Ruku Blades Skulls
Ruku Skulls blade
Composite Fins, Spearfishing & Freediving
Description
Ruku has been proudly supplying Ruku blades to the New Zealand market for many years. The sports of spearfishing and freediving truly test the best of equipment on the market and with this Ruku has been quietly working away at producing a better blade more suitable for the sport we all enjoy.The goals of the new redesign have been to create a blade that performed over a wider range of user’s from the new spearo to the rigours of commercial diving and competition diving. Ruku blades have been rebuilt from the ground up with a complete redesign of the blades internal structure and now using a more advanced resin system.
The comprehensive redesign involved rigorous testing so we could develop new features such as the ellipse end and the angle of the pocket. A lot had to be considered, but with the help of a broad range of divers Ruku has truly delivered the next generation in performance.
Pockets
Ruku Blades will fit most pockets, Ruku Super Light, Picasso, Mares, Omer Millennium, Pathos (need glued)
The following pockets require Ruku to modify the blade at manufacturing, which can lead to a delay in delivery.
Omer Stingray, Pathos if you require the Rukus to be glued into Pathos pockets this will cost $60
Ruku’s are a handmade composite blade, and proudly New Zealand made. The Blades come with a 3 year warranty
Selecting a Blade
Ruku Blades now have a broader range of uses. When selecting your blade most importantly you need to consider your body weight, any injuries including ankles and legs.
Ruku Model Intended User
- X Soft up to 60kg
- Soft 60kg to 75kg in body
- Medium 75kg +95kg Spearfishing,Scuba
- Medium 75kg - 85kg Commercial use (Kina, Paua)
- Hard 95kg + Spearfishing, Scuba more fitter and heavier diver
- Hard 85kg+ Commercial use (Kina, Paua’s) see commercial blade
Please note if you have injuries, it would be advisable to drop a model down..injuries especially ankle and knee can create fatigue which will result in poor performance in your technique.
Testimonial from Dave Mullins
Dave Mullins is New Zealand’s deepest diver, he holds 17 national records and six freediving world records. To add to his accolades he holds a world record for a striped marlin which weighed 156.6kg’s
Up until a couple of years ago I swam with flat plastic fins. These performed well enough underwater but the lack of angle was starting to injure my ankles, particularly in competitions that involved lots of surface swimming.
In freediving I use very high angle monofins to reduce knee angle, both when kicking and when in the glide phase of the dive. After looking at the local options I bought a pair of Ruku's because the blades were angled well and they are made in New Zealand. I’ve always felt that the angle, length and flexural characteristics of a fin are far more important than the material used. Carbon fibre is lighter than glass but ultimately I haven’t been able to find much difference between the materials in real performance terms.
My first Rukus were Medium stiffness and while they felt good on the surface, they seemed a bit too long and had a tendency to fold in the middle under power. This wasn’t an issue on shallow dives but showed up when I went deeper, especially in Wellington conditions with a thick suit and lots of weight. It felt like they reached a point where the fin tips couldn’t keep up and ended up trailing behind the rest of the blade rather than actively pushing water. Changing to a pair of slightly shorter and much stiffer Commercial blades fixed the power issue but the trade-off was a hard slog when swimming long distances. The blades were really built to sprint and carry heavy loads.
When I spoke to Ruku I was told a redesign was on the way and after I gave some feedback we decided to experiment with a couple of variations. The aim was to keep the fins fairly soft but able to perform on surface sprints and deep dives without folding. It was an interesting exercise as a re-design of the internal structure yielded some fins that looked nearly identical to the previous model but behaved quite differently. The version with slightly reduced length and a steeper taper built into the laminate clearly outperformed both the originals and the much shorter comparison blades. They seemed to be effective across a wider range of speed and power, settling into a nice ‘jogging’ pace on the surface but still keeping up with harder kicking on sprints and deep ascents.
To be fair I had given Ruku a pretty tough brief after using my original Rukus since I weigh 100kg, operate mostly in cold water, favour soft fins and enjoy deep diving. This awkward combination of preferences and constraints probably meant that I ran up against equipment limits many divers just wouldn’t notice. I imagine it would be quite easy to slap together some tapered fibreglass sheets and churn out moderately functional fin blades that satisfy enough of the spearo population to stay commercially viable. It’s a lot more difficult to produce something that holds up in a more demanding freediving context and Ruku’s approach to continual improvement has been very rewarding.
The new blades should satisfy anybody looking for a good balance between surface swimming and depth performance, even at the serious end of recreational diving.
Dave Mullins
 |
 |
