Flat-To-Round-To-Vee-To-Flat Miniguns




Hi PG,

The Displacementia blog has been making me think back to a long series of 7'9"x19"x3" miniguns that I built between 1980 and 2000.

They had belly right in the middle of the board. Under the flip nose was flat so as to track straight while paddling in and taking steep drops. The middle four feet had 1/8" round bottom that blended into 1/8" vee which peaked at a tiny single fin, and then became flat again under the kicked up pintail. Such water displacement configuration was borrowed from similar designs ridden at Oahu's Sunset Beach in the late seventies. The slightly round bottom accompanied radius rocker through the mid section. Nose kick was elliptical and tail kick was parabolic. Rails were thick and round 70/30 all the way. No tuck edges. Outlines featured a basic pointy nose, wide point 6" forward, and a pulled in Brewer pintail from a bootleg copy of an actual Pipeliner template.

This design allowed a 7" fin to hold with sufficient tenacity to make it through 8' tubes along Westward Beach at south Zuma, which, because of its deep approximate submarine canyon, was often comparable to the Banzai Pipeline, minus deadly reef.

The round bottom fading into vee prevented these boards from getting stuck on one track, allowed more choice of trim angles, smoothed out chop, and increased lateral traction on steep faces. The game was to utilize the hull to eliminate fin area. Often on small days the fin was left on the beach for hot curl riding.

I suppose 1/8" is not a lot of belly, however results compared to flat bottom were night and day.

I hope this reminiscence of minimal yet fanatical dispacementia is of interest to your followers.

Check out the super 8 film from the wayback files. It sure was a fun era!

Cheerio,

Max
Suicidal Surfer from Meat Post on Vimeo.

1 comment:

Madafact said...

holy shit thats like a months worth of beatings :0