Why don't SUP foils have "wing-tip" guards?

[PonoBill]

Of course it would work. I love the work on that piece. I'd estimate it could be built reliably for somewhere between 10 and 15K. I could be wildly off, but that's an incredibly intricate piece of composite work, at the level of Formula One parts.

[supthecreek]

Could something similar be build by a foil company with an affordable process?

[PonoBill]

Maybe, once they get around to it. Most of them are going as fast and hard as they can just to get foils to work. They barely do.

[PonoBill]

I'm so tempted not to share this since Creek is going to yell AHA!, but let the chips fall where they may. Gary Efferding came by the shop today to talk about a project we're considering undertaking (yeah, I need another one, eh?) and showed me these foils that he built more than ten years ago. Four different kinds of flex material and released surfaces inside the foil to give it highly controlled flex. The purpose wasn't safety, it was smoothness and performance over a wider range, but you could toss this to a two year old and they couldn't hurt themselves with it.







Gary is a Wizard's wizard, so the stuff he does hardly counts. But we were looking at a variety of commercially available aluminum masts and they are astonishingly dangerous to no purpose. Both the leading and trailing edges are sharp. A sharp leading edge will have substantially more drag when angled even a small amount against the direction of travel. A rounded, symmetrical foil would give up nothing in terms of overall drag. the sharp trailing edge is almost as pointless. Any difference in drag between that and a slight rounding or a squared off edge would be almost impossible to measure. So yeah, this stuff could be safer without penalty. Gary's wing, on the other hand, would be a gold-plated bitch to build.

[surfcowboy]

Buzz me if you need a sheet metal company. I have an old friend who has one of the best shops on the west coast. I was thinking of getting him to make me a mast anyway.

This thing looks like alien technology.

[supthecreek]

aHA!

see.... I knew you could do it.
Hell, I'm never going to foil anything.... I just figured if someone was going to solve it, it might as well be us 

[PonoBill]

The aluminum masts are extrusions. I don't think sheet metal would be a great idea, though now that you mention it I do think a plate aluminum core welded to an attachment plate wrapped with PVC foam and a layer or two of carbon would be light, strong, and easy to fabricate. I gotta get my TIG up to the shop. I want to build that. With a bunch of lightening holes in the plate that could be a superlight mast.

[surfcowboy]

Yeah I'm thinking the key to getting the price down is getting away from molds or extrusion and into something you can fab. We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of parts here.

Aluminum core composite sounds pretty good. Get the foam surround CNC'd and you'd have a pretty fast assembly.

[PonoBill]

Actually, the way to bring the price down is to use molds, but that assumes quantity and a stable design. I think the first step is to optimize the foil form for SUP. I doubt any of the current shapes are really ideal. I think they're good, but not optimal. I'm interested enough to look at a testing program for doing that.

[ukgm]

I agree with Ponobill - we're a long way from optimal and even understanding how to tailor foils for paddlers of different sizes and abilities is going to take a while and settle down. I suspect a more modular approach may be the most economical commercial solution.

However, this might just be me being cycnical but I think SUP foiling is always going to be a very small part of an already very small hardboard market. I just can't see it gelling with the SUP market in general.

[surfcowboy]

That was my point. Of course molds are cheaper, but tooling that size seems like a pretty heavy startup cost for something that I'd assume has a few hundred customers. I may be underestimating the size of the market but unless you're selling masts to other manufacturers I don't see mass production numbers at a scale that would make a mold that big work. But I know molds are dropping in price all the time and you're in Maui and Hood River so you may see better numbers than I do.

If a Clearwater Foil was molded, I'd bet they wouldn't be $125-$350.

But for the foil, absolutely, that's got to be the way if I'm seeing what that guy is doing there. But again, that's not aluminum so it's a way mellower process, more like what UK has cut than working in metal.

But I'd love to see where this one is headed too.

[DavidJohn]

The Naish SUP foil is the safest and bluntest foil that I've seen..

 

[PonoBill]

I think the market size will depend on how easy it is to do--and yes Creek, on how safe it is to do.  Probably always a toy for madmen, but a good toy.

[ukgm]

I think the market size will depend on how easy it is to do--and yes Creek, on how safe it is to do.  Probably always a toy for madmen, but a good toy.

I think safety will have very little to do with it. That's never deterred people. It's going to be accessibility (in terms of both environment to use one well and the users ability to get on one) that will determine if this will literally sink or swim. Foil stuff isn't new and it didn't reinvigorate other watersports that adopted it. The other issue is that its not legal for competitive use either.

[PonoBill]

Sure has the regular surfers up in arms. Right now they tend to be used by very experienced people who stay out of the lineup--both because they can and because the foils are easier to use when the wave isn't critical. But there will be dolts. There are always dolts.