Wake surf board the Thumb

We’re putting the finishing touches on the annoucement for the winner of the Flyboy Wakesurf Huge and First Annual Surf Style giveaway. Stay tuned as we make that announcement here on Flyboy Wakesurf boards blog and thanks so much for your patience. We had well over 100 entrants and it took quite a while to get all of them sorted out so that we could be sure we had a fair “drawing” from the hat.

We got a few pictures from our good friends at The Walker Project who we’ve contracted with to build a Thumb wake surf board for us. We got a few pictures and wanted to share them with you here. Now remember this wake surf board is designed to be ridden on the nose, so it’s going to have a very odd look! Nose riding isn’t a wake surf trick we normally see behind the boat.  Currently wake surf boards are either skim, cruisers or shortboards and we wanted to build some awareness of some of the other styles that are available. In the ocean shapers make all sorts of boards and you’ll see all manner of surfcraft at your local break, but no so with wakesurfing.  We hope you’ll find this unique wake surf board both enlightening in terms of design and fun.

In this first picture, you can see the deck side is finished and that’s the nose up front, the pointy pintail is at the back! You may notice a small black dot in the middle of the board, that is a one way vent that the folks at The Walker Project install into all of the EPS and Epoxy boards. That vent allows air that is trapped inside to escape out rather than delaminating the exterior fiberglass. When we wakesurf behind the boat the temperatures can get crazy hot, much hotter than you’d ever experience down by the beach. Most of the epoxy development and guidelines for a wake surf board comes from ocean surfboard shapers, much of that doesn’t apply to our 110 in the shade temps further inland!

This venting process is something that TWP is doing to protect the wake surf board from that different environment behind the boat.

Ok so are you ready for the bottom? Now is THAT a fin or what?!

We know you’re probably howling right about now, it is a BEAST of a fin pod, but that is what we asked for. The folks at TWP have done a lot of ocean surfboards and that was one of the reason we enlisted their expertise on this project. The fin pod you’re seeing is called a Bonzer 5 and will be composed of four fins along the rails, you can see the black dots in front of that monster green center fin. Those are FCS fin plugs and there will be specially shaped and canted fins that work in conjunction with the huge center fin mounted there which accounts for all 5 of the fins. Also, the bottom of the board has a double concave, we’ll show you that in one of the following pictures. You can also see in this picture with that fin in place, the very significant pintail. That shape allows the tail of the board to sink, but also will help with turning when we are way up at the nose of the board.

Here is one more picture of the giant center fin and we’ll talk about the masking tape in that picture.

So no doubt you’re wondering about that upside down V made from the masking tape attached to that giant fin. It’s a little hard to see, but that giant fin slides into a fin box, we like to call it a “kook” box. It’s from a longboard and allows those huge sing fins to be installed and also allows some adjustment. There is a single screw that is tightened and the fin has some travel lengthwise in that box. What you are seeing in the pictures is that box being installed into our Thumb project. This board is of EPS and Epoxy construction so the kook box is installed with epoxy and that takes some time to cure. The green fin you see is a dummy fin that is used to align the kook box in the wake surf board. A hole is routed in the board and then the kook box pressed into it, but that doesn’t guarantee perfect vertical alignment. The glasser uses a square and level to assure the vertical alignment of the fin and then tapes it into place so it doesn’t move while the epoxy cures.

After the curing cycle, both the tape and fin will be removed.

One last picture. If you look really closely you can see the shape of the bottom back by the center fin. It’s referred to as a double concave. The stringer runs down the middle of the wake surf board and is a high point, matching the rail height. In between the rails and the stringer and on both sides of the stringer are concaves or low points.

In theory the double concave helps channel water flow and also loosens up the hold of the board. Now the Bonzer 5 is designed for ocean waves, which have quite a bit more power than we are used to behind the boat. In fact, virtually any fin pod designed for use in the ocean is ridiculously over-finned for behind the boat. This makes sense to us logically, a fin pod designed for waves moving 15 to 20 mph up the face and 6 to 8 feet tall would just offer too much hold for our boat wakes, that maybe hit 3 feet tall and with a flow that is probably less than 10 mph up the face. Those two environments would dictate different fin pods for optimum performance. Still we all like what we like and for this wake surf board, we want to be able to ride the nose! Hence that huge center fin and we also really wanted to try out the Bonzer side runners which act somewhat like a quad.

So that’s the update, we should have this wake surf board in hand shortly and we’ll keep you posted on how it rides!

Thanks so much for following along, we appreciate it!

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