Unidirectional carbon fiber and wake surf board delirium.

We got lots of text messages and emails from yesterday’s post.    It’s good to see some thoughtful consideration on such topics as a surf wake.

So where were we? Oh yeah! Our perimeter frame wake surf board. It’s been quite awhile since we talked about this build, so a little refresher. Do you remember this picture? We had cut the rail material out from our high density divinycell foam. We’ll be attaching that to the side of the core in this post.

Ok, up-to-date? We vaguely remember where we were on this, ourselfs.

So we bend ‘em and glue ‘em. The end.

No, we’re just pulling your leg, but we didn’t do a great job of documenting this part of the process, so we’ll sort of talk you through it. Each of the pieces of the rail material are the same length, but they were also cut oversize so that we had some “play” in attaching the material to the core of the wake surf board. So the first step is to start from the inside of the stack of rail material working outward and mark and cut the length. We do this by placing the material flush with the tail block and then bending it down to match the outline. We then mark it at the nose and cut it with a razor. Each piece is done that way, BUT and this is important, the previously cut pieces are placed down first. The radius of the third piece is significantly longer than the first piece and so we need the inner pieces in place to accurately measure.

After each of the six pieces are cut to length and test fitted, we mix up a batch of epoxy and paint the inside of each piece, assembling the stack on the rail area of the core of this wake surf board. THEN, we tape that stack into place to allow us to manage the other rail and to also help while we move the project into the vacuum bag. You can see the various pieces of masking tape holding the material in place in the picture above.

Lather, rinse and repeat for the other side. You can sorta see in ths picture the built up rail material and also that it’s not very tight up against the core!

Check the backlighting on this picture! We’re stylish! Ok, the vacuum bag clamps the whole project down tight and all the pieces tight against each other.

We’ll leave the whole thing like that until the epoxy cures and then pop it out of the bag.

Ok, before we close this post we want to talk briefly about about the concept of carbon fiber and it’s use on a wake surf board, especially along the bottom. If you are a faithful follower of Flyboy Wakesurf boards you’ll remember that we worked on a reverse camber springer and wound up sort of disgusted with the results. Not because of the concept, but we just didn’t plan that construction very well. One of the issues was that while the springer stiffened up the centerline of the board, it didn’t do squat for the perimeter and so in effect actually induced a greater rail twist off! WTH?! Soooooooo not what we wanted to achieve. Well does that remind you of anything else? Yeah, all those carbon fiber taped bottoms. Without some form of stiffening along the rails carbon tape down the centerline is just bling, because it makes the center of the board significant stiffer than the perimeter and so under a load guess what happens?

That’s right the rails being significantly less stiff twist all up in response to the loads applied. PURE UNADULTERATED JUNK. So we are going to try something. We love the idea of uni carbon on the bottom that can be loaded in tension going into an air or a turn, and then have it UNLOAD with all sorts of snap.

Here is what we are up to!

Ok so you’ll need to come back and visit the Flyboy Wakesurf blog to see what we’re doing on this wake surf board build, and thanks so much for following along!

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