FlyBoy Wakesurf Boards

Jan
27

Wakesurf board and server errors

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

Jan
26

Wakesurf boards aspect ratio

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

Jan
25

Thermoformed wakesurf deck skin

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

Jan
24

Wake surf board rail bands

We have been giving some thought to the way that water interacts with the wake surf board. Hydrodynamics if you will. In the past we’ve shaped elaborate rail bands that followed the outline of the board. Tracing outlines that curved along the rail line and shaping to that curve. Then we thought, what purpose does that serve? There really isn’t any that we could think of that couldn’t be addressed by just creating a straight rail band, save for the nose, which curved inside a straight rail band. From a production stand point, a straight line would be much easier to cut and shape than a curved rail band. In looking at the amount of material that would be removed, it also seemed that it would reduce weight some and remembering our thickness = stiffness formula, using a straight line as the rail band would give a fairly static stiffness through the wake surf board where the riders feet are. At least that is what we are theorizing.

Water wraps curved surfaces, so the rounded rail on some wake surf boards create water attachment. Now that may sound bad to some folks, but it isn’t, by and of itself. A shaper may want the water to sort of GRAB the wake surf board in that area. It will increase drag and also that grip on that section of the wakesurf board. So, does water extend up onto the deck where the rail bands extend? Nope, it will wrap the curved surfaces, but eventually releases once that curve doubles back and starts to go flat. The next time you are out wakesurfing, you can observe this by looking down to the rails of your wake surf board. If you watch, you’ll see the water relaesing off the sharp or hard part of any rail, and wrapping up somewhat over a curved surface. Does the water double back and flow towards the center of the wake surf board? Nope. It would be cool if it did, because you’d have the ultimate grip!

That being said, the deck side of the rail bands should be shaped to help equalize the distribution of the stiffness through the board. We want to keep the area under the feet flat or flat’ish to better aid transfer of energy from the feet, but also to keep that stiffness very uniform through the area of the board under the wakesurfers feet.

Ok, so here’s what we are doing with our rail bands. You can see that they are basically straight and parallel to each other. The area under the riders feet will be mostly flat’ish

Deja Vu! Ok, we told you that we screwed up and didn’t get any pictures of some of the shaping, but you can see with this picture that we’ve foiled the deck and the rail bands down to the rails themselves.

Now that the core is principally shaped, we’ll thermoform the deck skin to mostly fit the shaped core and vacuum bag the deck skin onto the core. We hope you’ll follow along!

Technorati Tags: wake surf board, wakesurf board

Jan
23

Wakesurf board right side up

We are continuing with our wakesurf board building. You may remember that in the last post we talked about flipping the wakesurf board and rocker bed upside down to take advantage of gravity, so that the slow epoxy would sort of ooze downward with the force of gravity and by placing the board upside down, while laminating the bottom, we would allow the epoxy to flow into the core of the wake surf board. Now, that may or may NOT be what works best, but we’re going to try it just to see. The orientation would more closely mimic the methodology used in conventional construction.

Once the wakesurf board is out of the bag, we get a chance to verify the accuracy of the concave, rocker and alignment. Now is the time to fix any errors, as once we start building the deck, it’ll mostly be too late to affect any changes. So in this picture you can see a slightly exaggerated concave. That will calm down a bit after we trim the excess skin around the outline.

We finally got some rain here in NorCal, so in between storsm we quickly set out to trim the outline and do some shaping of the deck. You’ll notice in this picture the deck side of the wakesurf board is flat. We leave the EPS flat on the deck as an aid in handling, plus if we gouge the foam, it doesn’t matter at this stage. When it’s flat it makes it easy to do things like check the thickness or concave with a level. Also, as you know being the students of composite construction, thickness equates to stiffness and with that slightly thicker foam thickness we gain some stiffness until we can add the bottom skin and sandwich layer of fiberglass.

It’s a little hard to see from this picture, but we’ve run the electric plane along the outline to trim the flashing of the bottom skin and true up the outline some. Next we mark the new tighter outline. Remember our discussion about needing to trim the interior 1/8″ closer to allow for the deck skin thickness? That’s what that new black mark around the outline is.

