I'm pretty sure you can buy the tops. Chinook used to make them, i remember seeing them in a mag a few years back

Beware. It is not as easy as first thought. It takes alot of pacience and time to make a working fin, by that I mean even shape on both sides of the fin, nice profile, etc. I tried to make a new freestyle fin once. Not one of those people with the patience and ended up with a working but slow to plane and easy to slide out fin. So what i am saying is "It's not easy"

555 said...


.... The part I'm least confident in at the moment is making the fin heads.

Can you use the Select 'conversion' bases? I saw them in a shop and wondered if you could use them. I think you would just need to make the base of your fin to suit, which I think is just a flat surface.

The wave fin is a US box, but the freestyle fin will be powerbox. Making a mold off an existing fin had occurred to me, it's more the strength of joining the foil to the head, and getting it 'square' that I'm a little uncertain of at this point.

I have a plan to aid with the symmetry of the fins - by laminating multiple thin layers of timber under some serious vacuum I will get a very clear 'guide' from the glue lines. It should also stiffen the whole thing up (hopefully!). A profile gauge, and some molding putty will also help.

It's a relatively small and cheap project, so if it takes a few goes to learn enough tricks to make a good one, it's not really a problem. There are plenty of 'proper' foil coordinates available online, so shaping a foil that works shouldn't be too hard.

I'll pester Decrepit and see if he has any pearls of wisdom to share - thanks Grumps.

Ian K said...

Wet Willy said...

So if you're looking for an asymmetrical (sp?) fin for those specialized wavesailing scenarios...homemade might be the way to go..? Cos getting one perfectly even on both sides is gonna be a bugger...

And once you've gone down the asymmetric path (my spell checker says 2 ms) - 90 degrees becomes just a random angle. Err one way for more speed for jumping, the other for super locked in bottom turns.

Ooh, spooky...