The rabbitsfoot project is fascinating to me because there is no book. In fact, there are no rules for friction free surfing — sure, a book of sorts is slowly being written, but it’s still the wild west as far as I’m concerned.
Trevor Gordon and I nailed down a lot of basic elements that make the rabbitsfoot work, but we wanted to get a little weird and set aside a week to make four boards in one batch that expand different design elements that seemed to be working in previous boards — see what we could learn by getting a little weird with them. Some of the boards in the video have fully boxed rails with hard edge nose to tail; some are softer; and some you can see have squared off outlines, with more chimed contours.
One is only about 1 7/8″ thick with a concave deck, though the one that was the clear winner was by far the hardest to shape and glass. Such is life!
This most recent iteration blew the doors off of previous rabbitsfoot models, as well as the other three in the group. Now it will serve as the baseline for further exploration.
It has a modified toe side rail, with an added spine that fades off about 12 inches from the tail. In effect, you get grip and release right about where your back foot is so you can turn on and off the grip with a little more precision. There were plenty of other details like rail shape, rocker, contour depth and deck shape gained from these boards, but the changes to the toe side rail were the most obviously game-changing.
If I have any advise to offer anyone who’s playing around with friction free design, it would be to go balls to the wall and get as awkward and weird as you want — then make sure you’re paying attention to what the boards are telling you; it’ll inform your next move, and hopefully help write the book on this new world of design.
