Reverse Enginering

Throwing this one out there as a parallel to Teatrees "question"
Just had a new shortie shaped after about five years of solid stand up.
I am a child of the sixties and as such grew up surfing singles, graduated to twinnies in my late teens and then spent most of my adult life surfing thrusters. Like many I was baffled by the mid nineties, early noughties infatuation with hyper rockered potato chips and was an early adopter of the fish...surf what you like ethos that emerged almost as a reaction to the above.
Having spent some time in my teens canoeing stand up paddle always seemed like a logical fit, especially when arthritis kicked my arse in both knees and toes as a result of years of abuse prone surfing (dragging my back foot and hyper extension of toes, damaging medial meniscus of knee joint after numerous in the tube beat downs and general re entry land failures.)
To cut a long story short, time for a new surfboard.
After five or six years of stand up I am currently loving the best board I have ridden. At some point I will put up a review in the equipment section but for the moment lets just say its a custom, was designed by a local long boarding legend on the basis of his observations on the hydrodynamic qualities of the cuttlefish. This board is crazy good and as far as I am concerned is the answer to all of the questions I have ever asked about the short board long board performance potential of SUPs
The stand up version is the end result of three boards worth of design evolution and is almost the opposite to the drop rail designs I favoured in my first four or five customs. If you like I can throw up videos of each of the three "cuttlefish" inspired designs.
The short board is just a shrunken version of the SUP which is 7.2. I asked Fordy to come up with a shape that mirrored my SUP that didn't lose a heap of flotation in the conversion. The 5.11 baby cuttle is the end result...paddles like a mini mal surfs like a 5.11.
The following pics show the baby cuttle and I can say with a hundred percent conviction that the board is nothing short of insane.
I have ridden it solidly for the last five weeks in the points, reefs and beachies of Northern NSW and of my old haunts at home in Vicco.
Its better than good.....its faaaarken nuts.....havent ridden the SUP version in over a month.
The SUPs in the shed waiting for the summer crowds to arrive...in the meantime...I'm surfin!!!




















Cuttle mark One / 7.8 (rails and concave not quite right)

Nice looking board's

Nice board the 7'2. Reminds me of my old 8'6 Luke Egan Magic Carpet.

Loving the Oils and Hunters sound tracks...ah the memories

Thanks all
Just got back from a paddle/surf at my local
Misjudged the size after my low tide morning surf check so decided to bust out the stand up.
Rather than the one foot beachie I was expecting the incoming brought some swell with it and it was a respectable three to four.
The whole time I was in the water I was wishing I was on my shortie....ah well just gotta hope the body hangs in long enough for me to enjoy my second grommethood!!
To answer some questions. I recon I am around 5.11 and weigh in somewhere around 90 kegs. The stand up is 7.2 by 28.3/4 by around 3.3/4 through the middle and around 108 litres.
The beauty of this design is that you can wrap a heap of beef over the top of the concave but at the same time have a really fine rail because of the chine on the underside.
Its very similar in concept to some of the stuff that Blane Chambers has done but the old bloke/legend who designed it is not a paddler and has been incorporating the "cuttlefish' elements into his longboards for the past five or six years.
Anyway, looking forward to a surf on the shortie tomorrow...and in case you are wondering, I gripped the shortie up just like my SUP cos I'm over wax...and cos it messes with peoples heads.
Cheers
Sparx

Hi Mr. Sparx I hate you. R U sleeping with the shorty or your missus at the mo? Anyone that is 65 + years old like you has no right to surf or SUP like you do. Didn't you know tanning machines are illegal in Victoria? I asked Mr.DJ or Mr. PT at a Demo a couple of weeks ago if you had passed on or something as I was extolling the virtues of custom boards, then you go and do something like this. Does " this " Fordy even know that you are showing his boards on a SUP forum? Go on tell everyone how much they cost!! I dare you!!!! Who wants to buy quality products cheaply anyway? F_ off into the short boarders forum and come back when you've grown up. You're as bad as them stuck up Queenslanders and New South Welshmen dropping into forums, making comments. What would you know you're a Victorian and any way and you're showing material from Tallows and Yamba/ Spooky's probably. Who's the guy surfing in the videos anyway? He looks a bit like you but we all know that you take your bat and ball and go home (Shorty and SUP) if there's more than two out at your local break because it's so far from Melbourne. My sister got a place near yours so I'm gunna send her around to fix you up, I'LL GET HER TO DROP IN ON YOU WHENEVER YOU TAKE OFF. Apologise to Fordy for helping him develop those abberations, and then to the rest of us at SEABREEZE that had to keep on watching those vids time after time after time because we all know Victorians cant' Surf, SUP or Shape. I bet you I get lots of when you surf in NSW. Kind regards Mr Sparx. BTW F'n Bitchen post. Word Boss You still da man!! I like that you left me on my Wallenius Short board in there. Are your son and you interchanging Shortys to Sup at that point in the first vid?

