Shaping for MOW’s

We are going to express some concern about our Webshots albumns. We’ve been posting to the Flyboy Wakesurf Blog for close to 3 years now. There are something like 850+ blog posts and almost every one of those posts has a picture or two in it. We’ve hosted most of those pictures on the Webshots website. It was owned by American Greetings, but was recently sold back to the creators of the site. They are taking the bold step of basically changing EVERYTHING In a world of instagram and facebook a simple photo hosting site probably has little value. However for us, what that means is thousands of dead links in all of our posts!!!! That article on how to do a 360, with those handy and helpful pictures in sequence are 6 weeks away from becoming red X’s. Sheesh, anyway our PLAN is to download all of them and find a picture hosting site that isn’t run by a bunch of MORONS!

We will make sure we get all the pictures back in place, but who knows how long that will take to identify and redo all the links, at least we’ll have something to do during the holidays!

We wanted to talk a little bit more about MOW shaping and then move on to some design elements and how we’ll plan to shape for the upcoming season. First an amazing piece of artwork:

Have you ever skated a halfpipe? Pipe across the lip at the top and what’s at the bottom? A nice smooth transition onto the flats. There is no trough at the bottom and as a skater you know you can weight and unweight to gain speed going into the opposite side transition. Landing on the transition is also the best way to NOT break your knees and ankles!!! Some of the wall is nice, but it doesn’t need to be 5 feet of vertical. In fact even the most radical halfpipes have some form of transition starting right off the lip. They may be steep, but it’s there…and there is never a trough, always smoothing into the flat surface of the deck of the halfpipe. No one wants a trough. It serves no functional purpose. It may be used as an indictaor for a taller/steeper wake, but the trough itself is useless. As you can see by the arrows describing waterflow, the entry into the trough is actually down, which would pull the outside rail down, while the inside rail is being lifted up.

The tendency is for the board to spin counter clockwise on it’s horizontal axis! No one really wants that, although it would be fun to watch.

How does one shape for that? Well one way to smooth the trough into a transition is by speeding the boat up. So let’s say that your normal board you ride at 10.5. Developing that same board for an average speed of 11.5, would work better in that environment. Another is just move further back on the wake. The power of that MOW would be greatly reduced, which is true with all wakes, not just MOW‘s. Tricks would then be performed in a much smaller area, basically it’s outside of the sweet spot and the board must be fast enough and manuverable enough to allow the rider to work in that tightened area. Working within that tightened area will dictate slightly narrower noses, faster down-the-line speed and much quick response times. Most likely, more bouyancy to work with the weaker wakes waaaayyyy back in the back. Also, a shorter and wider board, not significantly wider, say maybe 3/4″ and shortening the length by 1 or 2 inches. Then also, something to increase responsiveness, like concave decks. That tends to reduce volume in the deck, so there would need to be some additional voume built in along the rails, or actually slightly inside the rail line. Speaking of rail lines, the outline will be straighter to effect more down-the-line speed, but there will need to be somewhat more rocker to work within that smaller effective pocket. You get the idea, more manueverable, smaller, tighter and more agressive.

You’ll remember in the last build where we talked about the LSS construction, Lighter, Stiffer and Shorter. We will be relying heavily on those construction techniques to allow us to reduce the required footprint on the wake. As mentioned above, troughs serve no purpose and we’ll want a wakesurf board that won’t be forced to attempt to use that area on MOW‘s.

We are sort of in between projects waiting for some of our resin infusion materials and supplies to arrive, they are about a week out due to some shipping delays, but we will be demonstrating some of those techniques shortly.

We really appreciate you following along and hopefully over the next week or so, we’ll have several test bed boards rolling full steam ahead and we’ll be able to document some wakesurf board shaping concepts.

Technorati Tags: MOW, wakesurf board shaping