After seeing someone on this forum do such a great job on a tab for an 08 X-Star I have more or less tried to mimic the idea, here are some pics but I need help on whether the tab angle looks like it comes out to far or not far enough, is the tab to long or short and if it needs to sit deeper in the water etc etc.....
I have tried this out yesterday and although the wave was physically bigger to look at it still didn't have the push needed so I'm thinking it needs modifying. Worth noting when I tested it we had the KGB ballast around half full and the port ballast full with only the driver and one other person on the boat.... our lake is mostly 6ft deep (which I think is part of the problem?!?) but when we hit the small portion of the lake that is 9ft deep the wave got a whole lot bigger with just enough push to ride a surf style board (shred stixx)
any help here on if the angle of the tab needs changing or any of its dimensions would be great as trying to make this work at our regular lake... (until I can upgrade to a newer boat next year with tabs on it eg G23)
my thought would be more angle. although, you have a quite bit more length than the 2 gates I've built, which both worked well. Even given the surface area you have, you're not deflecting the boat off its original line enough to delay the wave on one side. with the stepped hull of your star, you need to get aggressive on the angle of the gate, your boat is locked on rails and will take quite a bit of force to create a nice wave.
I'd keep the length of the gate and try to get to 30* off the hull
how fast were you going?
evenly weighted?
any pics?
hard to tell with a dude on top of the wave how it really looked. get him to edge out away from it and get a pic of face of the wave. that will tell us a lot.
6 ft? you're gonna need a lot more weight. fill port and KGB. fill starboard 50% to start with. got another sac? put a 750 on the floor against port side seats, fill it up.
with that weight and more angle on your gate you should be getting close
I have an 08 star and the hull design is the problem.. if you look at the lower hull it curves way in.. that's why your gate doesn't match up with the outer hull... About the only way to get a decent surf wake out of the early pickle fork x star hulls is listing.. I have a combo gate and tab set up with dual lenco actuators with #1100 and #750 under the floor. You can get a clean wake with wake gates but it'll be a small no push wake... the only way is to sink it.. Also you need at least 10 feet of water to surf a heavy boat.. Otherwise you'll get bottom push..
Last edited by Pad1Tai; 08-02-2016 at 3:59 PM.
Reason: spell
You're going to want near 25 degrees as a starting point. But it's not rocket science and slowing the wake on one side is all that's needed. I've made a few full surf gates on previous boats and just made a temporary manual ghetto gate like the one here on my new 07 LSV. Another thing that will help, especially since the gate is manual anyway, is to load the surf side corner instead of both sides like an automated surf device boat. Yes it works great balanced, but it works better still with more weight on one side. The guys above nailed it too... 6 feet deep is gonna be your biggest challenge.
I just made this for an 07 Malibu 247. Check out the angle if that helps.