Wall Mount Your Kiteboard or Wakeboard With the Fins Attached!

Intro

Kiteboarding is an amazing sport. It is thrilling, fun, difficult, and gravity defying. It encourages travel and exploration and community. Luckily, the gear involved packs down to be much smaller than windsurfing which is good for those of us will small apartments. And if you are like me, you already have 2 bikes, camping gear, sailing gear, snowboarding gear, and the required accessories all competing for space in my tiny overpriced San Francisco apartment. So finding clever ways to store things is a must. Plus, if you can display things your are proud of, then why not? :)

Note: This only works for twin-tip style boards. If you have a surf board, race board, or foil board I'm sorry but that is what you get for being cooler than me on the water.

What you will need for this Instructable:

• HangTime Snowboard Mounts
• 4 Round Head #8 screws 1.5-2 inches long
• Access to a 3D Printer or 2 Risers from Shapeways(shameless plug)

After a long internet search I was surprised when I could not find anything that did let me mount my twin-tip kiteboard to the wall. But I did find these amazing little snowboard wall mounts from HangTime. So I ordered them and started thinking on how to adapt them.

Failure, Solution, Improvement

After receiving the snowboard mounts, it was time to design the riser. First I thought I could just scan the riser on a flatbed scanner and use that as a template in Fusion 360. Well that turned out to only kind of work, as in it didn't. So it was time to pull out the trusty off brand micrometer and get all engineer-y on this. After the critical dimensions were measured and reproduced in Fusion, the design was verified to be "close enough" via paper doll. Then, from the lessons of 3D printing it, I redesigned it... twice. The 3 STL files attached are the final design with 3 different heights.

Determining Riser Height

But how high should it be? The fins on my board are 2 inches tall and a fixed distance from the center of the board, but modern boards have variable rocker radius. So a direct calculation isn't going to be reliable for everyone. Luckily there is an easier and better way.

This is probably best done with 2 people.

1. Hold the board against a wall lightly. If you press the board on the wall it will flex and the measurement will be inaccurate.
2. At the center of the board, measure the distance from the wall to the back of the board.
3. Subtract the height of the snowboard mounts themselves, which is 9mm.
4. If at any point you are unsure or you land in between 2 sizes, give yourself more space from the wall rather than less.

As a side note, the reason you shouldn't take this measurement from the ground is because gravity will cause the board to flex under it's own weight and it will mess up you measurement. Even if you try to lift it up in the center gravity will pull the tips down giving you another bad measurement. On my board the flex was about 1.5mm.

Can't find the right one for you?

I've attached the STL files for three different heights. The original design is in Fusion 360, I built it parametrically so if you need a special height just let me know.

Printing

With STL files in hand, go to your nearest 3D printer and print away! For the rest of us, you can order these from Shapeways(shameless plug).

Tips'n'Tricks

Here is a list of a few things I learned about this part while printing it:

1. Use a Raft. Yes, it takes longer, but I had lots of issues with edges peeling until I did this.
2. The part does not need much fill. I went through a few different designs, as you can see. None of them ever needed more than 10% fill with <1mm wall thickness.
3. This part does take a few hours to print and you will need 2

Almost There

Now that you have your parts, simply mount it to the wall. Don't forget that you will need longer screws than the ones that came with the Hangtime kit. I recommend:

4 x #8 x 2" Round Head Philips

Once you have everything, simply follow the instructions that come with the HangTime kit. They can be found here.

For those that don't wish to click, they are transcribed them below:

Attaching the mounts to the wall

1. Using the new hardware you have purchased, attach the lower board mount to the wall with the rotating piece at the bottom in the desired location. Use the HangTime mount as a template.
2. Place the top board mount, with the rotating piece upwards, with a space approximately 1.5” higher than your board waist width from the lower board mount and secure to the wall using the hardware supplied. Use the HangTime mount as a template.

Placing the board into the mounts

1. Place the lower board edge at board waist into the lower mount – keeping the board toward horizontal.
2. Rotate the board off horizontal into the upper mount so the board edges are wedged in between the 2 mounts. Board must be positioned so the center of the board is slightly off center and when rotated it will be lower than when horizontal. This allows the weight of the board to hold it securely in place by HangTime.
3. Removal of the board is accomplished by rotating the board (in the opposite direction from the mounting direction) on the lower mount away from the upper mount, then lifting the board out of the lower mount.

You're done! Congratulations, you can now show off your cool board that you do cool stuff with!