Hi everyone,
Just a few pics of my new 142 Mutant.

15mm thick plastic surfboard rails
2.5mm thin flexible glass tips
PVC core for lighter weight
Assymetric rocker, more nose lift than tail lift
single concave bottom
Trifins nose and tail

Just a great board to go mucking around on and catch waves and carve them up.

boardbumps

If you don't mind, you've made it yourself?

Looks like a high quality build!

Being a mutant board builder myself i'm interested to know how it goes.

It seems quite rectangular for a wave orientated board. Also a very think center section.

What is the rocker at the front compared to the back?
Do you have options to offset the bindings? or are they center set?

Yes interesting design..I did notice the thickness in the middle. What flex did you build in?

Yeh let us knows how it goes...really nice finish mate, quality job.

I thought the definition of mutant was non-symmetrical twintip? It looks symmetrical to me...

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mattyjee said...
I thought the definition of mutant was non-symmetrical twintip? It looks symmetrical to me...

You making up your own definitions now?

mutants can be anything from almost tt to almost SB.

This one is at the TT end of the scale. infact if it wasn't for the asymetrical rocker it could be a TT.

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eppo said...

mattyjee said...
I thought the definition of mutant was non-symmetrical twintip? It looks symmetrical to me...

You making up your own definitions now?

What then is the definition of a mutant?
Surely part TT part directional. ???
By pure coincidence we had one of these "SurfShapes" in today looking for fins.
I didn't measure strap placement but it looked like a symmetrical TT with holes for 3 fins at both ends? It had very little rocker but a very pronounced thickness tapering from very thick centre to very thin tips.
Never seen one before & sent the owner off (very happily) with a set of 4 x standard 2nd hand TT fins.
If he comes back ill check the stance.

@ Eppo. Not certain but it was not obvious that there was more rocker one emd than the other?
The flex was about average for a freeride TT but exaggerated towards the thin tips. I suspect there was no inbuilt variation - just relying on the variable thickness. But again not at all familiar with the brand or the build.

Guys,
have a look at my profile.

I got home late last night the boys were at Tae Kwon Do and that finishes at 7.30pm. we live half our out of town.Had some good wind yesterday arvo 18 to 27kts. Bit gusty prefrontal wind.

This design is actually about 5yrs old.

I stopped kiting then after a good friend decided that life was not worth staying around for.
SUP was starting to take over then anyway, you only have so much time.

I started kiting again in 2012 as we have just had a sensational season over here.

The board has plastic surfboard shape rails thats why the rails and blank are 15mm thick. The blank is that thick for a bit of float and I can only get that light weight (2.6kg board, I know its a bit heavy) with PVC foam.

And yes I made it.

I started kiting in 99 using a PeterLyn 9mtr Water Foil.
Then Naish came along with the AR3, what a relief water starts.
Thats when the explosion in kiting happened.

The board has a symmetrical centered stance 360mm apart with 45mm of duck. I tried rear set straps but didn't like them, the nose was too hard to hold in. The object of kiting is to have fun, a centered stance gives me that. It can be set up for goofy or how it is now as a natural stance.

The core is tappered from 15mm to 1mm, thicker in the centre to accomodate tnuts, this does stiffen the centre up a bit but you have to be able to attach the straps. The foam ends around 200mm from the tips and then the glass starts for flex. I like a stiffer centre anyway for more drive on waves and variable flex and twist for turns. Single screws for the fins so as not to change the rocker and also allows smaller changes of flex around the fins.

Its a simple vacuum construction with glass outers. The bottom is the mould finish and the top is a fabric with glass over then a non skid peel ply so no sanding. Just fine tune the plan and shape the rails.

The rocker is 25mm nose with a 540mm flat section then 18mm tail. the rocker has no late lift at all in the tips, I don't want the drag.

The fins are hand made standard glass panel but with epoxy resin to give the G10 look. I usually mould them to save on materials. The outer fins on the tail are 45mm the centre is 35mm. The outer fins on the nose are 40mm and the centre fin is 30mm. I have found this is the best allround combo for hold and drag.

Surfing the board is great in hollow sucky waves or good fast waves but it hates fat waves. Surfboards are better in fat waves but surfboards have deep fins so water depth can be a problem. Although really don't have flat water around here only surf.

I like the challenge of Mutant design but also I have a chronic bad back from a surfing accident from in my youth and twisting for toe is a pain ala surfboards.

boardbumps

Nice build, Boardbumps. I have a Shinn Wave that's getting a bit old



I'm considering building one in foam/fibreglass based on this plan shape but adding surfboard style rails and bottom shape ie V tail, concave centre and a bit more tail lift than the Shinn.

The Shinn needs better rail to rail transition.

Any suggestions out there?

hey Graeme,

Have you tried the cardboard wave?, and if so what did you not like about it?

