yes if you could buy a new polyester speed board for $1395 your getting ripped

I am going to get one to test out and see how it goes. XST 80 Length 7'9”/236cm Width 20.75”/53cm Volume 80L

I don't see there being much weight difference it will come down to stiffness. But a softer ride might be faster over chop.

There is a topic at the moment in Windsurfing General - Is windsurfing popularity still declining? The feeling here is that gear is getting too expensive and too technical, so for a board that is probably about 95% of the performance of carbon for half the cost that will give the same amount of fun, I say go for it.

Not at all.

The only reason I don't have polyester speed boards anymore is that the mould for the blanks has been destroyed and we can't get suitable blanks anymore.

For a board such as you describe, there are actually advantages. The slightly 'damper' ride of a polyester board eats up chop much better than stiff carbon boards which rattle your fillings out. It is interesting that most Carbon Art brand speed board actually have only a small proportion of carbon fiber in them, and to me that is an advantage.

In a small speed board weight is not an issue and lighter is not faster. We have seen people experimenting with actually adding lead weights to speed boards with favorable results!

up until about 2006 I was regularly using a couple of 47-48cm wide polyester speed boards with great success. I have a 44+ Knots peak on one of them! I was also using a 21" wide slalom and it is still the fastest board on choppy water that I have ever had.



The biggest problem I had with my polyester boards is the long term stability of the rocker shape. I re-faired to rocker of my 47 speed board a couple of times after it developed slight negative tail rocker due to warping. (This can happen to epoxy boards as well though).

I eventually ripped the US type fin box out of the slalom board which ended its life. If it had a Tuttle box it might still be alive.

If you know a source of quality polyester blanks suitable size for speed boards I would be most interested. I recon I could still build a polyester speed board for about a third the cost of an epoxy in about a quarter of the time. I have a few pretty radical ideas I would like to try but I will never do it in Epoxy. Too much trouble and mucking around.

I will be getting the board at the end of the month so all will be revealed then. Will post the pictures.

Having a look at you board it is almost the same as one I have just finished out of wood. Once your poly board is done could you post the weight for a comparison. This is the dimensions for the frame with the wood being 6 mm on top of this. The weight ended up at just over 7.5 kg without the foot straps.

Nice bit of crafting there!!

keef said...

Sailquik, you can find heaps of blanks at your local tip, if your lucky you mite get one for the price of a new Tuttle box and mast track, that's if you can get one with a Tuttle, box keeping in mind that polyurethane is a closed cell foam it lets very little moisture in and that means resin , just get an old fat urethane board score it with a fine router and the glass will just peel off leaving just a bit of foam fur on the glass, if your careful you will end up with the exact blank before it was glassed , i did a post on the hardcores a while back

One thing I did learn in my Polyester shaping career was that it is a huge advantage to source blanks that are as close as possible to you final shape. The outer foam is the densest, hardest and most stable. The more you mow away, the softer to core gets and more glass has to be laid on to stiffen and harden it up again. This is especially a problem on the deck where you need resistance to your feet impacting the foam core. We tried making speed boards out of slalom blanks and were a disaster. A year or so back I called Burford to see if they still could still make the speed blanks. Unfortunately, they had hacked the molds up to produce another type of blank for Nippers boards or some such, so no can do anymore.

That is the fourth wood one so far Keef.


This is the 1st one. It was built with bits that were kept over the years.


The 2nd one I didn't pay enough attention to weight. Although it sails ok, it is just a bit too heavy.


This one is a 43 cm board. Sailboards plane using dynamic pressure (equal & opposite forces ). On this I wanted to see if it is possible to use static pressure ( like an aeroplane wing) to keep it up on top of the water. To achieve this I put a 1/2" concave on the back 1/3 of the bottom. It is hard to say if it has an effect or not, but the board seems to get up on the plane easily for a board of this volume. It might work better on a formula board, but I will leave that for someone else to experiment with. Maybe Starboard will do this and claim another windsurfing invention.

What brand of Polyester blank are they?
Whose is the milling set up?

SWS said...

Would there be much speed difference between a polyester speed board and a 100% carbon speed board?

not sure if i'm missing something here, your saying polyester foam as the core " not sure what it is" and OES says
Four new 2012 designs , base on our super fast rocker lines , with our very controlable veed , double concave, bottom shape.

There will be two differant types of constuction our standard model ,CGC [Carbon/ S Glass/ Corecell] and our PRO model FCC [Full Carbon /Corecell]

i thought corecell was PVC outer core,

SWS said...

It is OES setup and the blank is a SUP blank.

ok so there using a sup blank to make speed boards, mmmmmmmmmmmm that will be interesting

decrepit said...

The blanks are polyurethane.
Unlike styrene foam, they aren't troubled by polyester/vinyl resin.
But they can still be made with epoxy and carbon.

yes i under the system decrep, its just a bit confusing, OES claim the boards are corecell, wouldn't think they would be useing a urathane"ply stringer" blank as well as corecell, it will be interesting to see the finished product

keef said...

SWS said...

Would there be much speed difference between a polyester speed board and a 100% carbon speed board?

not sure if i'm missing something here, your saying polyester foam as the core " not sure what it is" and OES says
Four new 2012 designs , base on our super fast rocker lines , with our very controlable veed , double concave, bottom shape.

There will be two differant types of constuction our standard model ,CGC [Carbon/ S Glass/ Corecell] and our PRO model FCC [Full Carbon /Corecell]

i thought corecell was PVC outer core,

SWS said...

It is OES setup and the blank is a SUP blank.

ok so there using a sup blank to make speed boards, mmmmmmmmmmmm that will be interesting

I asked them to make a polyester one as it is $1400 less than a full carbon one.

They are using the SUP blank as it was the only one that would fit the shape of the board, Being a SUP blank makes no difference other than that more needs to be cut away to shape it into a XST 80.

decrepit said...

SWS said...
>>>>>>>>
They are using the SUP blank as it was the only one that would fit the shape of the board, Being a SUP blank makes no difference other than that more needs to be cut away to shape it into a XST 80.

Weeeellll maybe, but as previously mentioned, the deeper you cut into a moulded urethane blank the softer it gets.
If you're not using good sandwich technology or perhaps carbon, it's going to dent very readily.

i didnt notice the density change with the hardcore but i used divinicell in the high stress area's, SWS have you got a gestimate on this board, if its a sup blank it will have a stringer, my guess the board will be weighing in at around 7kgs without straps

problem with PU is that it has no memory, and over time it loses its shape easily.

Pounding through chop the foam is compressed and it permanently collapses a bit with each bit of chop.

A board made with EPS core holds its shape better because the shape is significantly defined by the outer PVC shell, and the blank is able to be compressed without losing its shape, so under impact, the shape returns to original.

Over time the EPS boards will lose their shape, but not as quicky as a urethane board.

Also the urethane boards have much more damping. Can be nice on a speed board, but I find that using glass on a EPS board works nice too. Full carbon boards are a waste of carbon and your knees.