Kiteforum.com

I've gotten hooked on wake skating the last two seasons, and naturally just had to build my own boards.

Started off with building a laminated ply board, with carbon top and sugar sprinkles for grip.
Works really well, but I had some other ideas I wanted to try.

With skates you generally don't want a light board.

Given that I wanted to go heavy, the next idea was to centralise the weight to get faster rotation around the centre of mass for kickflips and shuvits.

And so was born the ledbeli (lead belly ). A composite skate with 1kg (2 lbs) of lead weight placed in the centre of the board.

Specs:

• 1000mm long x 400mm wide (centre) and 300mm wide (tips)
  blended 3 stage rocker
  concave deck, kicktails
  grind base
  peelply grip deck
  3.4 kg total weight (I was aiming for between 6lbs and 7lbs, so pretty ballpark)

I'm using 15mm corecell M80 for the core. This is a SAN based foam and should be able to handle plenty of abuse.
Drilled some holes and added 48x 20g lead weights in the centre.

Layup was from top to bottom:

• Peelply
  160gsm 0/90 twill glass
  graphics
  200gsm +45/-45 twill alutex
  410gsm 0/90 biax glass
  core
  410gsm 0/90 biax glass
  200gsm +45/-45 twill alutex
  graphics
  160gsm 0/90 twill glass
  Isosport 0.8mm PTEX base

Bagged everything.

Infused the resin, cooked everything at 50C for a day, ripped off the peeply, trimmed the edges and voila!

Can't wait to see how she rides!