Shaping the wakesurf board deck concave

In our last post we showed the mock up of a shoe and then also the traction we intended to apply to the MOW specific wakesurf board concave deck. We’ll post that picture again, for continuity.

A little discussion before we continue. The deck side of the wakesurf board will have a concave under the front foot that is close to 1/2″ deep and spans the width of the wakesurf board, at least wider than James’ foot and still leaving enough room to shape the rail bands. We will be attaching a skin to the deck, as is our normal composite sandwich construction. That skin will not have any impact on the depth of the concave. The bottom of the concave will be raised by the thickness of the skin, or 3mm, but also so will the two outside peaks which form the start of the rail bands and the edges of the concave. That said, we can shape the wakesurf board deck concave to the final projected depth of 1/2″ from the peaks and we’ll be fine after attaching the skin.

The width or radius of the concave is different however. On the radius of the concave which extends up to the tip of the peaks, that will actually lose some width due to the skin thickness, so we have to extend the radius slightly, a total of 6mm of which 3mm will be on each side of the centerline of the wakesurf board. In the picture above you can see that we’ve used a shoe as a general guide of the radius of the wakesurf board deck concave, but we don’t want that to be the final dimension, it’s just a general guideline. We extended the concave some from the length of the shoe so that there would be room for a foot misplacement, but also we added that extra 1/4″ or 6 mm to what we felt was the proper radius! Wasn’t that fun??!!

You should also notice that we have placed the rear traction as we plan to use on the wakesurf board. It has an angle on the back as an aid in helping water flow up and over the traction when the wakesurf board is revert, also the concave in the back is very shallow, but still present, we calculated it at around 3/16″ max depth, compared to the 1/2″ under the front foot.

The next step is to trace the outline of the traction, so that we have the rough area that we want to shape the concave into, you’ll remember that we didn’t want to lose any volume with this MOW specific wakesurf board, instead we were shaping the concave for control purposes only. In the picture below you can see the marks we’ve made to reflect the location of the traction and then the heel and toe lines based upon the arch of the shoe.

Now comes the hard part! Once we have the boundaries of the concave figured out we need to blend those into the actual deck of the wakesurf board. A wakesurf board deck concave that has abrupt edges or no transition is just as horrible as a wakesurf wake with no transition. Nobody likes it despite the marketing hype that you read. We’ve roughed out the general shape of the wakesurf board deck concave, blending the lines and attempting to retain as much volume as possible.

We’ll skip ahead briefly and share the roughly shaped deck on the MOW specific wakesurf board so that you can get an idea what it will look like as we begin to actually mow the foam.

The 2 x 4 across the peaks of the concave give you an idea of the depth of the concave, and also the raidus of the concave, as we elaborated on earlier.

Thanks so much for following along, tomorrow we’ll go more in depth on the actual shaping of the concave, expanding on that last picture.

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