserves to be used.  I also think that the word olo is unlikely to have meant 'finless' or rockerless' rather it was a term for the biggest boards.

An important part of the olo surfboard tradition was that these longest of all super boards were reserved for royalty. In that respect we are following the tradition. Roy Stewart's olo boards are very rare, time consuming to build and extremely expensive.   Those factors will ensure that riding and owning them is an exclusive experience.

There's also a precedent for reviving hawaiian surfboard terms in a modern context.  If we take a look at the word 'paipo' for example it's now the accepted term for body boards which are not made of soft closed cell foam. There are hawaiian body board builders using plywood, rocker, glue, and non traditional shapes marketing their boards as paipos, and worldwide there's a large group of makers using everything including the kitchen sink ( literally ) to make what they call paipos.  My feeling is that one can only sit back and enjoy it, trying to stop the word being used for a bodyboard made of plywood or junk found in a dumpster is a waste of time as it's not going to happen.
 

 Traditional Paipo or modern paipo?


Words change their meaning over time, in these cases they are not losing their original meaning, which is still there, but widening their meaning. As mentioned above a simple qualification is all that is needed in order to clarify what is meant by the term. For example we can have 'plywood paipo' or 'traditional paipo', or simply paipos identified by the builder i.e.' Poohbah's paipo'  ( Poohbah is a paipo builder from Rodntube's paipo forum ).   On that basis my boards can be identified without ambiguity as 'Roy Stewart Olo's ' It can be painful to see words change in meaning, but there's little which can be done about it apart from exercising our right to use them as we choose.

Alaia or not? Roy with a nearly rockerless 1.5" thick flexible  8'1"  built  1996

Now regarding the word 'Duke'.  I defend the use of that one vigorously. I have not named my board  'Duke Kahanamoku'  or said that the board is a copy of one of his boards. Furthermore there are dozens of  actual Dukes ( both past and present)  in this world and I'm descended from many of them. Also Duke Kahanamoku was not actually a Duke he was merely named 'Duke' . . . so I suppose I could object to his use of the term for a similar reason to that which people  have used to complain about  my use of the term 'olo'. . . . that it's not historically accurate.  Of course I have no such objection.   If  you look at our other surfboard models you will see that we use other European terms including 'Baron'  and 'Chieftain'. We'll also be using the word 'Laird' and will not be asking Mr Hamilton's permission as there have been many real Lairds in my family.  Of course there's an allusion to the great Duke Kahanamoku when using the term as a surfboard name, and I'm standing by it as a compliment to Mr Kahanamoku.

To anyone who still doesn't get it, I can only say that olo is what one sees when looking up my nostrils !

Celtic Olo builder  

More wavy sword blade, wing, and fin theory

  In order to get a feel for the sort of  air resistance generated by a wide blade which is stalled ( keeping in mind that tubercules reduce drag even when not stalled ) one can swing a lightweight wooden staff or batten with a similar width. A flat sided batten will work best.

In doing so it's immediately apparent that the maximum speed of the cut is determined by air resistance.

In support of this we can note that air resistance goes up with square as speed increases. Also  as discussed  the drag caused by the outer part of a completely stalled wide cutting blade   is definitely very significant in proportion to the muscular energy  available to power the sword.

Once a sword is in a continuous circular arc motion  ( excluding air resistance ) it takes a lot less energy to keep it in motion than it does to accelerate it in the first place. Thus continuous arcs are not necessarily very tiring, as long as the air resistance is low. 

Air resistance is the catch. Air resistance saps energy very quickly. I've found this also with shorter weapons. For example it is less tiring to do fast whirling staff escrima drills with thin  heavy sticks than it is with  thicker lighter sticks. When such drills are done slowly the lighter thicker sticks are much easier to use, but once going fast air resistance soon limits the top speed. . .  and that's when doing very tight small radius arcs spirals figure eights and so on, it's even more the case with longer weapons.  With simple strikes where the weapon travels through a shorter arc ( e.g 90 to 180 degrees ) this isn't as apparent, the lighter stick feels faster as the limiting factor then is inertia during acceleration.

With longer weapons the most energy efficient redirections are larger arcs which maintain the speed of the weapon rather than shorter stop/start turns with greater acceleration/deceleration and consequent energy sapping inertia issues .  During larger arc redirections and turns  air resistance needs to be addressed partly because the speed is higher and partly because the blade is experiencing relativley high angles of attack even in a large arc turn.

