I've learnt to windfoil on a 1500 freeride foil (GA Mach 1 'hybrid' freeride foil) (me: 80kg) and I've been getting better and steadily faster over several months practice. Some of the experienced guys I foil with were surprised at the speed I was hitting the other day on my 'beginner' gear - my GPS showed 22 kts peak speed at one point. They advised that there's a likelihood something will break if I'm doing those sorts of speeds with a large freeride wing of that size.

I will probably have to upgrade to a smaller high performance foil at some point, but is there a immediate risk of me breaking something doing those speeds with such a large foil?

What sort of size front foil should I be looking to upgrade to? I've been advised 1150, or 900 would be the next step.

Cheers!

Unless you are jumping I wouldn't worry about breakage. And unless you are making most of your jibes regularly I wouldn't recommend down sizing. My $0.02.

The only thing you can break is the nose of the board in a hard crash Force equaling mass time velocity squared and all that. The foil isn't going to rip off. Back when the Infinity 76 was a current wing, some guys could wring a surprising amount of speed out of them. Iirc, some were hitting maybe 23-24? (I could be misremembering)
Separate topic: usually your 2s speed is a better indicator of your speed unless you are using a really good gps device (the gps forum is knee deep in threads about this). Otherwise, it's too easy for your top speed to be due to an artifact or crash, etc Not saying you weren't ripping it up but 2s and longer will give you a more realistic view. Jibing will be a bit easier in the 1500 but the recommendations for your next step sound reasonable. (And some people just have the need for speed)

yes get something around 1000 high aspect you will be surprised how easy you can still get flying and it will be a lot more fun.

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BullroarerTook said..
Unless you are jumping I wouldn't worry about breakage. And unless you are making most of your jibes regularly I wouldn't recommend down sizing. My $0.02.

What he said! I love that you are going that fast on a big wing.

Lift is always roughly equal to weight unless there is a shock load like landing a jump.
Big foils can hit a real drag wall where more power just makes them twitchy but that's not going to damage anything on the foil.

The new generation foils are surprisingly capable at smaller sizes - with technique and a little more takeoff speed you can even get down to a 540 as a single foil option!

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Grantmac said..
Lift is always roughly equal to weight unless there is a shock load like landing a jump.
Big foils can hit a real drag wall where more power just makes them twitchy but that's not going to damage anything on the foil.

Absolutely: lift=weight and drag= thrust in steady state.

Once you reach the speed limit for the foil, the loads increase dramatically, since the foil cannot accelerate to alleviate the load.
When the loads increase, so does the probability of breakage. And everything breaks, jumping or not.

A smaller or higher performance foil makes life easier on both the rider and the gear.

Thanks all. Looks like I'll need to upgrade to a smaller 'performance' foil in the near future, but neither will my current setup suddenly explode to pieces on me either - I hope ! My gybes are coming on well, I can very nearly do a whole gybe on the foil without tapping the water now. I think the 1150 HP wing will be the next step. Fast enough, but still friendly in the gybes.

Next, I can eventually work up to being one of those 30 knot lunatics, haha..

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AoetearoaSailor said..
Thanks all. Looks like I'll need to upgrade to a smaller 'performance' foil in the near future, but neither will my current setup suddenly explode to pieces on me either - I hope ! My gybes are coming on well, I can very nearly do a whole gybe on the foil without tapping the water now. I think the 1150 HP wing will be the next step. Fast enough, but still friendly in the gybes.

Next, I can eventually work up to being one of those 30 knot lunatics, haha..

I think you could go smaller.
i learned to gybe on a 1300cm2 wing 4 sessions ago.
last week i disided to try on my 768cm2 and was suprised that the amount of glide (or lack of resistance) made it easier.

if you keep on freeriding i'd do for 900-1000.
if you want to persue speed probably a lot smaller than that, with the highly efficient wings these days.

I'd like to see an example of a large freeride foil being damaged by speed which didn't involve a jump or contact with an object.

Challenge accepted

Yeah, thats Starboard, rubbish freeride gear

I've had one of those fuselages, the design was not good. I machined a version which didn't step down so close to the mast insert.
You could put the mostly efficient, slippery foil on there and it would still break.

Galaxy Gong recommends titanium fuselages for foils pass particular size for that reason..

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Grantmac said..
I've had one of those fuselages, the design was not good. I machined a version which didn't step down so close to the mast insert.
You could put the mostly efficient, slippery foil on there and it would still break.

That's also how I solved the problem after breaking several of them. (Warranty replacement took longer than the fuselage lasted)

What ever you do just make sure that parts( fuse mast wing ) are available for the system that you get. Some foil sets like the SB Supercruiser only had one or very limited options to change parts like a smaller front wing. I went from SlingShot to Patrik and a whole range of options. And now loving 900 on the light days and 550 when it honking