Have you ever wished that your wakesurf board was a but faster, more responsive or maybe released better? We all have, in fact you probably have a wakesurf board in your garage that you’ve outgrown or felt were not fast enough or responsive enough. We want to show you a trcik for some of those molded boards that you can use to breath new life into them. We have an Inland Surfer Ooze that James Walker really likes and it’s a good size for him, but now that he’s ridden it for awhile, he’d like to improve the release and speed, as well as, responsiveness. We’re going to do that by grinding the rails down. This probably isn’t a good idea on a non-molded board, unless you’re handy with fiberglass, but for molded boards, it’s simply a matter of grinding away some excess resin to reshape the rails. As we talk about yesterday, epoxy and polyester boards that aren’t molded can be changed also, but there isn’t much external resin to work with, so you’ll wind up having to relaminate of you hack into the foam, OR you can build up a resin bead along the rails and gring that down.
So here is a picture of the rails of our Ooze and if you look at them carefully, you can see they are pretty soft, or rounded for a skim style offering. If we could reshape that we’d have a faster, more responsive board with better release. Being that this is molded and also, that we are kinda handy with fiberglass, we thought we’d give a go at reshaping the rails.
Here’s all you’ll need. Sanding disc or grinder and a sanding block with several grits of sandpaper, we started with 60 grit on the sanding pad and then used the sanding block with 80, 100, 150 and then finally with 220.
After liberal grinding and sanding you can see that we’ve reshaped the rails to be a tad more hard or sharp
You should know that surfboards that work their way from laminator to sander usually have a small bead of resin around the rail to allow the sander to grind a sharp edge where needed. So there is no underlying foam or fiberglass, but instead just a build up of resin. You can do that too if you don’t like the tuck of a rail or want to completely reshape the rails of your old outgrown or even a favorite wakesurf board. Regardless of the wakesurf board construction, you can add a bead of epoxy or polyester for this purpose.
Here is a short unedited clip of James Walker wakesurfing the Ooze front shuv’s and all manner of other tricks.
…and finally you’ll shine like a rockstar! Ok we just wanted to work that photo in there. 
Mostly what we want to convey is that if you’re board is really just amazingly close to what you want, but it’s a tad sluggish, some resin work or grinding can make it ride like a completely new board. There tends to be an emphasis on swapping fins (which is limited to the effectiveness of the fins) and buying new wakesurf boards, but there are tons of other options and rail work can have an amazing impact on the performance of your wakesurf board.
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