Review: ZRAX board racking system

It all started out one sunny afternoon when my girlfriend suggested, “Honey, perhaps the surfboards should live outside?”.

She may as well have asked me to move to Dubbo (very far from the beach). I snapped back, “Perhaps you should live outside”.

Glare of death, storm clouds, great trouble ensued.

And so began the mission to find a storage system that would enable the surfboards to live inside the flat but not take up half of the living room.

A small advert in the back of Tracks magazine piqued my interest… hmmm… the ZRAX board racking system. Let’s take a closer look.

I was pretty excited to receive my ZRAX in the mail. I unwrapped them quickly and then realised I’d need to make a hole in the wall from which they’d be hung. Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not massively experienced in the DIY arena and drilling holes wasn’t in my sphere of knowledge before getting the racks. It would be a few months before I finally purchased a drill and figured out how to use it.

So, after getting into trouble from Virago (my girlfriend’s new nickname, which means a large strong and aggressive woman) for making one huge, weird hole in the wall I enlisted the help of a brother from another mother, Biggie C, who happens to be lot more handy than me. After filling in my disastrous void we succeeded in creating a more appropriate hole and screwing in the ZRAX fixing point. Cool. Just a quick word of warning – if you’re drilling into walls please check there is no electrical wiring in there – I used a nifty scanner I bought for 30 bucks to check for live wires. If you hit a live wire with a drill there is a good chance you won’t be surfing for a while, so be warned!

Setting the racks up is a breeze, it’s just a case of attaching a couple of tubes to the straps and aligning the structure so it’s suspended all nice and straight from the fixing point. The whole thing was ready to rock in about four minutes.

About two minutes later the racks were filled with my prize possessions and my girlfriend surveyed the results with wonder and awe whilst I played a sound clip of audience applause for myself. It was a great moment, I love that sound clip. I then discovered how the racks are even more incredible than I had imagined, because you can actually adjust them by sliding the straps up or down, meaning that the boards can be stacked either horizontally or virtually flat against the wall, revealing even more space in the room.

So, to summarise, I am stoked by the ZRAX for several reasons:

1) They have given me so much more space
2) They are super-easy to set up and adjust
3) I can display my boards neatly and they look oh-so-sexy
4) Virago and I are now blissfully happy
5) I learned how to drill holes and have been inducted into the wonderful world of DIY


Our first video review… like it?

Stoked in any language. Well done Tim Mitchell, the Australia-based inventor of the ZRAX. We love your work and give the ZRAX our coveted Editor’s Choice Award.
5 stars

Essential Information

Buy your ZRAX from www.zrax.com for as little as $79.95 or find them in good surf shops.