Awesome surfing in vid 3 mate you & that board just look in total synch.

Love the Oils & Hunters but surfing to 'Rough Rider' from The British Beat was really cool as well.

Thanks again...jeez where to start
Kami, I run the FCS PC 7's on my standup. The image below is of the setup on the mini cuttle which comes as a set. Started with the same set on the SUP but found it too loose so had to buy another pair of PC 7's and run with four fins all the same size. The trailing edge of the rear fin on the SUP is eight inches from the tail. I have used the same fin placement on all of the cuttlefish designs...and yes if you look closely in one of the photos above, the dog does indeed look like one of the Ewoks from Star Wars!

Chrisrum. Definitely not the Mornington Peninsula...but pretty much as close as you can get without actually being there
The design elements of the cuttlefish...good question. Wish I could get Scooter (we'll call him that cos thats what we call him) to explain it to you the same way he described it to me but that would take about one hundred cups of tea on the front deck, numerous instructional sessions with a slide rule and the production of hundreds...literally... of marine ply rail templates.
The best I can do is show you a couple of photos of cross sectioned cuttle bones I picked up off the beach this morning
These are two different cuttle bones with one somewhat larger than the other. In the first pic you can see the way the volume of the cuttle rolls over the top of the concave through the bottom. however because of the chine on the outside of the concave the rail is a very pinched fifty fifty style rail.

The second pic of the smaller cuttle probably illustrates this even better. As well as the low volume rail you can also see that there is a very definite edge coming off the outside of the concave. As was explained to me by the guru this means that you can make a very wide board surf a lot narrower because if the concave is doing its thing and generating lift then you are in effect initially turning off the outside edge of the concave as opposed to having to lay the board up on a rail...that comes later.
For big assed SUPs this is a way of capturing that short board feel and yet maintaining both volume and width without compromising manoeuvrability

Amongst the hundreds of plywood rail templates I was shown...a good number of which ended up under Fordies windscreen wipers every time he stopped his car long enough to be apprehended by Scooter (even at the local supermarket...I kid you not) was a rather elaborate flip chart affair that matched volume, thickness to rail size. By means of some slide rule voodoo he'd actually come up with a formula by which you could have boards of varying thickness and width and yet by calculating when to start running the chine off the concave you would always have the same low volume rail profile. In other words a twelve foot tanker, thirty two inches wide and five inches thick through the middle would have the same rail profile as my seven two.
Phew...design rant just about over. As far as the edge through the tail, that's just a preference. I have always had boards shaped with hard edges through the back eighth. As a short boarder I haunted some slabby lefts and was of the opinion that the hard edge through the tail gave me a little more holding power in critical sections as opposed to softer edges which tended to release eg slide out.
Done and dusted...God bless eccentric surfing geniuses...every towns got em
Cheers
Sparx

Ha Ha
The house I was living in at the time was littered with cross sectioned cuttle bones from numerous impromptu design raves over a cuppa.
Scooter had a theory after much cross sectioning and observation, immature cuttle...small concave, mid size cuttle...deep concave, big old croc cuttle and the concave actually becomes rolled v or more hull like. His reasoning was that by the time the cuttle reached maturity it was the alpha predator on the cuttle scene and didnt need the manoeuvrability afforded by deep concave. It was all about speed and what better way to generate that than through rolled v or a hull.
My shaper, Simon Forward or Fordy as he is known was as bemused as I was. Scooter rode shotgun in the shaping bay on the last one...he was that keen to make sure all the design elements and nuances in his head made it into the board...total gyrogearloose.
Cheers
Sparx