So we titled this post, Wakesurf board design, yeah but does it work? In short, we don’t know.
We’re going off on a tangent for a minute. We get lots of emails from companies trying to sell us stuff. The current trend is; here is a free “whatever” just give us your name and email address. It’s opt-in email address gathering in exchange for something that seems to be of value. So we got an offer from a company that we’ve already done this with. They had the email address and name, so when we clicked on the link to get the special free whatever it was, guess what?
They asked for the email and name again. Really? They were so focused on gathering email addresses that they didn’t filter out existing addresses? And why didn’t you just send the damn report rather than making folks click on links and be given the landing page, yet again. Think we filled out the email grabber again? No, we walked away feeling like just so much email space to those folks and certainly not valued.
The very next email, seemed to do it RIGHT! There wasn’t an opt-in form, instead it was a link to the report. The 10 best ways to shave a cat or some such nonsense. The report or free offer was junk, but we’d already opted in, so they were at least more accurate in filtering out the existing email addresses.
But what both companies did was just irritate us. One with the over-zealous focus on gathering email addresses and the other with a junk report that had no relevance to us.
One of the things we try hard to do here at Flyboy is value you. We share much of our research and development work on wakesurf board design so that you have a better understanding of US and our purpose, but also in hopes that you’ll walk away with some useful knowledge, even if it’s what NOT to buy from some of our failed experiments. 
We like being thought leaders, it challenges us and at the same time sets us apart from all the “me too” companies.
We are going to challenge some of your acceptance of what wakesurfing is. Not that profound, that sounds like the bumpy-lumps spam’ish crap. We want to explore some design and shaping options. Briefly, most of what we see in our wakesurf board offerings are repurposed ocean skim boards and repurposed and smaller ocean surf boards.
We are reminded of Mike Armstrong’s, of Calibrtaed Wakesurfing, statements about the fact that we are wakesurfing. Not skimming or surfing. There are so many differences between the various sports. With ocean or flatland skimming, there are folks running down the beach and tossing the board in front of them. There are design elements in skimmers that are optimized for just that purpose. How much does that help us in wakesurfing? Zero, right? Why do we have those optimizations?
No damn reason at all! Those attributes have no relevance for us in wakesurfing. Like that stupid junk report in the opening paragrapgh “The ten best ways to shave a cat”, it’s irrelevant. Why do we buy it? Well what are your options, right? Plus there is just so much jibberish from folks proclaiming to be experts. Literally last week they were picking up their first broadcast and this week they are spewing the latest and greatest technology. So not! The size of your ego isn’t commensurate with your knowledge.
A company’s ability to gather email addresses, or sell units of product, doesn’t make that product good, nor is it reflective that the designs are progressive or even good for that matter.
So, what sorts of things do we know that are needed for ocean related sports. Padding out and paddling in is a big one. We don’t do that, so big thick boards with tons of volume aren’t relevant are they? Huh. Something else in here also. When you’re paddling in, or sitting in the lineup what does the deck of your surfboard need to look like? Kinda smooth and not catching your knees or elbows. We don’t have that either, do we? Huh.
Remember last week when we showed the picture of James winch and grinding his Flyboy? By the way, we’ll post pictures of the bottom of that board, soon, and you can see it’s basically untouched after grinding that rail.
Now a wakesurf board is way too light to be effective off of a rail, you get to the end and the board just sails away. But are there somethings we can take from that sport? We grab stupid stuff from surf and skimming, why not take smart stuff from wakeskates?
That was the start to our work with concave decks, but about half way through that we got an idea. That whole, what is the relevance to the current deck shapes in wakesurf boards, or is it just another ten best ways to shave a cat report?
Then we stumbled across this, as we were thinking about James grinding a rail on his Flyboy Wakesurf board.
It’s a copy of an Integrity wakeskate. Now, hold on there! We aren’t saying go surf a wakeskate, they weigh 8 gazillion pounds, but look at the deck surface. Concave deck under the feet and what else? Kick tail. Not like the so called traction claims, but a true to life kick tail. The purpose is to provide you with additional leverage for getting the board up off the water. Do we do that? You bet’cha!
So we want to show you a brief picture set of a board that we are building. We’ll also tell you that we are meeting with the folks from Calibrated Wakesurfing, to start work on a couple of skim related project boards and we’ll keep you posted on those developments as they progress.
Here are the two shots we want to show you. The first is a small outline of the tail of a skimmer project. It is 3 mm thick and is tapered towards the inside of the outline.
In this next photo, we’ll show you that there are 3 components. The core, the ring like piece from above and then a cap, that is actually tapered and fits the outline of our selected tail pad. The end result? Concave and a real life kick tail.
Here is a better picture of the cap piece.
Why should wakeskaters get all the advances??!!
Will it work? We really don’t know, but from a design perspective we know that it provides additional leverage on wakeskates. We also know that the process of getting air on a wakesurf board and a wakeskate are very similar. We also know that from a design perspective, wakesurfing is mostly just a copy of it’s ocean bretheren and that quite a bit of that copying is the ten best ways to shave a cat, in terms of relevenace to wakesurfing. This may prove to be total crap, but we’d really like to test it and redirect our thinking away from SURFBOARDS and more towards WAKESURF boards.
We had hoped to get into the details of our new concave deck wakesurf board but got sidetracked with the explanations of our explorations!
Here is a picture of the deck side of that new concave deck wakesurf board and we promise we’ll get into those details soon. As you can see, it shares some attributes with that wakeskate pictured above.
Thanks so much for following along and listening to our rantings and ramblings, we appreciate it.
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