OTHER DIMENSIONS
A JOURNEY THROUGH PERFECT RIGHTS AND DISPARATE BOARD THEORIES WITH ALEX KNOST, ELLIS ERICSON, ANDREW DOHENY AND SHYAMA BUTTONSHAW DURING THE FILMING OF "HANDMADE II"
Surfboard design is shit science. Always has been. Sure, there are myriad ways a shaper can alter a blank to intentionally affect the way a finished board rides, but it’s a game of trial and error, eyeballing and improvising, infinite variables and back-of-the-napkin math. Sometimes a shaper can’t reproduce a magic board because there’s an imperceptible difference in the blank, dooming any attempt before it even starts. Other times it’s because someone spilled beer on the napkin that had all the useful math on it.
It’s at this strange intersection of art and engineering where we find every single surfboard design theory. To the untrained eye, some of these ideas may look great on the rack of a surf shop but end up pushing water on a wave. Others may look batshit crazy yet end up having unexpected hydrodynamic merits. Some just look like the result of a temper tantrum.
“This one time, I had a board that was sticking so bad, so I just el bowed all these little divots into the bottom, from the nose all the way down to the concave,” explained Alex Knost, while perched in a tree overlooking a perfect right-hander in Indonesia. “And it worked. It loosened up the board and it turned really nice after that.”
Knost, a flamboyant log-and-alt-board icon who’s been building his own surfcraft for over a decade, was talking about something many shapers call “The Golf Ball Theory”. The theory, as you probably guessed, posits that surfboards can travel more quickly through the water (as golf balls do through air) when you have dimples to disrupt the flow of water along the board’s planing surface. According to Knost, the turbulence the dimples created on his sticky board stopped it from tracking in too straight a line, allowing him to more easily transition from rail to rail. Voila! Problem solved, and with a shit-science twist, thanks to Knost’s probably-sore elbow.
Knost shared his golf ball story at what you might call a shit science summit, both because he was surrounded by likeminded foam-and-fiberglass researchers, and because we were physically at
