A little history about what motivated me to start developing composite sandwich technology for wakesurf boards. Back in 2008, I was riding for The Walker Project and had won several contests, including the Texas State Wakesurf Championships. Then the World Wakesurf Championships was approaching and my perimeter stringered board broke after about 3 months and the weekend before that contest. We did a quick fix that evening, but it just didn’t perform like it did in the previous 3 months.
Here are some pictures of what I am talking about with regard to heel dents. You can see the huge mess where the fiberglass ripped along the perimeter stringer on the left side of the board.
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A huge mess, huh? The perimeter stringers really seemed to work well with that board, BUT, due to the proximity of the stringer at the heel of the rear foot, after a few landings from aerials, the deck fiberglass ripped and the board was history!
So we looked at deck patches of extra fiberglass – that made the boards heavy and they lost their pop. Then deck patches of Carbon Fiber and those boards were just dead. Stringerless boards didn’t seem to work at all for us. Greg Loehr and Warvel Surf Foam developed the WMD compsand, which is similar to what we’ve done, but they used a bamboo laminate on the deck to avoid the heel dents! BUT, they stopped production almost as quickly as they started. Then we started messing around with composite sandwich construction. The composite sandwich that we use at FlyBoy Wakesurf is super stiff, but THAT is a wonderful attribute for behind the boat. The borads still flex, it’s just that the rebound is QUICK, much quicker than non-sandwich construction. What we found, is that with our small wakes, that super quick rebound offered just perfect POP off the lip.
What the composite sandwich construction also offered is light weight and ruggedness. The deck skin is 5# density foam, almost twice the density of the foam typically used in wakesurf construction, but also, because we engineered the construction appropriately, the boards are light – 4 pounds before fins and traction.
Here are some comparable photos of the prototype board that has been ridden for about a year. Not a single heel dent after repeated aerial landings. What a difference the enegineering made!
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Huge difference, right? The basic concept of the composite sandwich is what makes the difference. Windsurf boards, which undergo much larger stresses than a wakesurf board, have been using this technology for years. Just one last set of photos so that you can see the difference side by side. The top board with the huge heel dent is EPS and fiberglass, the bottom picture with NO HEEL DENTS is the FlyBoy Wakesurf – James Walker Signature model, composite sandwich construction.
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We’re really excited about this construction, not only because it gives us the most responsive ride we’ve ever experienced, due in part to it’s light weight and exceptionally fast rebound, but also because it’s extremely rugged – heel dents and catastrophes like we experienced before the WWSC in ’08 are a thing of the past! AND FlyBoy Wakesurf is the only manufacturer to currently offer this robust and resposnive construction, we utilize carbon wrapped rails to effect a the responsiveness of a perimeter stringer and the high density foam on the rails, adds perimeter weighting and ding resistance. The end result is unparralleled performance.
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May 10th, 2010 at 12:14 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Flyboy Wakesurfing and Flyboy Wakesurfing, Flyboy Wakesurfing. Flyboy Wakesurfing said: Wakesurf Boards: eleminating heel dents http://shar.es/m6FD5 [...]
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May 27th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
[...] suseptible to this, but all boards, if hit hard enough, can develop dings and holes. Even the FlyBoy Wakesurf Board in Composite Sandwich can get a hole punctured into it, even though it’s resitant to heel [...]
May 27th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
[...] suseptible to this, but all boards, if hit hard enough, can develop dings and holes. Even the FlyBoy Wakesurf Board in Composite Sandwich construction can get a hole punctured into it, even though it’s [...]
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