Never wet trial
 

Well after reading about and watching a few of their video's. I decided to pick up a kit from home depot (doesn't hurt they had it right by the front door).
The product has a kind of rough feel and not what I expected it to look or feel like.
It is extremely spooky how much it really is just like the demo video's.

I tested it out on our beater boat board(LF custom).
Normally we ride about 11mph with full ballast and with that board you can do decent but not like our others. After the coating I had to speed up to 12 to keep from hitting the boat.
After the coating the board was much faster and seemed to be able to recover from pearling easier than normal. It made it release off the top of the wake easier. It did seem to make it feel looser.

We did have an issue with the coating peeling off by the end of the day but we did not wait the full 12 hours before we used it. It kind of reminds me of plasti-dip on how it peels off. Rubbery and smooth peel off.
I sprayed it throughout the morning with one base coat and three top coats.
Then let it sit about 2-3hours before it hit the water. Also the test board isn't the best surface and I could have done some mild roughing of the surface to prep it.
Either way for $20 it made for a great experiment and would recomend it for others to play around with.

Thanks for the review Daniel. Yeah if you want it to stick at all you will need to do surface prep.... for an older/used board that means a complete sand job, and wipe down with acetone or strong alcohol. That was my impression too, much more soft/flexible then I was expecting. I think from a production standpoint, you can achieve the same effect more or less with a coating of rainx or a hydrophobic sealers like nano-diamond, etc. Never wet is silicon-based, which is why it will never really be hard, and another reason it might not ever really effectively stick to polyester and epoxy finished boards. Personally, I like a texture acrylic finish (which is hard and UV resistant) coupled with a nano type wipe down... The texture acrylic finish gives you a myriad of contact angles.

Nick

Is it possible to get a product like nano-diamond onto a board post production?
For $20 it was hard not to try it out.
I will most likely not re-coat the board but it was quite cool seeing that product really work as advertised.
What is the texture acrylic finish do or look like? Is some of this stuff done on any production boards?

Im still not convinced that never wet on the surface will make any noticeable difference, but i still can't quite figure out how to back it up.

Either way, the never wet could only account for drag due to surface friction, which is minimal. Most drag that is experienced by a boat or a wakeboard is due to pressure. Think about your boat slammed vs. unweighted, thats drag due to pressure you are noticing, the surface friction is not changed based on weight.

But basically, all fluids must satisfy a "no slip condition" which essentially means that the fluid particles directly in contact with the surface will have no velocity relative to the surface (they move with it). This creates the velocity distribution and the surface friction ;)

this article does a decent job of it.
http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Apr20...2004p50-60.pdf

Im up for a decent discussion :D

I'm not here to debate theory with ya. Just go bust out $20 and a beater board and tell me what you think.
I am not going to put it on my good boards, but was a interesting trial.

cowwboy, after working with the stuff what would be your thoughts on applying it to a boat cover?

It will change the color of the matterial and I would be concerned with what it would do in the uv and the abrasion of rolling the cover up.
I can't judge on durability since I didn't do proper prep or wait the corret dry time. But the water repelling properties are awesome.

From what I read, the stuff doesn't do well with UV rays. For your cover, you want Star Brite Waterpoofing with PTEF. I just did my cover. It took about a gallon.

So im thinking I have a way to test the theory, and I will maybe slowly work into actually doing it, filming it, and posting it...... what do you guys think?

I would love to see the results.

Well I tested the portion of never wet that didn't rub off and I guess we surfed all the top layer off. It doesn't bead up like it used to.