gorgesailor forum posts in last 60 days

It is an Autima boom. Made by E.Fwu in Taiwan. Aeron is made by Technic Devotion in China

Grantmac said..

lemat said..

Gestalt said..

Grantmac said..

Roo said..

Mark _australia said..
Cost. Foam makes new models easy to produce .. but slight tweaks for costly mould changes made it hard to have a range of hollow boards.

then labour cost maybe for more complex layup, trimming halves and then bonding halves properly.
I think foam sandwich is the best blend of cost vs durability vs ability to change shape if needed and that's why it's prevailed.
I've seen some great DIY hollow boards but I think the current mass production of them is a response to the trendiness of wing / DW and wanting to have something new that the other companies don't have. I hope it doesn't translate to $5000 windsurf boards soon.

Yes it was all about price. They were going to retail for USD$4000 back in 1991 (about $10000 today), the Japanese were snapping them up. They were too expensive to make. The best shaper and best windsurfer in the world were involved.

If I was too make a hollow board today it would be 3D printed and easily modified. I have plans for a basic monocoque that a number of different shapes can be fitted to. You could easily have 3 different slalom/speed boards using one monocoque.

I think some form of 3D printing/additive manufacturing is where this is going. Between foaming filaments, continuous fiber printers and the ability to put strength exactly where it's needed.
Maybe not this year, but likely within the decade.

Other food for thought:
The shape shifting molds used to make the newer laminate sails could possibly be a basis for making custom molded laminates for hollow boards.

Agree, 3d printing is the future. I've just ordered some Lisa harness lines, they are using 3d printing for many components..

Not future for all, in facts i see mechanical parts makers, that moved to 3D printing process" for everything", come back to cnc router for many builds because of strain failure. Layering additive process suffer from lake of homogeneity.

That's where the continuous fiber printing is a lot different. But the binding agents just aren't there yet I don't think. Plus it is very slow at this time.

There is lots of promise here but yes a long way to go. None of the 3D printing process are anywhere near the strength of molded or even CNC machined counterparts. Continuous fiber printing only allow you to engineer strength in 1 plane or axis - very limited applications. The beauty of composites in the way fibers can be oriented in different axis or even organically. Imagine a tube where the fiber could only go around the wall(hoop strength) but had no long axis fiber. This is basically what you could build with current continuous fiber printers. even if you were to print the tube lying down the fibers would only be linear & you would lose all hoop strength. When 3D printers are able to lay fiber 3 dimensionally with say a 5 axis extrusion head, then you might have something - assuming you can get good fiber/resin ratios.

MJP68 said..
Yep fair enough. Should have bought the matching extension to sail but wasn't fully aware that each manufacturer has a different "system" if you will. Sure I'll be able to work around it with some experimentation. At least I'm getting the matching mast/sail combo so I got something right.

It does feel like we've moved to more of an "ecosystem" style of buying gear, I just didn't really notice the change as I wasn't actively buying gear while it happened.

They don't really have a different system. It's just some manufactures might specify the downhaul setting(for instance) as amount of extension vs. total mast length - e.g a sail designed for a 430 mast specified downhaul range of 440-442 rather than 10-12cm(430+10/12). As for the block to block measurement, this is also fairly standard & should really be the same as bottom of sail pulley to the bottom of the mast or top of the collar to the top of the pulleys on the extension. These are really the same since thif you downhaul block to block since the bottom of the pulleys on the sail will touch the top of th pulleys on the extension & the top of the collar is where the mast rests. Following these guidelines will get you "in the ballpark" & you can tune from there. that said if you are not using the specified mast for the sail(at least the correct bend curve) then it all goes out the window & you are back to experimenting.

In my experience, heavy & unresponsive is what you will get when you rig a sail meant for flextop on a harder top mast. This is exacerbated by using the 460 since you are rigging on the stiffest section of mast & effectively moving the bend point up in the sail. If you go the other way - rigging a harder top sail on a flex top mast you will get a sail that is twitchy & lacks power - though it is easier to mitigate this with some outhaul/downhaul tweaking than the reverse(hardtop in flextop sail...) Also in my experience, the Sumo erred on the hardtop side so big difference to the OEM Ezzy which leans flextop. Masts which would work in the Ezzy IMO are Goya, Hotsails, Simmer, Chinook maybe others.