Concave deck without losing volume

If you’ve been following along, you know that we want to shape a short, fast, super manuverable pocket-rocket for working in these diminished functional length pockets on MOWs. One of the concepts we’ve mentioned is a concave deck, BUT we’ve also mentioned wanting more volume for use in the wake in the very back of an MOW. Normally a concave deck is associated with reduced volume and we don’t want that. So what we will be doing is ADDING foam to the deck in the outline area where the kicks will be along the outline. The kicks, will in effect be triangles glued to the surface of the deck defore final shaping. We aren’t concerned with adding extra stiffness or reducing volume, instead improving control is the principal focus of the concavity. Because of that, our concave deck is going to be significantly tighter than what you’d normally see on a wakesurf board. Probably just outside the outline of James’ foot.

That would not be a good universal board as it’s doubtful that many folks will have the same shoe size as James! We’ll post up the first few frames of the construction, and just remember that our plan is to ADD foam to develop the kick for the concave deck, not shape them OUT of the existing foam. So the tail of the board will seem thin, or at least a normal thickness. In a rather radical departure from normal lengths we are going to make this board 4′ 2″ long. That falls into a grom measurement for many boards!

Back to the concept of a concave deck, the influence we are talking about comes from skateboard decks. This is a picture that shows the concept.

As you can see, the rails or the outline are gently rolled up, but the center of the board remains flat. The thickness of the deck is the same everywhere, there isn’t any volume change to worry about. Now we’ll actually wind up adding a touch of volume, but it will be minimal. The key is that we don’t plan to take any away. Also, you’ll note that the depth of the skateboard concave is really minimal, about 3/8″ on this deck. Basically just someplace for the toes to push against.  We haven’t quite fully figured out the potential issues with traction, nor how we are going to skin this board, as we plan to make it in our sandwich construction.  Stay tuned for those items!

On to the construction, we scavanged some 1 pound density foam for this project you can see that it’s lightly stained on the outside. We’ll be melting away the rocker, so aren’t too worried about the outside.

We are using our standard rocker template for this project, but in actuality the rocker will have a steeper run up at the nose. We are going to keep the same total nose rocker, but the curve will be more aggressive out at the nose. It’s a decreasing radius curve. That is there is a constant curving part but it gets more and more aggressive as it gets closer to the nose. The idea was that we still wanted the same amount of TOTAL rocker but we wanted it to remain unchanged in that area close to the apex.

This is a different view showing the rocker that we will be hotwiring in.

Finally, the rocker hot wired in. We will need to bend in a little more using a shim on our rocker bed. In effect we want to wind up with the nose in the same spot from horizontal, but 2 inches closer to the tail!

The next steps will be working on the revised outline. While we made the board shorter, we added about 3/4″ inch all the way around, so none of our templates will work!  Hopefully the change won’t affect James ability to throw a big spin!

Thanks so much for following along we appreciate it.

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