Oh shoot! It seems we didn’t take any pictures of the next phase. We need to bring the deck height and the foil for this board, into tolerance. We use a hotwire to make quick work of the big pieces, but then the electric plane, surfform and sanding block to adjust it to spec.

We are going to jump ahead so that you can see we’ve shaped the deck down to spec. In our next post we’ll work through a slight change in the rails that we’re making.

We hope you’ll follow along in our next post as we talk about the changes in the rail and rail bands.

Technorati Tags: wake surf board, wakesurf board

Jan
21

Wake surf board more myths

One of the interesting things about wake surf board design and fabrication is that there is a significant amount of misinformation that gets bantied around. It makes it hard to make an informed decision unless you actually know how to build a wake surf board. If you did, you probably wouldn’t spend a great deal of time on this site, save to see what we are doing!

There is this myth, about molded boards where the external layers of fiberglass and resin are allowed to soak into the EPS foam and thereby reduce shear or make the board too stiff. Logically, the same would hold true for conventional construction also. EPS foam is EPS foam, regardless of whether it’s being laminated by hand or inside of a mold. Conventional construction will sometimes seal the EPS blank to prevent undue resin absorption. That can’t be done with molded or vacuum bagged boards??!! Of course it can. There is nothing that prevents the interior core of the EPS from being sealed. So if that is a step that increases the performance of a board it can be done by hand, in a vacuum bag or in a mold.

Another myth that gets thrown out there is that molding results in excess resin out at the exterior of the wake surf board. That certainly CAN happen, conventional lamination techniques aren’t a safeguard against that happening. It’s just as easy to ladle on too much resin by hand as it is in a molded or vacuum bagged construction method. The real concern is whether or not the builder is making efforts to reduce the weight of the board and is keeping resin and reinforcement ratios at an optimal level, NOT if the construction is molded, vacuum bagged or by hand.

So having said that, we intentionally set out to use extra resin in the core and in the sandwich layer of this current wake surf board build AND have it soak into the EPS core. I know, we’re crazy! Actually, we know that resin weighs substantially more than fiberglass, but it also does a really good job of gluing things together and in increase some stiffness and compression strength. We have been very careful to not get crazed, but instead changed the resin to reinforcement ratio from 1:1 to 1.5:1. So if we had 4 ounces of reinforcement, we used 6 ounces of resin.

We also did something substantial different during the lamination of the bottom skin to the wakesurfers. We’ll show you a picture first and then go into details. This is a picture of the rocker bed and the wake surf board both inside a vacuum bag.

Can you tell what’s different? Did you guess that the whole thing is upside down? (No fair Jim, you’ve already guessed! ) Can you guess why?

Well first off we need to give you some background. The vacuum bag pulls all of the air, or most of it, OUT from inside the bag. The net result is a vacuum, no air, just the wake surf board and and it’s components. What does a vaccuum do to gravity? That’s right NOTHING. So while the vacuum bag exterts considerable pressure on the surfaces of the wake surf board, it doesn’t change gravity in the least and the epoxy, while it is still liquid will react to gravity by flowing downward towards that gravitational pull. Now, when we are vacuum bagging the deck side, where does the epoxy run? Right, down into the EPS core by virtue of the gravitational pull. Where does the epoxy flow if we leave the rocker bed right side up when laminating the bottom skin? Did you theorize away from the core and towards the bottom skin? You’d be right! In conventional lamination, what happens to the epoxy when the bottom is being laminated? Well, the laminator turns the wake surf board upside down and works with the reinforcement and resin such that gravity is pulling the resin downward and into the EPS. Now we’ve also used a slow hardener to insure that the effects of gravity could take effect. The cure time at the temperature we were working in was about 7 hours.

So what, you ask? Well it’s a consideration that we need to address. Gravity has an effect on the flow of resin and if we WANT that to happen then we need to utilize that force.

BUT and this is a big but, what if we don’t want that? What if the best performance occurs when the resin is kept towards the surface and away from the EPS core. We go back to the way we’ve done it in the past and turn everything right side up! The point being that using the vacuum bag as a tool gives us far greater flexibility than conventional techniques. Also, we’d like to toot our own horn for a minute here, we utilize what may seem like unconventional techniques, but it’s mostly just us experimenting with what works best and not being tied to any one concept or methodology, instead focusing on what provides the best results.

