A great website to go to for calculating the right amount of volume for your next board is If you’re going to be looking for a board in a physical shop, you can look for certain design characteristics to determine which board you should choose. The bigger you are, the more volume you want, and inversely, the smaller you are, the less volume you’ll need. The measurements you’ll want to look for for your first board will vary depending on your weight and height. A 7’0”, with the same measurements as a smaller board, isn’t going to feel any different or be any easier for a beginner to learn on. Not adding these two volumes to the equation really made my extra foot of volume useless. My mistake was getting a board that still had the thickness and width of a smaller board. The two other types of board volume are thickness and width. But there are more types of volume than length – and this is where I went wrong. ![]() In my case, I thought I was doing this by getting a 7’0”, which has a foot more volume than the length of a shortboard I could be using. As a beginner, you have the option of getting the feel of a shortboard while having enough stability to learn on. If not, no worries, there’s another option: more volume. If you can get your hands on a second hand longboard, great you might get lucky and find something for $200 that’ll last until you can step down to a smaller board. As longboards can be expensive new, anywhere from $600 to well over $1000, it just wouldn’t make sense to drop this kind of money if you’re final goal is to shortboard. Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to get a longboard for your first board. I was able to see a realistic path of what I could do to progress down to a being able to do the tricks I’d set out to do when I’d started. I wasn’t frustrated anymore, and I could get down the basics. When I finally tried a longboard with more volume, I felt like I was finally able to enjoy what I was doing. I spent a whole year riding the wrong board and being incredibly frustrated. I wanted to shortboard right away and start doing all the crazy acrobatic tricks from the surf videos that inspired me. As a beginner, you won’t have the particular muscles needed to sustain a decent length of surfing and so having more volume will make catching waves that much easier, and will inevitably make your introduction into surfing a lot more fun. We have made some assumptions about the average size and shape of various surfboard styles, and used this to categorise the formula into the three surfboard shapes available in the calculator.If you’re a beginner, you want to have more volume. The logic is derived from comparing a large amount of data of known surfboard dimensions and volumes, and then building a formula based on this data. The calculator takes a much more simple approach to provide an approximate value. There are alternate methods such as measuring the weight required to completely submerse the board, but this becomes tricky with Soft Top Surfboards and the variable boyancy. dunk your surfboard into a giant bathtub then measure how much is spilled onto the floor! Even the simple submersion method is still quite complex, as you need to submerge the surfboard into a vessel of water with a known quantity, and then measure how much is dispersed. To accurately measure the volume of a surfboard you need to use software to measure it from the CAD drawings or use a submersion technique. Surfboards that are too bouyant can also feel less stable as you feel like you are balancing on top of the water, rather than in the water. Imagine two copies of the same board, but one with the fins mounted at the other end and how different these would be to surf!Ī surfboard with higher volume will typically be easier to paddle and to catch waves, however it will usually be slower to turn and harder to duck-dive under waves. Two surfboards can share identical volume but feel quite different in the water due to where that volume is located in the board. It is however crucial to understand that volume on it’s own does not dictate the performance of a surfboard, and the shape has a major role. Surfboard volume is a major factor to consider when choosing your next surfboard and comparing the volume of similar shape and length surfboards is one of the best ways to understand really how much difference there is as it summarises all the measurements. As surfboards float, this means that more volume = more buoyancy. The greater the volume, the greater the amount of water that is displaced when trying to submerse the surfboard. ![]() Volume refers to the size of the total area of a surfboard.
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