Thursday, March 12, 2009

My Board Design Details

Below is the Bill Foote designed 14 ft race board. This is a board everyone who tries it, loves it. Including Stoneaxe, who participated in the Kenalu Raceboard Showcase. This is Rand's board from the standupzone. He had this one built after one demo on a similar board. Rand's prior boards were the XP Vortice, and several custom SIC race boards. So it was high praise coming from a guy with that extensive quiver history, to say he had to have this Foote board. That was my first clue to go with a windsurf rocker. Foote is an old windsurf board builder, so I assumed the rocker had some windsurf knowledge in it.


Another photo of the Foote, in process of being built.


My template was copied from this photo. This is the new F-14 production board. Considered one of the hot new fast boards for the coming racing season. It was very easy to print this photo, determine the scale, then take dimensions right off the photo. I wanted to use the F-14 template instead of Foote's wide tail template, but still wanted the clean release square tail, so my tail is square, but only a few inches wide at the back. It was my belief the narrow tail would make my board faster in non planing conditions, than Foote's wide tail.


My rocker was created by measuring a windsurfer. The windsurfer I measured was shorter than 14ft, so I had to project that rocker out farther to see where it ended up. Once I had that info, I compared it to this standard blank available from American Blanks. The rockers matched from mid point back. The nose rocker on the windsurfer was way more. Therefore I added 2" of nose rocker to this blank. Width was reduced to match what the top production race boards are doing. Between 26 1/2 and 27 wide.

Next I looked into prone paddleboard rockers to see how flat they were. These are the boards made for California racing. They use 1 1/2" of tail rocker. I didn't want to go that flat, because my board was designed for swell chasing. This just confirmed I was where I wanted to be with 2" of total tail rocker from the mid point (7 ft up).



This is how I created it. I'm stoked it turned out fast as hell.

4 comments:

csx355 said...

Hi Dwight - thats a hell of a project and it has made a great story board - along with Stoneaxe's 'You dont know what you are missing' article it almost makes me want to get a downwinder!! Steve

Anonymous said...

That's a great mix of design influences there. I hate seeing such a newb as Stoneaxe quoted though..:). My distance/downwind experience is all so new about the only thing my opinion should count for is initial stability. I was very pleasantly surprised by how stable both the Foote and the F-14 are with a slight edge going to the Foote.

As for enthusiasm on downwinders...you don't know what you're missing....:). Get out and try one Steve. The ones I did on Maui were close to being as much fun as surfing and those were just small swells. I can't wait to try it in some bigger stuff.

srfnff said...

Super sweet! Nice work!!

Sailor said...

you mean that the nose rocker of the f14 is now 8 1/2" and the tail rocker is 2"