During WWII it was discovered that the spitfire could turn more quickly than the ME109 as even though it did larger arc turns it did so with greater airspeed due to more efficient lower drag elliptical wings. Turning tightly is not always the fastest way to turn, it uses more energy.  Of course if anything gets in the way of the fast  moving blade during a turn it is going to be damaged a lot more than by a slowly moving stalled blade attempting a tight turn, and that is no doubt  a bonus when 'hedge trimming' a wall of opponents

Stall reduction via a wider range of air flow angle of attack is also useful due to the fact that pre stall and stall situations create vorteces which tend to make the wing or blade oscillate uncontrollably. . . so it's good for control as well.

One way of avoiding air resistance and stalling problems is via a narrow thicker blade tip, however with these types cutting efficiency is lost, and the pointed tips create very significant tip drag vorteces which spatulate tips largely avoid. So all things considered, for the control of 360 degrees of territory I'd design  a long wide bladed cutting blade with leading edge undulations. . . . ..   and behold such types exist !

There is another reason why undulating blades experience less drag, to do with  air flow from the strong of the blade to the weak. During cuts ( particularly the long continuous arc type )  the majority of the time the blade is presented strong first, with the weak trailing behind. This creates air flow towards the tip which makes  a big increase in the drag inducing tip vortex as the air flows off the blade at the tip. Leading edge tubercules help to prevent this flow to the tip, and spatulate  blade tips deal with it better than pointed ones.

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Harvesting paulownia for surfboards.

Yesterday was paulownia harvesting day.

Here Scott 'Scrappy Dog'  makes a start by topping the first tree.

   
Flower buds

Scott surfs, but not on this day as he spent 5 and a half hours climbing.

Some of the slimmer trees are topped and left standing so that they can thicken up after being given more room to grow.

I acted as the 'groundie' by throwing a rope with a small sandbag up the tree to Scrappy, which he'd tie on so that I could pull the logs over in the right direction  

The trees were tall and surrounded by building and an orchard so they had to be felled very carefully.

Approximately 2.5 cubic metres of surfboard wood

Around 17 years of growth . . .. .

a question from Lafayette C Curtis regarding the aerdodynamics of swords

  Mr Curtis is a member of the ARMA Renaissance Martial Arts forum, and asks:


"  What's with this obsession over angles of attack, really? I thought with proper edge alignment a sword's aerodynamic angle of attack should be virtually zero!  "

http://www.thearma.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=37342#37342


Firstly it is not an obsession, it's an interest in the subject. Obsession is an ugly thing to be accused of. I am merely very interested. I must also add that it is my job as a designer to investigate these phenomenon, it's not just a hobby.


Secondly, we read that these large two handed sword were used at times to defend against many ( being designed to do so ) and were used in wide sweeping circular motions. Such motion must inevitably include curved cuts, turns, and other arcs rather than just absolutely straight cuts. Turning a blade in mid air means that the blade is necessarily presented at an angle of attack to the air flow. . . . it's not possible to turn a blade without doing so.

Now, the chord ratio of these blades ( as wings ) is very low, typically in the range of 3% to 6%. These low chord ratios mean that the blade will stall at very low angles of attack. Stalling is not ideal as it increases drag, slowing the blade and using more muscular energy. Stalling also drastically reduces lift.

The effect of drastically reduced lift due to a stall is that the blade will not 'steer' its way through a turn. If the blade does not stall the lift which it produces will tend to make it travel in the direction in which the edge is presented. If it stalls it will tend to continue on its path without turning properly flat first rather than edge first.. . . this tendency will have to be overcome by the swordsman using more muscular effort. 

 
For wide sweeping arcs including changes in blade tip altitude and turns of various radii, the action of the swordsman in keeping the blade aligned to the airflow as much as possible will have the effect of making the blade follow the path in which it is directed better. It's a win/win situation as the edge direction tends to align the airflow and make the blade ( or wing )turn as directed.

That's unless the blade stalls, and just slews sideways while slowing down .

It is not possible to deny the fact that the kind of wide bladed swords we are talking about have significant aerodynamic properties at the speeds they can attain, or that they stall at very low angles of attack. Swords are not exempt from the laws of physics as we all know.

Blade undulations are able to increase the stall angle by 30 to 40%, that is a very significant improvement. The decrease in drag and the increase in lift are also helpful. 

The Jet tunnel finned semi gun wooden surfboard

Here's the latest progress on the Jet 7-8:

:

A number three elliptical pintail

Single concave through the nose and mid section, with soft rails. .  a favourite combination

Weathered  planks, no logo

The first resin coat

A tunnel fin question: Is the tunnel a venturi ?