I have read a lot about the wave and it seems to tick most of the boxes for me. I just need to demo one now.

a hawaiian shirt with super narrow stance

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bennie said...
hey Graeme,

Have you tried the cardboard wave?, and if so what did you not like about it?

I have read a lot about the wave and it seems to tick most of the boxes for me. I just need to demo one now.

Haven't been able to find a CB Wave locally to demo. You're right, they're getting good reviews. I like the wide tail on the Shinn since it planes early. I've noticed that no one is putting surfboard style bottoms on mutants. They're usually flat or have a few channels which is not what I want. A bit of rocker and some V hopefully will loosen up the turns on a wave face. I often find that the rail grabs turning down the face of a wave on my backhand.

Time to break out the plane and mess up the garage.

yep build one if you have the skill. far more saticfaction sherding on something you have built yourself!

just a thought , but what advantage do you see in setting 3 fins almost parallel across board.? how well does it work.? does the centre fin interfere with water flow for heelside fin? or just increase grip.? nice board but.

On the Shinn I have put two 40mm Underground fins up front to make it easy to jump to toeside. On the back I have a 50mm Shinn fin on the heelside rail and massive 100mm fins in the centre and toeside rail. The big toeside fin helps a lot in forehand bottom turns.

It's worth playing around with fin set up to get what you want out of the board.

yeah. i started off with bigger fins and i'm systematically getting smaller and smaller fins. I like the slidy feel.

just back from Tae Kwon do again and dinner is finished. A quick one as we have guests.

The pics that I have shown you are of the board that I am riding now. It is an old design but I reckon it is still out in front as far as Mutants go.

I think a mature mutant design is more like a twin tip than a surfboard.

The Five things that I think define a mature Mutant design are:

twin tip planshape

board length around140cm

assymetric rocker

surfboard rails

flex in the ends.

Remember a surfboard has flex and a lot of the design thought is being put into how and where and how much a surfboard flexes, with a polyester (PU/PE) surfboard as the base line.

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boardbumps said...
just back from Tae Kwon do again and dinner is finished. A quick one as we have guests.

The pics that I have shown you are of the board that I am riding now. It is an old design but I reckon it is still out in front as far as Mutants go.

I think a mature mutant design is more like a twin tip than a surfboard.

The Five things that I think define a mature Mutant design are:

twin tip planshape

board length around140cm

assymetric rocker

surfboard rails

flex in the ends.

Remember a surfboard has flex and a lot of the design thought is being put into how and where and how much a surfboard flexes, with a polyester (PU/PE) surfboard as the base line.

Thats pretty bold stating your mutant is better than most mutants.

Your mutant is almost a TT. Obviously you want mainly TT riding with a little better wave performance. The more wave performance you want the more sb orientated you need to go.

There are some pretty good mutants out there today. The mako is awesome but its stiff doesn't have surfboard rails or asymetric rocker!....but it has insane concave.

My board is flexible offset footpads asymetric rocker and it also is awesome.

Hi Guys,
just back from the earlyand had breaky and coffee.

The three fins across allow me to use shallower fins for low tide sand banks, mostly beachies to sail on around here.
Our flat water spot is a creek about 20ft wide and at low tide you get the flatest water for speed runs but it is only ankle deep with a couple of holes to turn in.

I swapped fins around for some time before settling on three fins across. the centre is set closer to the tip. It does not interfere with the other fins and does not feel slower. When I had the same size fins across the board felt really sluggish. I removed the centre fin and the board came alive but then was letting go in heavy chop and not holding on waves.

I added the smaller centre fin and the board felt just the same as with 2x45cm but was so much easier to hold in heavy outside chop and just gripped on the wave face.

The wide ends allow you to have three fins across. I like the wide tail with ultra thin edges for really good edge pop, this also translates to great holding power for waves. The wide ends also allow earlier planing and a bit more recovery time from high jump landings. The end flex really softens landings although the thicker stiffer middle rail section can be a bit of a jar on the knees.

There has to be a trade off somewhere, a thick 15mm surfboard rail in the middle gives a much smoother forgiving ride on waves with easier thansitions.

I have in my museum boards from 1999 thru to 2008 when I stopped kiting.
The earliest boards are around 7ft foam sandwhich for learning on down to 6'3 for wave riding. Some really early twintips wake style with wrapped rails. Early step rail twintips and step rail mutants.
I think it was Naish that coined the term Mutant.
We then went to capped rails like snow boards (todays standard build). I even have some early balsa cores that I mucked around with.

I really like the twintip style mutant, very versatile. You can just blast around doing wake style or go carve up waves. The short length of TT style allows really short carving arcs on waves with no swing weight.

I have a smaller 132 but I find that its a bit short for waves. When you want to carve around a whitewater section to get to the pocket again it just does not have the length of arc I want.

