Talisman (Step Up)

Start at a 6'2" by 19 1/8" by 2 3/8" — that's 29.8L. From your 30L daily driver that's almost the same volume but two inches longer, which gives you the paddle advantage into a faster takeoff without making the board feel sluggish. If you mostly want the Talisman for solid overhead with real push (Lowers on a south swell, Mentawais reef passes), bump up one size to the 6'3" at 30.7L. If you want to use it down into the chest-high end of the wave window too, hold the 6'2". Talk it through in the Board Builder — happy to walk through the trade-off with you before you commit.

Yes — if you ever want to ride the same board as a quad. The 5-fin gives you four extra plugs at build, and you can swap setups between sessions. Thruster is the right default for the wave window the Talisman is designed for: solid overhead with push, where you want the trailer fin's tail hold when a 6ft wall is trying to wash you off the rail. Quad gives you down-the-line speed in long, fast walls — useful at mainland Mexico beachies or North Shore points where the wave is moving fast through a long inside section. The 5-fin is $40 at build for the extra plug pair; if you're sure you'll only ever ride thruster, stick with the default.

The Talisman is built for chest-high through double-overhead. The bottom of the wave window is chest-high — and even there, only when the wave has push behind it. A waist-high windswell session is not what this board is for; the foiled rails and pulled-in tail will feel slow and under-volumed because there's no wave energy to load them. If most of your sessions are waist-to-chest mush, look at the everyday HPSB end of the line — the Talisman won't reward you. The sweet spot is solid overhead with real swell energy: a south swell at Lowers, a long-period north pulse at T-Street.

The Talisman is built for surfers who already own a daily- driver shortboard and know how to read a steep takeoff. If you're still building confidence in head-high surf on your everyday board, work that progression first — a step-up will outride you in the kind of wave it's designed for, and you'll spend the session feeling like you bought the wrong board. The right time to add a Talisman to the quiver is when your daily driver has started feeling small in overhead surf and you want a dedicated second board for the days the swell shows up. Honest self-assessment beats marketing every time.

6–8 weeks from order confirmation on the standard build. The $1,100 Premium tier (resin tint plus gloss + polish) adds 1–2 weeks because gloss + polish is its own slow finishing pass. Every Talisman is built to order in our San Clemente shop — 25% deposit at order confirmation, balance due on completion. Timeline reflects current queue and gets confirmed on order; if you have a specific trip date you're targeting, tell us at order time and we'll be honest about whether we can hit it.

Same wave-window framing — both boards are built for the intermediate-to-advanced surfer stepping into overhead surf with confidence. Both run thruster as default and squash tail as the stock option. The Talisman is built to your dimensions in our San Clemente shop, where the Step-Up Pro is built to factory dims. If you've ridden a Step-Up Pro and liked it, the Talisman conversation is "what about that board did you want to tune?" — width, thickness, volume, tail shape, glass schedule are all configurable. Different shaper voice, adjacent product slot, and more knobs to turn at order time.

Standard is 4oz S-cloth + 4oz warp on the deck, 4oz S-cloth on the bottom — the modern shortboard schedule, optimized for performance and weight. For the bigger end of the wave window — a true overhead-and-up customer — stepping the deck up to 6oz + 4oz adds durability for the kind of beating a step-up takes per session in real overhead surf. The trade-off is roughly half a pound of weight, which slightly works against the paddle advantage you bought the step-up for in the first place. The right answer depends on where you sit in the Talisman's wave window: optimize for the lower end (chest-high through head-high+) and stay 4S+4W; optimize for the upper end (solid overhead and up) and bump to 6+4.

A centered wide point keeps the board balanced under your feet — you turn the Talisman from the hip, not from muscular input. On a step-up, where you're already asking the board to go faster than your daily driver, a centered wide point is what stops the board feeling pushed forward and nervous on the rail. The flat panel through the nose handles chop on the paddle in (and on the takeoff line into a section); the single concave under your front foot loads the lead foot through the wide point; the deeper double concave behind the fins splits water for drive out of turns. Pair that with the high entry rocker for steep takeoff confidence and you've got a hydrodynamic story that's tuned for speed and hold in waves with real push behind them — not for looseness in soft surf.

- Q1 sizing example uses real numbers from `Boards/talisman-step-up.md` §"Stock Dimensions Summary" + the contour-diagram-derived stock dim table in `Boards/talisman-step-up.page-copy.md` §5. - Q2 quad/5-fin framing pulled from `Boards/talisman-step-up.md` §"Fin Scope" — `[BLAKE: ?]` resolves to "yes, offered" in this draft; if Blake rules quad out, swap Q2 for a "what if I want a single-fin configuration?" frame and answer "not offered on the Talisman, look at the longboard line if that's what you want." - Q3 + Q4 wave-window / skill-level framing pulled directly from `Boards/talisman-step-up.md` §"Voice + Positioning Summary". - Q5 turnaround pulled from `Boards/talisman-step-up.construction.md` §2. - Q6 competitor frame: per voice rules, the answer references CI by name (the customer asked about a specific CI model — answering with pure abstraction would be evasive) but does NOT compare a Lundquist model to another Lundquist model. - Q7 glassing answer pulled from `Boards/talisman-step-up.construction.md` §6 — preserves the `[BLAKE: ?]` trade-off framing rather than claiming a single right answer. - Q8 contour-derived design question replaces a generic "demo policy" question per the polish brief rule (contour PNG exists → swap one generic Q&A for a contour-specific one). The hydro story is sourced directly from the Vision read of the contour PNG during the Polish 09 pass.