 " In looking at your fin configuration I would assume that a primary function of the "tunnel" is to create speed by funneling the water, compressing and then releasing it. The right angled portion of the fin would appear to be an answer to the tunnel's tendency to force the board to track while it generated speed - so the "wag" of the right angled portion of the fin would be to create a snap out of the turn. On it's own this would create drive coming out of the turn but, with the presence of the speed-and-track-inducing tunnel it helps overcome the tracking tendency and returns the board to an easier to turn and smoother turning board than if the right angled fin existed alone. "

Thank you



Hello J,

Actually the tunnel is designed to work without compression of the water or to keep compression to a minimum.   If you are thinking of the 'venturi' effect it's of no use in surfboard and fin design as compressing the water merely creates drag with no benefits. Constricting water flow  doesn't speed up the  flow rearwards creating thrust as venturi  theorists suppose, instead water  is dragged along with the surfboard. In other words with a constricted flow the water accelerates in the opposite direction to that which is supposed.

Essentially the tunnel fin is a low drag fin which provides lift in the vertical plane as normal fins do as well as in the horizontal plane as winged fins and other 'hydrofoil' fins ( including canted side fins ) do.

I'll be happy to explain how they work in detail.

Regarding the 'tracking' idea tunnels are the 'loosest' fins with the least tendency to track which I've ever ridden. The boomerang fin is not there to prevent tracking, it's there to provide more lateral fin area. Tunnels work well in larger sizes but at the size shown above  ( 8 inch diameter) they need some added fin area in order to get sufficient lateral resistance ( unless one wants to do a controlled 'lala' sideslip ).  At ten inches in diameter I find that a tunnel is fine on its own.

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The seven paths to olo surfboard enlightenment

There are seven paths to the enlightened state of Olo royalty.

1) Buy a board from Roy Stewart ( go straight to heaven )

2) Build a board to one of Roy's designs. ( Roy did his time in the desert making boards with only a couple of simple handtools, and recommends it to hard core pages. . it demonstrates their toughness and shows their willingness to accept pain )

3) Employ an artisan to make one. There is a man in Japan who made a beautiful "island rocket' Roy Stewart design and there are many builders in Australia who could do the same ( a balanced route )

4) Take the principles of pure surfing and apply them to your own designs ( it works )

5) Enlighten your local foam scraper by explaining the principles of pure surfing to him when ordering your next custom foamie ( not for the faint hearted it's the St George option )

6) Talk about it on forums while never doing it. ( This is the easy path but it takes 3,500 years )

7) The priceless gift exchanged for priceless gift option ( known as barter to the vulgar )

SUP design: stability and planshape curve, a question from Dave

 

SUP Design - Constructive Criticism please!

I've attached a PDF of my ( AKU shaper ) design so far, any feedback would be gratefully received.  I'd like the board to be a bit of an all rounder, so I don't mind a bit of compromise as far as flat water performance goes.

Out of interest, what are you thoughts on stability of a narrow tailed SUP if it's got a lot of fin surface area? Do you think the fins would counteract the narrow tail to any degree?

Very nice, almost identical in planshape and volume to my Baron 12 footer. The Baron is only 2.25 thick and is only 27" wide though.

The board will ride waves very well, but don't underfin it !

If you have enough stability for paddling you'll definitely enjoy the surfing characteristics. . . making the rails more parallel will tend to kill those good qualities.

Although I don't currently standup paddle I've been riding very wide longboards with narrow tails for a long time, since way before the SUP revival happened and as you are probably aware I believe in them.

This is how it works regarding stability: When paddling the wide point area of your board will be in the water. When surfing this area will rise out of the water as speed increases, allowing the board to use the narrower tail. This means that with a wide midpoint and a narrower tail you get the advantage of width when you need it ( paddling and taking off ) and the advantage of the narrower tail for control and ease of turning when going faster.

So it's a good idea to increase overall width and reduce the tail width as you have done. If you wanted to increase the stability of your design ( which is probably fine as is ) I'd do one or more of the following three things:

1) Increase the overall width, while maintaining your drawn in tail

2) make the board longer

3) Flatten the tail rocker

I'd also pull the rocker apex forward to the same position as the wide point, this is a foolproof way of matching the planshape and bottom curves, and m,akes sure that the long rail ine is used to best advantage. Having the apex behind the wide point makes the board lose drive, bringing it forward also flattens the tail curve which is good for speed . . the tail's what you are going to be using when going fast.

A big fin will help prevent fishtailing when paddling, and is a great secret weapon when waveriding on surfboards like this as that narrow tail gives precise control over the lift angle of the big powerful fin, a great combination !

I'd better stop before I suggest a big tunnel fin on the tail, even though it would be the icing on the cake

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