Wake surfer vacuum bagging kevlar bottom

There’s a nasty virus running amok in the Walker household, so we hope you’ll bear with us as we try and beat this thing. Lots of coughing and hacking going on and no so much writing or production!

In the last post we had cut all of the reinforcement fabric and in today’s post we are cutting the consumable supplies for this wake surfer build. These are the breather, peel ply and a release film called Stretchlon. The peel ply goes down first and does two things, it releases from the cured resin and also leaves a very fine texture. We’ll talk a little bit more about a second texture we are testing out in this wake surfer in a minute. The breather allows air to pass through it even at full vacuum plus it absorps excess resin. The stretchlon pulls the whole package tight so that we can slide it into the bag, then when the vacuum clamps down the laps and all of the curves are nicely conformed.

Now that we have all of the material cut out and ready we will begin the glue up, the reinforcement is again biased cut for each layer and we alternate the sides of the fabric, a warp and a fill side if you will. The material is wet out and applied to the bottom, then the peel ply, breather and finally holding it all down with the stretchlon.

Ok now on to the second texture we were talking about.  Look close to where the rear foot would be, you’ll see a slight waviness in the pattern

We’re not completely sure this will work, but we’ll give you the rundown. You may remember a few months ago that we wanted to develop a C pinning methodology but just couldn’t find a practical way to do it without a machine. We recognize the potential benefits, but haven’t found a suitable way to implement it! What we’ve done is placed a Z azis indentation in the foam, that cause the various layers to gain just a slight amount of a third dimension under the feet on the deck and then inbetween the feet on the bottom. We are running the indentations at a slight bias also.  They may look almost random, but in effect it’s a slight diagonal. We are theorizing that by implementing some reinforcement on the 3rd axis we can gain some rigidity without the extra weight. We’ve had to be very careful of pulling the extra resin and also we were very moderate in the “groove”ing. It’s just barely visible and you can sort of feel it with your hands, but it’s not as defined as say ridged potatoe chips. It could be that it will delaminating under the first test ride, but we’re hoping not.  We really don’t like the crazy hype that goes on in this industry, so we don’t want this to sound like it’s the next marvel!  We still don’t know if it will work, but we thought you’d enjoy know what’s going on with those crazy lines on that wake surfer.

That’s all for today, thanks so much for following along and sticking with us as we try and beat this stupid virus, hopefully we’ll be back to more wake surf board production in no time.

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