This is going to be a concave deck wakesurfer week. You may remember back when we built the concave deck wakesurfer and we took it out for a quick test, but James Walker was recovering from a knee injury and didn’t get a chance to ride it. We really liked the concept and James has such a background in other non-strapped board sports like skateboarding and wakeskating, that we wanted to develop a deck that gave James that same level of control.
We’re not sure if you can really see it in this picture, but the middle of the deck side of the wakesurf board is carved out. Like you would see with a wakeskate or skateboard deck.
In surfboard shaping, the concave deck is often employed to reduce volume in the middle of the board and put it out at the rails. As students of composite design you know that would move stiffness out towards the rails, which is a common design element or at least a characteristic that most shapers strive for in some manner.
We didn’t really want either of those attributes or lets say we didn’t want to enhance what we already had, so we tried to shape the board without increasing those attributes and didn’t quite get it right with this concave deck wakesurf board. We wound up with the rails too thick, but it did lead us to the next method of designing and building for the concave deck wakesurfer. What we were striving for was more control, sort of a more tactile feel of the deck surface. We already had a good distribution of volume and we didn’t need to get closer to the water in the middle, nor increase the stiffness of the rail line. James really liked the concave deck and we also have a new production concave deck wakesurf board that we’ll have in our hands when you are reading this. We hope that you’ll check back in tomorrow to get the first glimpse of the second iteration of the Flyboy Wakesurf concave deck wakesurfer. We’ll talk about how we redesigned the first effort to achieve the design goals of basically leaving the original Flyboy Wakesurfer alone while adding the concave deck for control purposes!
Here are a few select pictures of James Walker wakesurfing the concave deck wakesurfer prototype. You should be able to double click any of the pictures to go to our Flyboy Wakesurf Flickr album.
You know us, we strive for unedited videos. We know that folks judge by appearances, but also know that you’re smart enough to know when a rider doesn’t land a trick and we just don’t want to be known for attempting to mislead you into thinking something was landed when it wasn’t. When James falls, you’ll know it. We’d guess we aim to be trusted rather than pretty.
So…here is a short unedited YouTube clip of James Walker wakesurfing the concave deck wakesurfer.
If you would prefer to watch the concave deck wakesurfer video on your Youtube console, just follow the link.
Thanks so much for following along and be sure to check back tomorrow for the first glimpse of the Flyboy Wakesurf concave deck wakesurfer.
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