How to Mark Fin Placement on a Surfboard

Video Transcript

"ABE TOKE: Hi, welcome to Expert Village, my name is Abe Toke. I'm going to take you through step by step to shape yourself complete surfboard. Now, we're pretty much ready to mark the fins. Generally, there's all different types of fin configurations. Single fin, double fin, tri fin, quad fin, you know, however many pins you want. But this is going to get a tri fin. General rule of thumb, I mean there is no really right or wrong way. You can just go grab your favorite board and maybe measure off of that. Usually the fins start about 11 inches up. So these--the two side fins will be somewhere about 11 inches. So I'll mark that right here on the stringer. And that's the back part of these two pins. You can measure the fin that you're using. You can look at other if you're going to use a fin box like a future system or like a FCS. Then you'll just kinda need to know the length of the fin. They're generally around four and a quarter to four and a half inches, I think. I'm going to mark that right now. So up from my 11 mark, I'll go four and a half up. So I'm going to square this up straight of with the stringer once again to my 11-inch mark, and I'll measure over somewhere around six inches. That number can be more or less depending on the width of your board and where you want the fin to this rail. So generally, anywhere from five and a half to six inches or so is how far out they should be off the stringer. Same goes to this side. So if you put six inches on this side or five and a half on this side it definitely should be the same on this side. Then we'll go up to this other mark we made. That's four and a half inches up or four and a quarter, and do he same thing. Six inches or so is how far out they should be of the stringer. Now what the fins are going to do here is they have a slight camber or toe so the fins aren't straight to each other. They're actually toed in a little bit. Generally, around a quarter inch toe is the rule of thumb. And I just put little dots. You can use the very tip of your pencil and just put a little dot. I'll do a little straight line in between your two marks. Stick the pencil head in your hole and that way you'll butt the thing up, and you can kinda do that to the other side too. It let's you know you're right on the target. So we got the two side fins. The middle fin is pretty simple. Anywhere from, I don't know, two and a half to three and a half inches up or four or whatever, whatever your favorite board says. Now like I said at this point, we got our fins marked out. The board is basically done."