Well i took these 3 fins.
And made thses out of them.
The little twin fins are for my tabou twister 100, they are about 132mm tall.
The powerbox fin is now 16cm.
I chose elliptical tips this time to see if they are less dragy.
Now i just need to go and test them.
I think you actually cut them off a couple of dolphins and glued them into a fin base
Good job..... have you stopped itching yet he he
thats brilliant, let me know how the smaller fins go in your tabou 100! i got the tabou 90 but smashed the nose so shes getting fixed! i have them with 14s and they are awesome!
Cheers Steve
nah i havent had a chance to try any of them yet. been too busy training for the wave nationals.
I've lent the tiny round one and the black base penguin fin to Hoop to test for me since he can actually bust out a few freestyle moves.
I've been using a set of elliptical curve templates by staedler (the pencil making company spelling probably wrong though) to get the nice curves.
Some nice looking fins Bertie - good work - will be interesting to hear how they go!
I made one from last years JP Freetyle fin - pictured here next to the 2010 JP Freestyle fin that came with my 98L JP Freestyle board this year.
Works unbelievably well - sooo much better for freestyle - and not much impact to normal sailing!
I guess the problem with twin fin freestyles is u need to find a pair of fins to cut up.. Is there an evil twin without any fins or can u buy them? why not cut up the standard twister fins? (I dont think tabou seriously expects anyone to sail with unmodified standard fins anyway!)
Alex brought in his fins to have a look today. They look bloody good. I've got a couple to try out.
I think they're going to go well. Will let you know.
Oh yeah, Green Head is looking good for tomorrow.
I had a go of the 1st fin in the line up with the 3 blue fins. Impressed.
Not sure how big it is but the size was pretty spot on. You could get up wind pretty easily and you could still get it to pop out and slide pretty easily. It didn't feel draggy like a lot of hand shaped freestyle fins do.
Over all I think that one is a success. Looking forward to trying out some of the others now.
Nice work.
Well for Alimac23 i took this fin below:
Then made it look like this:
I made another tonight out of this. Its now a weed freestyle. Will post a pic once i've wet rubbed it in the morning.
they look really good, seems like you are a big fan of the maui ultra fin style profile. looks like you are removing a lot of material, how are you doing that whilst maintaining an accurate cross-sectional profile? what tools are you using?
I have a spare fin that i'm looking at making into a supershort freestyle fin, sounds like it will take a lot of time and patience
Here is what the concrete wave now looks like:
its supposed to be a weed freestyle if ya couldnt tell. But i'm not a fan of 45 degree fins.
As to shaping its lots of angle grinder both cutoff wheel and sanding pad. then orbital sander for fine tuning. The old sanding block still get a fair bit of use to clean up the outline and tidy up the leading and trailing edges.
i thought the rake and throwing off thing was more about the trailing edge rake and not the leading edge?
i think i read that somewhere. not sure.
yeah, dunno slfack you could be on the money,
i haven't tried enough different freestyle fins.
i know the guys up this way all use wave fins with lots of rake and don't struggle that much.
next fin on my list is a freestyle pro, i had a look at them a week or so ago, they do look sweet.
i just don't have the time, supply or patience to carve my own fins
i'd like to know where bertie gets all of his fins from,
these things will become an endangered species soon......
the reason for the weed freestyle fin is coz some of the best freestyle spots in WA are much easier to sail with a fin that sheds weed. I have made a few rough ones before for people but think there is a better solution out there.
The trailing edge rake angle is intentionally very close to vertical. I doubt it would catch like a traditional wave fin does when going backwards.
The leading edge progressively increases in rake angle as you get to the tip, for weed shedding.
Squarish and quite thin tip for reduced induced drag.
Fairly fat profile coz FS boards are sailed slow (relatively speaking) and to generate lots of lift at low speeds.
All the fins with the narrow tip outline are to reduce tip surface area to prevent catching whilst spinning and backwards sliding which i can see as a issue at times with a "Spud" shape fin.
All fins were claimed from the bargain bin at windsurfing perth. At present i dont have a powerbox board, so this as an exercise had been about killing time doing the kind of stuff i enjoy most.
I am starting to look for more fins to play with. If you have some damaged twinzer fins(US box) or power box fins where the base is still OK, i'd love to take them off your hands or reshape them for ya. PM me if you have some. Cheers
Weed fins cut down as Freestyle Fins seem to work pretty well. Nearly all of the Freestyle crew in Safety Bay use them (due to heaps of seaweed) and don't seem to have any hassles. Here is a pic of the one Matt uses. It's 13cm deep and he uses it for everything from freestyle to sailing upwind to the islands for a bit of bump and jump.
Here's a sequence of it in action.
Because of the rake they sit even further out of the water sliding backwards. Most guys don't worry very much about how well the fins are finished, actually I'd say most fins are just hacksawed off and given a light sand.
ah yeah, sounds about right. I was thinking of attacking the old fin i got with a flapdisc to remove bulk material then hand sanding to finish. might have to see if i can get my hands on a orbital sander to save a little time. I suppose the tricky thing will be to get the fin profile right.