RealSurf Surfers' Forum

Definitely make a McCoy go better. You can use it to cut lettuce without it going brown too.

How did you test them - just stick them on a board and surf?

And why did you put it in backwards?

ctd wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:39 pm

How did you test them - just stick them on a board and surf?

I surfed them myself, but that is only good for basic strength testing. I don't surf well enough to be quite certain which fin is better than another, if both fins are good fins. It turns out that none of the fins I surfed myself were actually duds, not surprising considering that I started with well proven designs, and then made them better. I can tell if there is nothing much wrong with a fin if I surf it, but I cannot tell if it is a whole lot better than a good fin.

I mucked around with copying other fins by making silicone moulds, then filling them with resin, and I snapped off a good number of them myself. I was almost getting the hang of finless surfing in the process...

Once I was able to make fins that don't snap in a hurry, I started to hand them on to better surfers to try them out, and they like the fins a lot.

The main 'test pilot' has been and still is 'wrcsixeight' on Swaylocks. He has been surfing the same 2 self made hollow wooden boards for many years, including self-made fins and bought fins, and he is able to tell exactly what kind of fin is in his board and how it performs in what part of the wave. He is a skilled craftsman and was able to repair my fins when they broke often in the early days of testing. He was pretty much blown away by how much better the fins perform compared to traditional raked fins, and has spent many hours repairing the fins, usually because the tab for the screw plate snapped off, or the roll pin broke off the fin tab. None of the fins ever snapped off while he was surfing them. A lot of the development process and surf-testing has been described in https://www.swaylocks.com/forums/3d-pri ... board-fins , but much more was and is happening in email conversations.