Wakesurf board right side up

We are continuing with our wakesurf board building. You may remember that in the last post we talked about flipping the wakesurf board and rocker bed upside down to take advantage of gravity, so that the slow epoxy would sort of ooze downward with the force of gravity and by placing the board upside down, while laminating the bottom, we would allow the epoxy to flow into the core of the wake surf board. Now, that may or may NOT be what works best, but we’re going to try it just to see. The orientation would more closely mimic the methodology used in conventional construction.

Once the wakesurf board is out of the bag, we get a chance to verify the accuracy of the concave, rocker and alignment. Now is the time to fix any errors, as once we start building the deck, it’ll mostly be too late to affect any changes. So in this picture you can see a slightly exaggerated concave. That will calm down a bit after we trim the excess skin around the outline.

We finally got some rain here in NorCal, so in between storsm we quickly set out to trim the outline and do some shaping of the deck. You’ll notice in this picture the deck side of the wakesurf board is flat. We leave the EPS flat on the deck as an aid in handling, plus if we gouge the foam, it doesn’t matter at this stage.  When it’s flat it makes it easy to do things like check the thickness or concave with a level.  Also, as you know being the students of composite construction, thickness equates to stiffness and with that slightly thicker foam thickness we gain some stiffness until we can add the bottom skin and sandwich layer of fiberglass.

It’s a little hard to see from this picture, but we’ve run the electric plane along the outline to trim the flashing of the bottom skin and true up the outline some. Next we mark the new tighter outline. Remember our discussion about needing to trim the interior 1/8″ closer to allow for the deck skin thickness? That’s what that new black mark around the outline is.

Oh shoot! It seems we didn’t take any pictures of the next phase. We need to bring the deck height and the foil for this board, into tolerance. We use a hotwire to make quick work of the big pieces, but then the electric plane, surfform and sanding block to adjust it to spec.

We are going to jump ahead so that you can see we’ve shaped the deck down to spec. In our next post we’ll work through a slight change in the rails that we’re making.

We hope you’ll follow along in our next post as we talk about the changes in the rail and rail bands.

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