So hopefully we haven’t left you topsy-turvy, but instead intriqued by the intorduction of this new technique! Thanks so much for reading this far and we hope you’ll continue to follow along!

Technorati Tags: wake surf board, wakesurfers

Jan
20

Wakesurfers core outline

In our last post we talked about hotwiring the rocker into our core and we mentioned that we wanted to explain a few things with the cutting of the outline as we have some changes in the way we are building these two new wakesurfers. If you’ve followed us for an appreciably period of time you know that we have changed the construction methodology from a glued up rail component to a thermoformed deck skin which wraps the rail.

We start by laying out the centerline of the rockered billet. This doesn’t need to be super critical side to side, because as you can see we have a good two inches of leeway. The centerline needs to be straight, but the rocker is effective and accurate across the width of the blank, so the centerline could be drawn at 12 inches in from the edge, or possibly 11.5 inches in and it wouldn’t impact the core of the board. This allows us to use some chunks of EPS that might otherwise become waste due to damaged edges or corners. In this picture you can see there is one very clean edge and the other side is somewhat ragged. We measure off the true side and place the outline such that the ragged side does not become an issue.

In this picture we have rough cut the outline, but it is based upon a template that we have which measures our finished wakesurfers. The problem with that is the deck skin wraps the rails by 1/8″ on each side or a total of 1/4″. So using this template creates a core that is oversized by 1/4″

Now we want to try some double skinned wakesurfs. We’d love to try one that used two skins around the entire exterior and then one that just used a double skin on the deck.

You’ve all followed us long enough to know that there is an actual composite sandwich on both the deck and the bottom. That is there are reinforcement layers of fiberglass or carbon fiber on either side of the skins. You also know that doubling the thickness of a sandwich quadruples the stiffness of that sandwich. Therein lies the beauty of the composite sandwich. The thickness can be increased by any manner of low density material, so that the weight increase is negligable, but that stiffness increases exponentially.

Now, if we use a double skinned methodology we will gain some compressive strength, you can imagine that two layers of 6 pound’ish density foam has more compressive strength than one layer, but at the same time, that will increase weight somewhat. We aren’t quite sure yet what that weight increase will be or how it will affect the ride quality. Regardless, we will do the experiment, but as you can see, if our template is already 1/4″ oversize, then if we use two deck skins, we’ll be off by close to 1/2″ at that point. PLUS, the thickness will need to be ajusted to accomodate the extra layers of skins, whether it be 2, 3 or possibly 4. In terms of flexibility in the wakesurfers it might prove to be advantageous to offer full double wrapped or just a double deck wrap and single bottom wrap in terms of durability or perhaps performance. We’ll test both just to see how it impacts both durability and performance.

Thanks so much for following along and we hope you come back as we try something new with our lamination!

Technorati Tags: composite sandwich, wakesurfers, wakesurfs

Jan
19

Improving wakesurfs

If you’ve been following us for any period of time, you know that we are focused on the improvement of wakesurfs. Much of this blog is devoted to research and devlopment with regard to wakesurfs construction and particularly composite sandwich wakesurfs. We are going to be undertaking a number of new construction concepts over the coming weeks. These will focus on componentization of the wakesurfs.

We had a good time showing off our Supreme V226, which we consider to be the best wakesurfing boat for our purposes and wallet! Now we are back to our construction!

One of the things we will be using is carbon fiber. We’ve used an almost pedestrian 2 x 2 twill before and for this build we have a few new fabrics we will be introducing. One is the spread tow carbon fiber, which we introduced a few posts back, and the other is a carbon fiber and kevlar hybrid. This hybrid fabric will be in a 2 x 2 twill, not because it’s the best option, but it’s about all we could source!

We we posted about the spread tow fabric before, and we posted pictures, but without any real reference between them. Our good friend Eric asked to have a static frame of reference in comparing the two different weaves of the spread tow carbon fiber and the 2 x 2 twill. He suggested placing a quarter on the fabric so that it was easy to judge and compare.

We’ve done just that and here are those pictures! Thanks again Eric, excellent idea!

