Inland Surfer Contagious traction modification

Do you love the Inland Surfer Contagious, but hate the location of the traction? Yeah, us too! Inland Surfer does a great job of keeping the price of their boards low and one of the ways they do that is by using one set of traction across several of their wakesurf models. For the most part the Inland Surfer Contagious is a solid skim board, but isn’t always considered a pro level design. Our very own James Walker really likes the feel of this skim style wakesurf board. It’s size, shape and weight seem to be just what the doctor ordered! With one exception. That traction! The traction is nice enough, but the kick at the back was too far forward for James. Now you may be thinking, that’s no biggee, just heat that baby up and pull it up! Not quite so fast there! The various Inland Surfer skim style boards are fairly thin, the Inland Surfer Contagious is 5/8″ thick and a little heat will very possibly lead to a delamination of the tail section of the wakesurf board. Trust us on this!!!!!

The traction is stuck down with a super heavy duty marine grade epoxy. It’s definately on there for the long-term. This is NOT the same stick’em that you’ll find on after market traction with the 3M adhesive. You can remove the traction in total, but it’s not an easy task or all that fun. We are all about fun and reducing work here at Flyboy, so we started to investigate just removing the kick of the traction. So we yanked on it! We know, not the best way to test, but we found that the kick didn’t have glue under the whole thing, just along the outline. Anyway, it came up fairly easy, there was a small amount of EVA foam transfer

We are going to present teh next picture and then discuss a number of things going on.

The kick will leave a small amount of EVA stuck to the board, that black line, so we peel that off using a razor. The kick is very flexible and can be flopped back and forth. We flopped it forward and then cut it off using a hacksaw blade. A knife or razor can be used also. Finally, measure the location of the thru bolt for the fin. You’ll need to put a small whole in your traction to get to this later, IF you want to be able to remove the fin.

Whew, that was a LOT. Once you have the area cleaned up and the kick removed you have a few options. You can glue the kick down in a different location, or like we did, we broke out a different traction pad and cut it to fit. We like the glue on the aftermarket traction sets. They stick perfect, but are still removable with reasonable effort.

We wanted to move the tail backwards about 1.5 inches, we had already ridden the Contagious and had a solid idea where we wanted the kick, so we measured and marked the aftermarket traction and then using a pair of scissors carefully cut a straight line across the pads and test fitted them. Once we were satisfied with the placement and “straightness” we stuck the pad down.

You’ll notice in the picture above the gap in between the two halves. You can leave that, or fit a small section on the arch that comes with your traction set, like we did.

Now for the proof! Here is James Walker landing a back big on the Inland Surfer Contagious in a short unedited YouTube Video clip

You have to love watching James trying to get used to riding without fins! He is definately a surf style rider!

One thing we forgot to document was poking a hole through the traction so that you can get to the thru-bolt to remove the fin.

We are still working on that composite sandwich multi-density wakesurf board core and want to show you a fun demonstration soon!  Thanks so much for following along!

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