30years in a garage just down the road from where I lived this man made me an awesome custom carbon slalom board, guessing about 100L and under 8kg, very fast and very tough,


The thing that surprised me is this guy I'm led to believe now works as a senior technical director for Cobra!

Tad Ciastula, legend!

He lived in his own time zone, you didn't want to order a board if you needed it by a certain date. I once made the mistake of telling him I wasn't in a hurry for a board as I had to wait for an injury to heal, months later all healed up the foam blank with my name on it was still a big rectangle and was being used as a notice board.
Months later it just needed paint which apparently he was low on so I made another's mistake and said I didn't care about the colour. This resulted in him mixing all the odd bits of paint he had together to make enough to do my my a lovely shade of grayish lilac.

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Ben1973 said..
He lived in his own time zone, you didn't want to order a board if you needed it by a certain date. I once made the mistake of telling him I wasn't in a hurry for a board as I had to wait for an injury to heal, months later all healed up the foam blank with my name on it was still a big rectangle and was being used as a notice board.
Months later it just needed paint which apparently he was low on so I made another's mistake and said I didn't care about the colour. This resulted in him mixing all the odd bits of paint he had together to make enough to do my my a lovely shade of grayish lilac.

Lilac/Grey .....sounds like he might have gone onto work for NP/JP

Found a pic of the board,

^^ Rushwind on an alloy mast?
Fast and lethal.

Might of been an early Neil pride carbon, I did have a couple of alloy mast but I think that was before this.
Loved those sails, matched with that boards flat rocker, razor shape rails and 48cm width they were seriously fast, you just had to be on it all the time as the combo took no prisoners.

Also so had a weird glass mast with a preset bend in it so depending on what way around you rigged it varied the stiffness, no idea it it worked, it very very heavy and impossible to get up some luffs with the bend. Didn't keep it long.