Here is the 2 x 2 twill

…and here is the spread tow carbon fiber fabric

As you can see, it’s a pretty significant difference in the number of interlacings per square inch of fabric. Also, you can see how that many extra nterlacings increases the number of crimpings in the fabric. We are going to use that spread tow fabric on the bottom of our wakesurfs in the next few builds.

Now that we have that up to date we will continue with detailing this new componentized construction. You may remember in our last post we used a slightly higher density EPS core foam, and for this build we will return to our ‘tried and true’ 1 pound eps core. We like the lower density 1 pound foam for a few reasons. One is lower weight, but the other is the improved shear properties. The interior of the board, around the neutral axis, is free to shift and move some, which actually helps create a stronger board and one that feels more alive. A stringered board is locked down in the middle and, to us at least, feels dead in comparison.

Here we show a picture of a 2′ x 5′ x 3″ billet of 1 pound EPS foam. We’ll shape the rocker and outline before attaching the skins.

We are researching the use of a CNC machine to help us most consistently shape the interior foam with the help of Jeff Wahlers from Souldcraft Wakesurf (and thanks again Jeff for all of your assitance!), but until then, we are doing all of that by hand. We start by using our templates to hotwire the rocker, here you can see we’ve attached the templates on a measure marked. We had some issues with the edges of this billet, so aligned a bit inside to clear the damage.

Here is a picture of the rocker hotwired in. It’s oversized from what we need, which is why the tail looks a little weird. We’ll trim that off when we go to cut the outline.

That’s where we’ll leave it for now, we have the rocker basically cut and now we can locate the apex and align our outline templates for cutting. We have some new concepts there so we’ll wait for another day to expound on those!

Thanks for following along!

Technorati Tags: best wakesurfing boat, composite sandwich, wakesurfs

Jan
18

Best wakesurfing boat

We were out in the shop working on the latest composite sandwich wakesurf board and looked up at our Supreme V226 nestled into the confines of the other side bay. It struck us that we haven’t posted about one of the best wakesurfing boat in awhile. Now calm down we aren’t saying that ours is the best, we know about brand loyalty and all that. Not every wakesurfing boat serves everyone’s needs equally. We have some very spefic needs and we’ll talk about them here. We also want full disclosure, James Walker is sponsored by Supreme and that is just wonderful, but at the same time, he had other opportunities and turned those down and we bought the Supreme V226 because it best met our requirements.

After James Walker won the Men’s Open Surf division of the World Wakesurf Championships, we decided as a family that it was time to retire the old Tige and get a new wakesurfing boat. By the way, we still have that old Tige and would love to sell it to a good home, drop us a note if you’re interested! So we sat down and developed some criteria that would define the best wakesurfing boat for us.

Over the course of a few years we had been on a number of boats at contests, and the like, and were really concerned with the inconsistency of the wake between sessions and even when weighted during the same run. Some of the most expensive and highly touted wakesurf boats would literally couldn’t maintain a consistent wake with the same ballast configuration. You’d go out in the morning and it would be perfect, weight it the same way in the afternoon and it was short. That eliminated a few of the smaller 22′ish length boats right off the bat.

Next we wanted a good clean wake, who cares if it’s consistent and consistently crappy. Have you heard the phrase “great surf style wake” that’s a euphamism for being too steep and being devoid of a GREAT transition. If you look at pictures of ocean waves, they all have amazingly long smooth transitions, so a steep wake with no transition isn’t surf style it’s just a bad wake, in our opinion. So tall’ish, solid lip and a good well defined rampy transition was something we had to have. This elimianted almost all wakesurfing boats. Now you’ll hear people rave about the height or whatever and that’s fine, to each their own, for us, that just defined junk. The elimination of a good rampy transition is a severe limitation of a wakesurf wake, in our opinion and is prevelant on boats which brag about height. That vertical transition makes any sort of surface rotation harder, plus it requires aerials to be done off the face. In our opinion, anytime a board or wake dictates how you’ll ride, it’s substandard.

The Supreme V226 has one of the best ramps and transitions of any wakesurfing boat. In fact, in our opinon, the best transition that we could find in all of the boats we had wakesurfed. If yours is better, please send us an invite we’d love to wakesurf it!

