Set a swallow tail and a beak nose by numbers

Swallow, fish and moon tails

Pick a swallow, fish or moon tail in the editor's Tail section and the tail tuning shows its numbers. Notch depth is how far the cut runs up the stringer from the tail, in millimetres. Tip width is the slider the tail has always had. Under it, Tips apart is the same setting as a shaper measures it: the distance between the two horn tips, in your unit. Type a distance and press Enter; the tip width moves to cut the tail to that distance, and the outline, the 3D view and the exports follow.

The numbers come off the tail the board actually has, the cut the 3D shape is made from, so what you type is what a tape measure across the tips reads. Tip width is held between 0.3 and 0.9 of the tail's width at the 12-inch station, so a distance outside that is cut to the nearest one the tail can make.

A bat tail shows Tips apart too. Its cut is a scoop rather than a notch, so it has no single depth to read.

Where the numbers are printed

The spec sheet's Tail panel lists Notch depth and Tips apart under the widths, thicknesses and rockers. The design page and the share page add them to the Tail row, as in "Swallow · notch 90 mm · tips 294 mm apart". A tail with no notch prints neither.

A beak nose

A beak keeps the nose thick right out to the tip. In the editor's Slices tab, the Foil section has Beak length, how far back from the tip the nose starts to thin, and Beak drop, how much thinner the nose is at the tip than there. Both are thickness, deck to bottom at the same spot, the way calipers read it, so the nose rocker does not change them. Clear Beak length to take the beak off.

Under the two fields the editor reads the board's own nose drop, beak or not: how much thinner the nose is at the tip than a beak length back, or 150 mm back when there is no beak. A beak only keeps a nose thicker than the foil would make it. If you ask for a drop larger than the foil's own, the tip stays as the foil had it, and the readout says what the board does.

A board whose side profile you shaped by hand on the Rocker tab draws its nose thickness there, so the beak fields give way to a line saying so; reset the Rocker tab's curve to use a beak.

The spec sheet's Nose panel prints the beak, or the nose drop of a board without one. A beak changes the 3D shape and every export of it; resizing a board scales the beak with it.