Are you ready for the second question in the Flyboy Wakesurf Huge and First Annual Surf Style giveaway? We have a couple of great shirts to give away, both are XL’s, so if you have no need for that size, well you could use them as a coverup on the boat! We have a great green striped shirt from Supreme Boats, picture below, manufacturers of the best wakesurf boat and proud sponsor of James Walker and his surf style Flyboy wakesurfers. The other is a cool T-shirt from Inland Surfer.  Just so that we’re clear, you’ll get two, count ‘em, two shirts.  We also have some of the Inland Surfer wakesurfing DVD’s featuring the riding of all the Inland Surfer team riders like James Walker, Keenan Fleagle and Sean Cummings, among others.

We apologize for the quality of the photo, it was eeeeeeaaarrrrrlllllyyyy, but this is the Supreme casual collar.

We still have the grand prize but also a few surf ropes, and a board sock to give away, so be sure to check back often. Ok so some background on surf style boards and today’s question. Surf style boards, as oppossed to skim style boards, typically have a fin pod. That is there is a grouping of fins, typically two out along the rails and for thruster or quads there can be trailing fins. There are a myriad of variations, like the Inland Surfer A Frame quads where the more inboard fins are further ahead of the rail fins, but the most common element in a surf style board fin pod is two rail fins. Virtually all surf style boards have that attribute.

So, today’s question is: what is the name of the two large rail fins used on the Inland Surfer Flyboy division James Walker signature model?  This is the trade name that Inland Surfer uses.  You can find it on the Inland Surfer website fr the description of the Flyboy Division James Walker signature model, or on the flyboywakesurf.com website.

Now we are posting this question on Saturday, so we’ll take answers through the close of business on Monday and we’ll announce the winner on Tuesday!

Technorati Tags: flyboy wakesurf, surf style, wakesurfers

You’ll most likely laugh when you see the junk we’ve pulled up for the creation of the test panels for wakesurfers. When we are build there is inevitable scrap and waste, and we attempt to save as much of the leftover or disgarded pieces of wood, foam and fabric as we can. Typically it looks like it’s just hoarding, but really it’s a functional purpose! Really!

When we order material like Divinycell for use in our wakesurfers, it arrives in large sheets typically 4′ x 8′ pieces that are rolled into a tube for shipping. Naturally when we use that for a deck skin, with the curved outlines, we’ll wind up with large sections of scrap. What we typically do is save those scraps for test panels like presented in this discussion.  Sometimes when the pieces are large enough we can try and piece together a mosiac of sorts for a skin.  That is the concept will be working with for the perimeter of some future R&D wakesurfers.

So in the picture below are some of the materials we’ll be using. The grey stuff on top is a high density foam Divinycell and the grade is H-80. It’s a 5 pound density foam. The small section of wood is a piece of basswood. The larger section of wood grain looking stuff is a bamboo veneer. It’s not paper-backed. Lastly off on the right is carbon fiber.

So now what? Composite structures attempt to combine differing materials with the idea that the best attributes of each material, suited for the task at hand, will be utilized. We’re not really sure that this combination is the best, but we thought they would provide an interesting mix. Divinycell is a closed cell foam and so if it’s applied up against the core of the board it can effectively prevent water absorption. The basswood is very snappy and can provide some responsiveness. The carbon fiber is super stiff and will maintain that stiffness over a much longer life cycle than wood alone. The bamboo offers some compressive resistance.

So that’s a good theory, it may be total crap, but you get the idea, we want to see if there is a good combination of materials that can be developed that would improve wakesurf board performance possibly even making new wakesurf tricks viable!. We might revisit this test with differing combinations of materials in the future. The process of testing is mostly fraught with failures as we try to weed out what does and doesn’t work.

So…we hack the crap up into tiny pieces. While that’s true it’s just to get them into the size of our selected test panels. You can see that our plan is to use several pieces of each material within the cassette.

Here is the proposed stack, you can see the alternating materials and we probably have a 3/4″ thick pile going. The next step will be to laminate it all together with epoxy inside the vacuum bag. It sure looks like the structure will wind up being crazy stiff, but maybe that will be a good thing?!

So that’s the start of the process, we’ll revisit this after we get it laminated and can try and do some testing. Thanks so much for following along, we appreciate it!

Technorati Tags: wakesurf tricks, wakesurfers

You’ll have to watch this entire video, you’ll see James Walker working on the ollie oop repeatedly and the reason is that he has this trick in his mind and he’s trying to work it out. He lands an indecision, another wakesurf trick that James Walker brought to wakesurfing last year, and then the repeated ollie 3′s. At the end you’ll see it, it’s an ollie oop to a backside switch revert shuv (to backside switch?). James didn’t land that in this video but something occurred to us.

The development of new wakesurf tricks isn’t dependent upon what scoring system is employed, instead it’s at a personal level. Is this where the progression of wakesurf tricks are headed? Maybe not and really wakesurf tricks should be a reflection of the discipline studied by a particular rider and not something that is forced upon riders.