While we are on the wake, height is good and we enjoy nice tall wakes, if the transition remains excellent and the length isn’t affected, but as we mentioned above, we will not weigh the boat dangerously or illegally. So we eliminated all of the boats that would require unsafe or illegal ballasting. It was amazing how many boats this criteria eliminated. What we were left with then is a handful that could develop a good surf wake, and still remain safe and legal. We are rather amazed at how cavalier some companies are about requiring their wakesurf boats to be illegally weighted and stating things like, “well it will look legal”. WTH?! Really?! We just turned away from those boats, if they would condone illegality you can guess how they’d honor a warranty – well of course your engine blew up, you overweighed it! You can’t make a good deal with a bad person, plain and simple.

We also needed adequate length at a reasonable speed. To us, reasonable is less than 12 mph. We often run at 11 mph and if the wake is soft or short at that speed it isn’t a solid wake. We see super long wakes where the folks don’t mention speed. 14 mph in order to generate adequate length was unacceptable to us. So as you look at all of the pictures of our Supreme V226, the ballast including people is well within safe and legal limits, plus the speed is almost always 11 or below. In our mind, this is what most typical wakesurf folks would be looking for.

Further, our money tree died in the last storm, pulled up by the roots and left on the lawn. Most likely we’re like you, we just can’t justify an $85,000 boat when a $58,000 boat will do the exact same thing, in fact mostly better. Residual value of a boat is so dependant on factors like the economy, reputation of the boat manufacturer and even legal conventions surrounding the sport, boat or location. Boat dealer and servicing options. Just way too many factors that can’t be controled. The one thing you can be safe in knowing is that the minute you tow the boat off the lot, it will depreciate in resale value. Projecting that LOSS is hard, but at the very least we knew starting at a lower cost would limit the amount of downward adjustment! Plus monthly payments are significantly less on a $60,000 loan compared to a $90,000 loan! AND that extra 30,000 even if you invest it only in a savings account earing less than 1% interest per annum, it’s still a positive return as opposed to paying the bank interest which is a cost to you!

In our opinion, the Supreme V226 is the value leader in the best wakesurfing boat category.

Lastly was the dealer consideration. We are located in the San Joaquin Valley in Northern California and the economy has hit us hard. The local Tige and Centurion dealers had closed up shop and there wasn’t much around. All things being equal, and they were NOT for us at this point, the dealer experience makes all the difference. We were fortunate that Cal Marine Sports carried the Supreme line. They have a great reputation and are wakesurf specific, so they knew what we needed!

That’s how we made the decision. You may have different criteria altogether and we don’t for a minute intend to tell you what your criteria should be, or what is the most important, we just wanted to share ours.

Now for a few pictures and you can see more of our Supreme V226 in our Flyboy Wakesurf Boards Webshots album.

This is a picture of James Walker in front of the Supreme V226 when we purchased it from the folks at Cal Marine Sports

This is a quick shot of the Supreme V226′s interior.

This is a picture of the transom and you can see it has an exceptionally deep V, with the trim tab at the bottom of the V. The V is present in virtually all of the best wakesurfing boat. It should be noted that this picture was taken just before the automated ballast was installed.

This picture shows the depth of the freeboard. We NEVER weight our boat illegally and we know it’s a pretty common practice to do so, especially amongst those pushing a particular brand of boat, but we just feel that’s irresponsible and bad for the sports image. We know the argument, that there is no weight plate on a 22 foot boat, but that doesn’t change the Coast Guard recommendations and it’s crazy to put 4,000 pounds, including gas, in a 4,500 pound boat. Anyway, we wakesurf responsibly and do not condone unsafe practices, like others do.

One picture of James Walker riding his Flyboy Wakesurf board to wrap this up!

Technorati Tags: best wakesurfing boat, composite sandwich, James Walker, supreme v226, wakesurfing boat

Jan
17

Divinycell composite sandwich skin

We talked briefly about the spread tow carbon fiber we intend to use in this upcoming wakesurf board build. We are emphasizing the componentization of this next build, where we select the best material for what we believe is needed in that specific area of the board. So the bottom of the board will get one treatment, the deck another, the rails yet another. The composite sandwich methodology we use to build our Flyboy Wakesurf boards gives us this flexibility. Not only can we isolate the external areas, we have the ability to isolate the internal components also. One such internal component is the skins of this composite sandwich. If you’ve followed along with our various builds you know we’ve used Balsawood, Corecell, Rohacell and as in this build, Divinycell.

