Wow! What a morning we’ve had. The server that hosts the Flyboy Wakesurf Boards website, flyboywakesurf.com went down and it tooks HOURS on the phone with the hosting company to get that resolved. At least we are back up and running! However that does put us substantially behind in documenting our current wakesurf board build.

Being so far behind, today’s post will be quick and sort of out of sequence with what’s going on! Hopefully we will be back up to speed tomorrow.

One quick picture of the Carbon and Kevlar Hybrid fabric that we will be using to laminate the deck of our wakesurf board. The fabric has not been laminated in this photo, merely cut to basic shape. Hopefully we’ll get to laminating it in short order.  Is that some Red or what?  It didn’t look so overwhelmingly red on the roll!

We apologize for the delay in documenting the two builds underway and appreciate your understanding!

Technorati Tags: wakesurf board, Wakesurf boards

Over the years we’ve been critical of wakesurf boards that don’t have tow-in or cant of the fins. Then doing some research we tripped across a Tomo Surfboard. We were fortunate to have seen several of this brands boards at Sacred Craft here in Northern California in Santa Cruz. The Tomo surfboards are unique in that they basically have straight outlines and rather wide tails. The Flyboy Wakesurf boards were design from the onset with straight outlines, because they have proven to be faster down the line.  At least one of those boards has no tow-in, the offest is zero degrees.  That got us thinking about wakesurf boards and their design.  We tend to be students first and designers second.  We thoroughly enjoy understanding the principles put into effect in designs used by others. 

Way back in the day, Lyndsey Lord a naval architetch wrote and published a book on Planing Hulls. As the story goes, back in the days of Prohibition, he was funded by wealthy clients (mafia) to develop fast planing hulls that could run rum to the US and outrun US law enforcement. It’s a fun story, even if it’s more myth than not. In his book, one of his theories is that straight’ish parallel outlines were faster and created less drag. We’ve certainly felt that was an accurate theory, maybe the rum runners did too? In handling the Tomo surfboards at Sacred Craft, those surfboards also had very straight parallel outlines, with wider tails which supported the straighter outline.

Here is the cover of that book.

To further our history lesson, you may have heard of a mini-simmons surfboard. An early pioneer in surfboard design, Bob Simmons developed a number of surfboards that used some of the formulas presented in the Lord book on Planing Hulls. Simmons’ surfboards had very straight outlines, wide tails and low rocker. They were fast boards and a deviation from what was popular at that time. The mini-simmons variety, sometimes called “bars of soap” are shortened lengths. Typical measurements would be 5’6″ and 22″ wide. In the Lord book, he defined aspect ratios that seemed to work best in ocean settings, with the best ratio being 40% or 0.4. That is, the width of the craft was .4 of the length.  He documented that higher aspect ratios, in the 50% and 60% range created smoother “release” and less trailing wakes.

Here is a visual of a Mini-Simmons. Note the relatively straight outline, twin keel fins and a sort of bump towards the tail where it is pulled in.

Jump forward almost 50 years and a young shaper by the name of Ryan Burch took it upon himself to unravel some of the mystery associated with the early Lord and Simmons formulas. He crafted what is referred to as the “Lord Board”, which translated much of what the architetch and surfboard shaper therorized. Straigt’ish outline, low rocker and an aspect ratio that is around 40% What was more interesting is that this is just a hunk of unlaminated closed cell foam. No fiberglass or resin, just foam. Below is a picture of that Lord Board. Look closely at the profile view, do you see the nose rocker? It’s just a thinned bottom!

Doesn’t it just look like a slab of foam? Probably because it is! You can see there is a very shallow rocker and it is mostly a very straight outline, with exceptionally wide tail. Did you get a good look at the tail channels?

Ok, Ok, Ok, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Wanna see how Ryan surfs that slab o’ foam? here you go, his video:

How does your wakesurfing compare? Do you have those surface reverses down like that? His style encompasses such creativity, it embraces a skatey-style that is fluid and slides around on the wave. What would you give to be able to ride and slide like that?  It got us thinking that we’d like to explore the design elements encompassed by Lord and Simmons.  In particular the 40%’ish aspect ratio and the super wide nose and tail.  There isn’t much carving going on, but that doesn’t invalidate the style, it’s just different.  Love it or hate it, we think you’d like to be able to wakesurf like Ryan surfs that slab o’ foam.

