One of the interesting things about wake surf board design and fabrication is that there is a significant amount of misinformation that gets bantied around. It makes it hard to make an informed decision unless you actually know how to build a wake surf board. If you did, you probably wouldn’t spend a great deal of time on this site, save to see what we are doing!
There is this myth, about molded boards where the external layers of fiberglass and resin are allowed to soak into the EPS foam and thereby reduce shear or make the board too stiff. Logically, the same would hold true for conventional construction also. EPS foam is EPS foam, regardless of whether it’s being laminated by hand or inside of a mold. Conventional construction will sometimes seal the EPS blank to prevent undue resin absorption. That can’t be done with molded or vacuum bagged boards??!! Of course it can. There is nothing that prevents the interior core of the EPS from being sealed. So if that is a step that increases the performance of a board it can be done by hand, in a vacuum bag or in a mold.
Another myth that gets thrown out there is that molding results in excess resin out at the exterior of the wake surf board. That certainly CAN happen, conventional lamination techniques aren’t a safeguard against that happening. It’s just as easy to ladle on too much resin by hand as it is in a molded or vacuum bagged construction method. The real concern is whether or not the builder is making efforts to reduce the weight of the board and is keeping resin and reinforcement ratios at an optimal level, NOT if the construction is molded, vacuum bagged or by hand.
So having said that, we intentionally set out to use extra resin in the core and in the sandwich layer of this current wake surf board build AND have it soak into the EPS core. I know, we’re crazy! Actually, we know that resin weighs substantially more than fiberglass, but it also does a really good job of gluing things together and in increase some stiffness and compression strength. We have been very careful to not get crazed, but instead changed the resin to reinforcement ratio from 1:1 to 1.5:1. So if we had 4 ounces of reinforcement, we used 6 ounces of resin.
We also did something substantial different during the lamination of the bottom skin to the wakesurfers. We’ll show you a picture first and then go into details. This is a picture of the rocker bed and the wake surf board both inside a vacuum bag.
Can you tell what’s different? Did you guess that the whole thing is upside down? (No fair Jim, you’ve already guessed! 
) Can you guess why?
Well first off we need to give you some background. The vacuum bag pulls all of the air, or most of it, OUT from inside the bag. The net result is a vacuum, no air, just the wake surf board and and it’s components. What does a vaccuum do to gravity? That’s right NOTHING. So while the vacuum bag exterts considerable pressure on the surfaces of the wake surf board, it doesn’t change gravity in the least and the epoxy, while it is still liquid will react to gravity by flowing downward towards that gravitational pull. Now, when we are vacuum bagging the deck side, where does the epoxy run? Right, down into the EPS core by virtue of the gravitational pull. Where does the epoxy flow if we leave the rocker bed right side up when laminating the bottom skin? Did you theorize away from the core and towards the bottom skin? You’d be right! In conventional lamination, what happens to the epoxy when the bottom is being laminated? Well, the laminator turns the wake surf board upside down and works with the reinforcement and resin such that gravity is pulling the resin downward and into the EPS. Now we’ve also used a slow hardener to insure that the effects of gravity could take effect. The cure time at the temperature we were working in was about 7 hours.
So what, you ask? Well it’s a consideration that we need to address. Gravity has an effect on the flow of resin and if we WANT that to happen then we need to utilize that force.
BUT and this is a big but, what if we don’t want that? What if the best performance occurs when the resin is kept towards the surface and away from the EPS core. We go back to the way we’ve done it in the past and turn everything right side up! The point being that using the vacuum bag as a tool gives us far greater flexibility than conventional techniques. Also, we’d like to toot our own horn for a minute here, we utilize what may seem like unconventional techniques, but it’s mostly just us experimenting with what works best and not being tied to any one concept or methodology, instead focusing on what provides the best results.
So hopefully we haven’t left you topsy-turvy, but instead intriqued by the intorduction of this new technique! Thanks so much for reading this far and we hope you’ll continue to follow along!
9 comments
2 pings
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January 21, 2012 at 7:37 am (UTC -8)
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Edgelsengagma
January 21, 2012 at 3:10 pm (UTC -8)
Nice read. I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. He actually bought me lunch as I found it for him! Thus let me rephrase: Thanx for lunch!
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January 22, 2012 at 5:33 am (UTC -8)
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Gordon
January 22, 2012 at 7:03 am (UTC -8)
This really is the best wake surf boards site in existence. So many of the so called authority sites are just jibberish or self-serving spam, thanks for TRULY helping the wakesurf community.
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February 4, 2012 at 1:32 pm (UTC -8)
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Travis Acerno
February 7, 2012 at 3:38 pm (UTC -8)
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Wakesurf board right side up
January 25, 2012 at 4:30 am (UTC -8)
[...] « Wake surf board more myths [...]
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January 28, 2012 at 10:38 am (UTC -8)
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