Divinycell is a crossed linked pvc foam, as oppossed to linear pvc foam. The concept of cross-linking is much like the rungs of a ladder. Linear is like the rails of a ladder without the rungs. The linear PVC is more flexible and can be considered more tough, much like comparing a rubber band and toothpick. The rubber band is capable of more tension and bending, but those properties aren’t really suitable for broad application in a wakesurf board. The cross linked variety is much more expensive, stiffer and we feel better suited to the demands of a wakesurf board.

One of the biggest benefits of the FlyBoy Wakesurf boards composite sandwich constructioon is the virtual elemination of heel dents. The construction allows the distribution of compression forces over a greater area than convetional construction, as well as, using a significantly harder and more dense foam compared to conventional constuction. That more dense foam, the skin of the composite sandwich doesn’t crush or compress like non-structural lower density foams and so is capable of distributing compression forces over a greater area. Imagine a slice of bread in comparison to a thinner but much more dense piece of balsa wood. If you apply enough pressure, with say your fingertip, to the slice of bread it dents leaving that depression just like the foam in conventional construction. Do the same thing with the balsawood, using the same pressure and there is no denting, but in effect the pressure is being spread over the surface of the balsa wood, you just can see it. This is how the higher density skin on the composite sandwich Flyboy Wakesurf boards work.

Again if you’ve followed us for any period of time, you’ll recognize that we routinely use a 5 pound density foam, with divinycell that is the H80 density. For this prototype we are increasing the density to 6′ish pounds, plus we also have thicknesses ranging from 3mm to 6mm. You know that the stiffness of a composite sandwich is derived principally by it’s thickness. In effect, the way we build our Flyboy Wakesurf boards is a cobination of 3 unique sandwiches. Each of the skins has a ply of reinforcement, thereby making up a composite sandwich with a core, plus the two skins are connected via an EPS core, making a separate third composite sandwich. By increasing the thickness of the skin thickness we can alter the stiffness of that component. It would be feasible to have the deck skin twice as thick as the bottom skin with an exponential increase in stiffness to four times that of the bottom.

This is the H100 we referenced earlier, you can see that it has a tan or yellowish coloration and might remind you of Corecell A500.

This is a picture of the H80 Divinycell that we have used most often, it is gray in color and it is a 5 pound density foam.

Interestingly enough, the compressive forces on a wakesurf board are rather unique when subjected to aerials. In terms of elapsed time, the deck skin is under compressive force the longest. Every minute a rider stands on the deck, it’s under compression, but not a whole lot of compression. Building a board to withstand that amount of compressive force doesn’t take much. In fact, you’ve seen the picture of the truck parked on one of our R&D boards. That takes more strength! Interestingly enough, landing from an aerial imposes some of the greatest compressive forces on a wakesurf board. Breakage on the deck side of a composite sandwich is almost always attributable to neglect or abuse, but the bottom can be the result of insufficient reinforcement. We should take a moment here and mention that Divinycell is typically considered a core foam, but we use it for the skin, because it is significantly more dense than the foams used in wakesurf boards, save for compression molded offerings.

Remember a few posts back where we talked about the tensile strength of wood and how the amount of force calculation included a factor for the amount of time the speed went to zero? That’s what landing from an aerial includes. Gravity is propelling the wakesurf board and wakesurfer unit down towards the wake accelerating at 32 feet/sec squared. That impact, while short-lived, is much greater than anything on the deck side, except for that very same landing. So we have to build to withstand that impact and it is greater on the bottom of the board, than on the top. Theroretically, we should be contemplating increasing the compressive strength of the bottom in some fashion. There isn’t impact issues, but there is compressive issues. This build will examine that theoretical concern hopefully address it!

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FlyBoy Wakesurf Boards – wakesurfing

FlyBoy Wakesurf – the most technically advanced wakesurf boards