Old school is cool, but not the ONLY option. New-age-never-seen-before is so amazing, but again, not the only avenue. It used to be this battle of surf and skim, but maybe now the battle becomes allowing a rider to choose and execute their own discipline and still be considered competitive? You can see the path that James is taking, he has brought several new tricks to surf style wakesurfing the Blender, the Indecision, the air 180 to backside switch 540, 720′s, a 1080 and this Ollie oop to backside switch revert shuv (to backside switch?). Certainly non-traditional and composed of combinations of individual wakesurf tricks. Is that the future? You know it should be, BUT and we can’t emphasize this enough, it shouldn’t be the ONLY future. If tricks like this become the only thing that’s competitive then that’s biased, but it’s JUST as biased if they aren’t considered at all or are marginalized. NOR should a rider be required to do them all. They can if they want, but not FORCED to wakesurfs. Maybe World Peace would be an easier task?

Thanks for following along and we appreciate you taking time out of your day.

As James would say: God Bless America!

Technorati Tags: wakesurf tricks, wakesurfs

We’re going to be doing some testing of new combinations of materials and also revealing a few secrets about how we are working on our new Flyboy Wakesurf boards. We test things ALOT. We have tons of ideas and there are so many new advances in composite technology on an almost daily basis, it’s hard to keep on top of them all.

One of the things that isn’t visible in the various veneer boards James Walker has been riding the last year or so, is this concept of cassetting. Not like your old tape cassette, but in terms of a perimeter frame. The original Flyboy Wakesurf boards had a small perimeter framework that did a few things, one was to add perimeter weighting, another was to add stiffness around the outline and finally, there is some ding resistance with a higher density foam out along the perimeter.

That framework, though, could be any number of things. The Gen 2 original flyboy’s have basswood, the newer Gen 3 Flyboy’s have built up layers of high density foam and carbon fiber. It’s possible to use just about any material in there, bamboo and wood veneer, actual wood like balsa or basswood or even hight density foam. All of those can be sandwiched together with reinforcement materials like carbon fiber. So there are LOTS of options, but also that means lots of testing. Trying to find the optimal combination is a rather daunting task. WE have some general idea of what works and what doesn’t but even things like what layer should go next “might” effect the performance of the wakesurfs. That might sound trite, but realize we are out at the rails, which are shaped, so the closer to the outline, the thinner the material will be.

One of the masters of this layering technique is Josh Dowling, but his designs are divinycell and paulowina, alternating. We love that look, but wonder if there isn’t a better combination that can give us better more response wakesurfs. The folks at Airbaze are using built up balsa wood and we really enjoyed that also, when we were building those several years ago, but finding consistent pieces of balsa wood always proved difficult, they are using a factory in Thailand and have access to a huge supply of Balsa, so we’re sure that will help them. We’d like to experiment with combinations of wood, carbon fiber, bamboo and high density foam. We recognize that it’s a crazy complicated build and the likelihood anything like that would reach production is slim to none, but we are theorizing the rails and the framework around them can be tailored in such a way as to achieve higher levels of performance in our wakesurfs.

So that’s the basis for this next build and we’re glad you’ve taken a moment to follow along.

We’ll start the process by cutting out our blank from a huge billet of one pound foam, you can see the markings this billet is a 4′ x 8′ section, 3″ thick.

It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but we divide the billet into three pieces. Two that are 2′ x 5′ and the last, or remainder is a 3′ x 4′ section at the end. Here you can see that we’ve cut the 3′ x 4′ section off and what’s left is the two 2′ x 5′ sections, which we’ll cut now.

…and there you have the basic core of this surf style wakesurfer. We’ll hotwire the rocker next and then work on the outline. We’ll also be laying up our test panels that should approximate what we’d like to see in our framework. That discussion will prove to be interesting, if not very conclusive. We think the eterminiation will be in the ride itself, but hopefully we can get an idea from the test panels. We should take a moment and explain this part also. We strive to build the best, most technically advanced wakesurfs for you our loyal customer base. That typically dictates ground-breaking materials and designs. BUT getting there also takes tons of effort. Sure we could use an off the shelf blank like some of the other folks, but is that technologically advanced? No, it’s just following what someone else has done. In fact that just becomes a commodity, doesn’t it? Like buying flour at the market, it’s all been done before, so just buy the cheapest one. That’s not Flyboy Wakesurf.

We won’t bring you someone elses tech or ladle on the ridiculous hype that permeates this industry. We’ll show you failures and please understand that when we do things like the test panels, if we do 6, 5 of them will technically be a failure! The one that we use, hopefully will show some promise. We aren’t afraid of showing you those testing failures because we know you’re expecting them. You want to see the process and gain the knowledge that will help YOU make better buying decisions, even if it’s not a Flyboy Wakesurf board. We believe that showing you those failures makes us your most reliable source for information and that will eventually lead you to become a faithful Flyboy wakesurf customer.

Thanks so much for following along, we REALLY appreciate that you take time out of your busy day.

Technorati Tags: surf style, wakesurfer, wakesurfs