Rocker is important, I use a three stage rocker. This is end lift with a straight mid section. The straight mid section gives you plenty of front foot glyde and longer arcs when you need it.

As for whether my board is a TT with a bit of wave control. I think you have misunderstood me.

I mostly only kite in the waves and wanted a surfing board that allows me to have the versatility of a good TT. So to my mind after much trial and error testing shapes over quite a few years this is the design I came up with, more than several years ago.

A good surfing board that looks like a Twin Tip!

A Mutant by definition.

Gotta keep an open mind or nothing will improve.

The concave that I use is around 6mm deep depending on the width of the board. I use a pressure plate to form the concave in the bottom.

I have been using concaves in my surfboards from the late 60's. It took a couple of years to put concave in my TT designs. But once I added concave there was no going back to flat bottoms. The hold for tracking in a straight line is just so much better. This can be a problem for wave riding as we found out for surfboards, too much causes tracking and actually makes for a stiffer ride not looser.

The best way to "loosen " up a board is to make the board shorter. This reduces the arc of a turn.

Its great to see all the old super short surfboard designs around today. When I was 18 I was riding a 5'4 surfboard.
All of Australia was.
Then Rolf Arness won the Bells contest down at Johanna on a 7'6 mini gun and board lengths went 7'6 overnight. It's taken nearly 40 years to get back to sub 6'0.

On the fins again, I think that the outside fins need a bit more end plate effect. The need to be moved forward slightly.

I was checking the flow off the ends the other day at the creek at low tide with super smooth flat water. Having a look at the flow at different heeling angles. There was some heavy flow sepparation at a really high angle of heel when pushing for every inch of upwind gain. It was only the high side fin out of the water and when this happened the speed dropped off. As soon as I settled the board to a flatter heel angle the flow smoothed out the noise stopped the speed increased and I went up wind higher.

Gotta take the youngest to a sleep over.
See Ya

^^^^


Thanks for the insight. It is very informative and I recon my next project is an Mutant with 3 fins:)

Just got a new bamboo batch today...Let the board games begin!

If may I ask, this rails are epoxy or ABS or else? I've found a major difficulty to source some ABS plastic in WA.

Also, the topsheet plastic (bottom), is it UHMW? Did you print it via sublimation?

You've mentioned hand made fins, what do you mean "standard glass panel"? How much sanding is involved in this?

Sorry for all this questions:)

Hi Dean,
The rails are foamed or airated PVC. The sheet has a structure somewhat like PU surfboard foam. Good resin bonding to the plastic. To get the colour (the plastic is white) I taped out and painted the rails with pigmented resin, like a pinline.

I have found that Syntactic foam is really good as well, just a bit messy.

You can make this foam yourself!

It is epoxy resin with filled with Qcells.

The secret to give this foam tensile strength is to get some surfboard rovings or off cut eglass and cut the glass into small fibre lengths of not less than 1mm and not over 3mm.

Use a slow hardner with your epoxy mix for syntactic foam, gives you plenty of play time, especially as its summer.

The boards width is 41cm and the ends are around but not less than 30cm. I weigh 95kg.

I pointed out earlier that the board is covered with "glass outers".

The logo has taken more than a few years for me to design. I print this out on acid free tissue paper with an Epson A4 printer using pigmented inks.

I use a stainless steel base plate and layup glass onto this then the logo and then cover it with the silver glass.
The silver glass is an aluminised eglass for cosmetics.
I let this set off for a couple of hours and then vacuum the preshaped core and the rest of the reinforcements.

The next day I take everthing out of the bag and place the board onto a rocker retaining jig and do the glass deck cosmetics. Finally finishing off with a peel ply for a non skid finish so that I don't have to sand or paint a gloss. I leave this over night to cure.

The deck logo is another little trick. I print out onto standard A4 printer paper my logo. I then spray a light coating of Air dry white Acrylac paint ( surfboard protec but white) this brings out the logo against the background colour. The resin wets out the paper really well.

The fins are made from 6oz surfboard glass with clear epoxy resin for that G10 look. 3 layers of 6oz glas is approx 1mm thick. I cut them out with a Jigsaw using a Rif blade ( carbide grit instead of teeth). The fins are so small that I use a 10mm angle grinder with a 80 grt disc and then wet dry.
I have a piece of plastic that is a similar shape to the foiled fin and screw the fin to this jig and then clamp the plastic.
Foiling is easier this way.

I prefer to use a coarse thread for strength for the quarter inch thick locating screw, witworth or UNC. I tap this out myself. I use small brass swages for the locating pins and glue them in. I like to use a single screw.

A good trick here is to use 5minute araldite to lock the screw.
5min Araldite never sets up hard so you can break the bond easily but the screws stay tight.

Go for it