In the last post we had laid out the rough dimensions of the concave deck wakesurf board, and in this post we’ll go about shaping those concaves. There are actually two concaves, one under the rear foot for the kicktail and then a separate one under the front foot. The concave under the front foot is significantly deeper and wider, or with a larger radius, than in the back under the rear foot.
We’ll start the process with our electric planer, and if you look at the attached picture you can see that we’ve rougly drawn the area of the concaves that we’ll be removing.
What we had to do on this concave deck wakesurf board is bring the nose down into the basic shape we wanted. The deck side of this wakesurf board is pretty full and will be so after we are done, so blending the nose into that fullness took a little extra work. You can see in the picture above that we’ve brought the nose down and that we have marked a rail line along the top of the high density rail material. That marks the line we want to bring the deck down to, after shaping the deck concave.
This next picture is not a great shot, but it will give you an idea of the process. We set the planer for a 1/16″ cut for each pass. That is to say each pass of the planer will cut a 1/16″ deep planer width from the foam. Since we want our cuts or the shape to be a concave, we start our cuts directly in the middle and then radiate outward for each pass. We want a total depth of 1/2″, but also want to leave ourselves a little to work with to cleanup the rather straight planer cuts, so we calculate 6 passes directly down the middle, which will cut a depth of 3/8″, then each planer width outward from the center will get 1 less path, so the two planer widths outward from the centerline would get 5 passes or a depth of 5/16″ and the widths next to that 4 passes for a depth of 1/4″ etc. If you look closely at the picture you can see the various depths and the planer paths cut into the foam.
In this picture you can see that we’ve hit the rails bands and brought the outline down to our estimated thickness, don’t forget that we still have two more pieces of rail material to add and also that we’ve roughed in the deck concave, as well as, thinned the nose some what. Our next step is to break out the surform and blend all those planer cuts into a nice smooth curve. We’re still shooting from the hip here, not quite sure this will be the best shape or not, but we are sticking to our plan. We’re also taking copious notes as we develop this concave deck wakesurf board so that when we get a chance to ride it, we’ll have a starting point for making revisions…and trust us, there will be needed revisions! Have you ever read or seen stories where everything is perfect 100% of the time? It’s not believeable is it? Life isn’t that way, we all know that. No falls, or stuff added to make the perfect wake more perfect is all marketing hype.
We just don’t play that game, we know you understand that the process of R&D winds up with more failures than successes, but the failures are what lead us to something better, in the long run. Hopefully. 
Ok, so back on task, you’ll remember the picture below from yesterday, we’ve rough cut our concave and then used the surform to shape it some, next we break out the sanding block and smooth the concave out. The 2 x 4 shows the concave as we attempt to keep it smooth and symmetrical
So that’s it for today. The next step is attaching the deck skin, which we’re a little concerned with because of the compound curves caused by the concave deck wakesurf board, but we’ll give it a ago, here is a picture from next weeks post about attaching the deck skin.
Thanks so much for following along with this wakesurf board concave deck, we really appreciate it!
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