Garret McNamara at pipeline with Roy Stuart's 13' Ghost

The mighty Ghost 13 at Pipeline with Garrett McNamara, showing the beautifully efficient lines characteristic of  the extreme pintailed 'Future Primitive' designs with their  spherical/elliptical rocker, continuous 50/50 rail section and thin parallel profile.



Photograph by  Ian & Erick Regnard  @ Tungsten: 



tungsten at photoshelter

Parallel profile advantages

The advantages are a thinner board for any given volume which gives a lower centre of gravity ( greatly improving control and feel ) as well as improving flex.





Greater flex occurs when thickness is evenly distributed, and the flex pattern is much better than when flex is confined to a small area in the tail as occurs with tapered profile boards.





With a parallel profile board the rider's feet are always at a constant distance from the bottom of the board, rather than standing facing uphill or downhill in relation to the bottom as with tapered profile boarads. The surface one is standing on is the same shape as the surface which is contacting the water. . . this makes for more intuitive surfing.





The constant rail sections which I use are not required for the benefits of the parallel profile, but do work naturally with the profile.

'Original Sim' 5'6" parallel profile Simmons inspired wooden surfboard . . . blank completed today

At 24" wide and with a fairly parallel tail planshape the 'Original Sim' has a lot of planing area for it's 5'6" length, as all Simmons type boards do.At only an inch and a half thick the board will have the alaia-like sensitivity and low centre of gravity which all parallel profile boards are renowned forRocker wise the board has zero tail rocker and a subtle but pronounced nose lift.The blank is hollow but has quite a lot of 'meat' in the rail blocking and deck planking to allow some freedom for the shaper.

Parallel profile surfboard construction frame width.

Answer to a question regarding the use of 3mm wide frames in the parallel profile surfboard construction system:3mm or 4mm is thinner than I'd use unless the frame junctions are tied with vertical struts, as it will reduce the glue contact area at the frame junctions by 80 to 90 percent compared with 10mm frames. Three millimetre frames won't provide sufficient glue contact area with the bottom panel either, unless one doubles the number of frames, but then the problem will be that even a slight 3mm 'creep' of the bottom panel during laminating will remove all the glue from the frames thus ruining the structure. With 10mm frames or 6mm frames there's sufficient margin that the panel can move a bit.People often assume that the parallel profile system can be 'improved' and of course tweaks and changes do occur all the time, but there is a reason for every aspect of our parallel profile designs, nothing is there arbitrarily. Changes shold ideally only be made once one understands the system completely, and there's a lot more to understanding it than most people suppose. It might look simple, but all the components are organically interrelated.So to sum up if you want to use 3mm frames then 'peg' the frame junctions with vertical struts, fillet the first frame panel on to the deck ( or the bottom if using a female mould) and apply a wide band of glue to the last panel to go on so that the panel can creep a bit without making the joint dry.If using dense timber and wanting to keep the mass low, the rail blocks should be beveled in cross section to conform more closely to the rail shape, the rail blocks must have at least half an inch or 12mm of contact ( across the blocks ) but that leaves some room for reduction compared with unbeveled blocks with an inch or more of contact in the middle glue joint.We are fortunate having paulownia as more often than not we increase the scantlings beyond the minimum required in order to give the boards sufficient mass, the resolute salmon 12 footer built recently is an example. Using our standard medium construction the board would have weighed 25 pounds, but this would have reduced drive and control too much compared with the original 50 pounder so we beefed the construction up to get a weight of 37 pounds.

flexibility in parallel profile perimeter stringered wooden surfboards

flexibility in parallel profile perimeter stringered wooden surfboards