We have a chunk of 2 pound EPS foam and we want to try shaping that Lord Board with an Aspect Ratio of around 40%. Think we can ride it behind the board? All finless and the like?  Think we can slide it like that on our Supreme V226′s wake?  It has a wonderful transition, but we may have to tone it down some.  This is something we love, being able to create a wake a wake surf a design that isn’t currently done and mastering a new style of riding.  Fortunately we are narrow minded and locked into just one style or type of riding and can explore the myriad options.

Wish us luck and we hope you’ll follow along, because this is something that anyone with a local Home Depot can make!

Technorati Tags: Wakesurf, Wakesurf boards

We want to talk a little about the concept of thermoforming a wakesurf deck skin. For those that have followed along with us, you’ll remember that we started these composite sandwich wakesurf builds with a high density rail material. It was almost a perimeter frame, that was built up and glued into place. For wood skinned boards that’s still needed, bacause bending 3 mm sheets of balsa of basswood is almost impossible without splitting the sheets on the grain. We have been using high density foam sheets for the skins of our wake surf board for awhile now for a few reasons. The high density foams are readily available, in fact they are easier to acquire than balsawood in quantity. In comparison to other materials commonly used as skins, they are more uniform. Balsawood for example is not uniform throughout, nor from piece to piece. That lack of uniformity while not a huge problem, does tend to create strtuctures that aren’t balanced.

The high density foam is the same over it’s length, width and thickness. Now wood, when done well, can make a board feel alive, but sometimes depending upon the lack of uniformity, it can just make it feel weirdly alive. High density foam can also be acquired in sheets large enough to cover the entire top of bottom with a signle piece, thereby eliminating seams and glue lines. Although we have seen some amazing combinations of wood and foam that results in stellar good looks.

Principally we have been using the high density foam for skins with the basica purpose of creating stiffness with low weight. We do not use a center stringer, so that the Flyboy Wakesurf Boards have great strength, flex and light weight. Further they don’t exhibit rail twist off as is common with center stringed conventional construction.

When we acquire our high density foam skins, they are typically 4′ x 8′ x 3 mm flat sheets. That requires that we cut them to the basic outline of the wakesurf and then for the deck skin, heat and bend them to shape. We can’t just bend them to shape as the rather tight curves along the rails will cause the foam to split. Larger diameter curves, like the bottom concave or the deck roll aren’t a problem and do not require thermoforming. The rails, however, do. We’ve become quite practiced at it, and we’ll show you the finished results in an upcoming post.

So the first thing we do is trace the basic outline of the shape we need. We use a simple marker for the task.

Next, using heat, we soften the high density form so we can mold it to the desired shape. We use a female open faced tool for this process and once the high density form has been molded to shape we trim any excess. We intentionally use a slight bit of excess because we aren’t quite that accurate while handling hot melted foam and pressing it in place! The extra gives us some leeway.

Once the high density foam is thermoformed we wet out our reinforcement layer fabric and apply it to the core. Next we lay the thermoformed skin on top of the wet out reinforcement layer. From there we apply 7,000 miles of blue painters tape. OK, OK, OK, not that much, but enough to hold the skin in place and the edges down to the core while sliding it all into the vacuum bag. Here you can see the tape, but also the thermoformed area around the wings of the wakesurf board.

In that area around the wings, you can get a good idea of how intricate the thermoforming can be. The hardest areas to thermoform are these tight compound curves.

In this picture, you can see the right hand rail of the board pulled tight and unifromly curved for the length of the board in the picture.

We leave the wakesurf deck skin in the bag overnight to cure and did you notice? The board is right side up, so what will happen with the epoxy and sandwich layer? You got, it! It will flow downward towards the core EPS foam, just as we did with the bottom. We are balancing the two cycles to achieve the same level of resin penetration.

Thanks for following along!

Technorati Tags: wake surf board, Wakesurf