Wakesurf board flex and other myths

We are really excited about the new Bigboy Flyboy, we think that board will help a LOT of folks ride better and increase their enjoyment of wakesurfing immensely!

We were thinking about something. There is a old thought about surfboard rails, that sharp / hard rails bury in the wave more than softer rounded rails and that gives more hold, but the reality is that is 100% wrong. Water wraps curved surfaces and can’t wrap sharply angled surfaces all that well and so rounded rails create more hold and sharp rails, less hold. The rail shape isn’t quite so easy, because there is water flow down the length of the rail and you have to be aware of how that flow BACKWARDS impacts the interaction with the wave or wake, but in general water will try and conform to curved surfaces and is able to do that on rounder rails easier.

Ok, so we got that myth out there, it won’t change what gets spewed, but you, our loyal readers will know better the next time you read mumbo jumbo.

One other area we want to talk about is wakesurf board flex. In most OTHER sports that involve equipment, over time that equipment evolves into shorter, stiffer and lighter. Skis, snowboards, skateboards…most everything. So the evolution is towards shorter and stiffer and in terms of wakesurf board flex, that would mean LESS.

We finished the carbon fiber hollow wakesurf board and really enjoyed that, the way that it rode and reacted, but we also think that a tad stiffer would be good. We’ll pop up a little video of the board while it still had a core and you can see, it’s MEGA stiff!

Nothing magic there just composite sandwich construction techniques.

So as we thought about that, more and more. We remembered we had some aluminum honeycomb lying around and so we decided to lay up a test panel using carbon fiber skins and the aluminum honeycomb as a core.  What we want to test is just how stiff that test panel would be.  More stiff, would equal less wakesurf board flex.

Here is a picture of the aluminum honeycomb. The cell size is a little large, but it will be fine for our test purposes.

The skins will be carbon fiber for this test panel and of course our choice of a slightly stiffer epoxy.

So that’s all for this post, we’ll hold off on the process we used to create the test panels until the next post as it’s a bit more involved.

Thanks so much for reading and following along, we appreciate you taking the time!

Technorati Tags: Bigboy Flyboy, wakesurf board flex