Two years ago I was delivering an order of boards to Shortbus Board Company in Hatteras, NC. Curtis Cromwell is the owner and a longtime surfboard shaper/manufacturer. While at his facility, I saw on the wall a lineup of freshly finished fiberglass wakesurf boards. I asked him about that business...and he told me it was doing great. The market was growing fast and he had successfully designed boards that professionals were excelling on. He then said to me..."if you could make a soft top wakesurf board, we could sell a ton of them."
From there, the idea was born to create a Rock-It soft top wakesurf board based off of one of Shortbus' designs. So Curtis sent us a 3D shaper file of a recommended design that we had to convert to another format to share with the factory--that was step one. The factory then built a prototype out of our materials (EVA top material, HDPE bottom, EPS foam + stringers). The first prototype came back to us and we went to Lake Gaston in North Carolina to test it out. We hired professional wakeboarder and wakesurf instructor Chance Croyle to help us on the evaluation.
At first, the pure file translation to the different materials didn't work out as well as we had hoped. The board was bending when weight was applied to it while being towed behind a boat or wakesurfing, which slowed the rider. It also had a very flat profile that was prone to the nose pearling under the water. This flat profile is common on fiberglass wakesurf boards (which often mimic skimboards), but the combination of too much flex with this flat rocker made riding the board more difficult than it should be. The foam materials flex more than fiberglass, so we realized we would have to bulk up the board a bit with a denser EPS foam bead, additional stringers, and more rocker.
Our 2nd prototype featured these improvements, but with a built in traction pad that we didn't like. It also arrived mid winter which meant we'd have to wait to give it some reasonable testing time. So we went back to the factory for a 3rd prototype.
The third prototype came with the right traction pad, rocker, stringers, thickness, foam bead density, etc; but also came in two manufacturing styles. One with the standard Rock-It surf manufacturing method, and the other with a new 3D Lamination technique that allowed for smoother rails since multiple materials weren't meeting & being sealed together at a hard edge.
We were able to get these boards into the water and come to a clear conclusion that the 3D laminated board fit everything we needed. So we finally signed off on our first production run in the fall of 2024 for a full launch of this product in 2025. We're looking forward to featuring it at the Mid Atlantic Boat Show in our hometown of Virginia Beach, VA in late January of 2025. Come see us there!