True Ames Greenough 4-A Single Fin - Volan

The True Ames Volan fins are fine-tuned with precision foils as well as proper flex. Crafted with a labor of love, these fins undergo the strictest quality control. Their Volan panels are meticulously hand-laid and templated ensuring optimal weave orientation and superior strength, with flex coming more from the body rather than just the tip. This enhances speed and projection off the bottom and through turns, making their Volan fins a pinnacle of the highest performance flex characteristics.

• Form | Medium profile, full base coupled with a tapering & moderately flexible tip
• Function | A fin that will hold when you need it to and release when the time is right
• Feel | Neutral-positive, perfectly-balanced, a fin that will drive off the bottom, and have an acute responsiveness through arcing turns
• Overall | Versatile - designed for all board shapes and surf conditions

Why You'll Love This Fin

1. The 4A is perfect in so many ways. It checks all of the performance boxes. The solid-sized base and width create stability and drive, while the rake and flexible tip enable top-to-bottom turns and maneuverability.
2. The Greenough 4A is a bread-and-butter fin. It allows you to feel the shape of a surfboard, it never gets in the way, with it's perfectly neutral design, when sized correctly to the board it fades away and becomes one with your surfing. It holds you tight but lets you loose, and it gives you feedback but disappears- truly the most versatile fin on earth.
3. The true beauty of this fin is that you can ride it in any board that has a single fin box. The larger sizes (9"-10.5") are great for single fin longboards, the medium sizes (7.5"- 9") pair well with speed shapes and mid-lengths, and the smaller sizes (6.5"- 8.5") pair well with shortboard single fins and 2+1’s (boards with side fins).

Materials
They love using Volan at True Ames for fins because of the intrinsic properties that the cloth provides which pairs well with their stringent production methods. Compared to their standard fiberglass, Volan is a heavier weight glass with a more coarse and dense weave. True Ames painstakingly layup each 44 layer panel by hand (about 2 hours for a 30x30” panel) in order to achieve a high glass to resin ratio, and also to ensure that the coarse weave is properly saturated - these details further add to the strength, and eventually the flex pattern’s ‘memory’, which is essentially the fin’s ability to endure a large number of reps and then ‘return to center’, all while sustaining a powerful flex. All of the True Ames Volan fins are also specifically templated and aligned for optimal weave orientation (about 70* perpendicular to the base) which allow the fins to flex more through the body and ‘trunk’, as opposed to just in the thinner tip area. All in all, they have found that this labor of love results in fins that have the very best flex characteristics that they're able to make.

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History & Origin

The man behind this revolutionary fin is George Greenough, whom the surf world is forever indebted to for his wave-riding performance innovations beginning in the '60s. Greenough ultimately paved the way from traditional logging to more progressive surfing in the pocket through the development of his Velo-Spoon kneeboard designs. To complement his kneeboards, Greenough found inspiration from mother nature for his fin templates through studying the tail fins of tuna–one of the fastest and most maneuverable fish in the ocean. The subsequent high-aspect ratio design he created allowed surfers to place themselves in more critical parts of the wave and execute more radical turns; it truly ushered in a new era of high performance capability. History lesson aside, the Greenough 4-A is a truly well-balanced fin. Its full base coupled with a tapering, moderately flexible tip provides a solid amount of drive off the bottom, and an acute responsiveness through arcing turns. Designed for both speed generation and spending time surfing in the pocket, the 4-A is a fin that will hold when you need it to and release when the time is right.