Here are some answers to some of the most commonly asked questions:
How heavy are your boards?
Our boards are designed to be lighter than most of the production boards out there, including the performance production boards.
Some custom boards will be lighter, we could make the lightest boards but we choose not to because a strong board will always weigh a little more than a light board.
However, not all heavy boards are strong. Our boards are built to strict weight ranges, but each individually made board’s weight may differ slightly. By up to a few ounces or so.
My buddy can make me a cheaper board:
We hear this a lot, and there are a lot of handy guys out there making boards at home. Everyone should try to make a board at least once in their life. It is fun and challenging the first time, and will give you a new found respect for people who do this for a living. But the results of a home-made DIY project will usually not compare to a board made by experienced craftsmen. Guys can go to home depot and get some supplies and start working away in their garage. These boards are cheap because the maker usually doesn’t factor in his own time and the 100’s hours spent of messing around and cleaning up afterward. The end result is usually a thin-skinned piece of styrofoam, that might look like the real deal on the surface, but probably wont last very long at all. The couple of hundred dollars you saved could be quickly spent on repairs, reinforcements, and or full board replacements.
What is the biggest difference between your boards and others?
Most people will make a single skin board, which we like to call the eggshell technology. *Eggshell tech works great for surfboards. Surfboards built with Urethane foam, and wooden stringers. Or even modern surfboards made with EPS/Epoxy monocoque are designed to be surfboards. Surfboards like to flex and these eggshell systems works quite well. However foilboards have much higher loads placed on them and they need to be built in a different way and they use about twice as much material on the outer lamination layers. Our foilboards are built using a technique called Foam Sandwich Construction. A foam sandwich board is made “twice”. The interior of the board is shaped and glassed, than a second layer of foam is added and a final layer of glass/carbon is added covering everything. Foam-sandwich is far superior for ding resistance as well as handling torsional and point loads. Another method we use to make some of our boards is the “wood veneer composite sandwich” with integrated layers of fiberglass/epoxy/bamboo and carbon-fiber vacuum bag.
What is Point loading?
Point loading is a lot of load put in a very small area. Point loading is bad for boards but is a fact of life we have to deal with in our board design and construction. By comparison there is relatively little point loading in a surfboard other than your feet. Whereas on a foilboard, huge loads generated by the foil are transferred into the board in a very small space (where the mast mounts). Other point loads are found around the footstrap inserts and the heel areas under your feet.
How do you deal with Foil Point Loading?
The most vulnerable area for any foilboard is the Foilmount. This is why most converted surfboards fail. Because a surfboard is not designed to handle the point loading from a foil mount. It takes a lot of reinforcement to be added to a surfboard to get it to handle a foil mounted to it. Eventually most all converted boards will fail because they were never intended to have a foil on there. No matter how many layers of fiberglass added to a surfboard, it will always just be a surfboard. However our boards are built to be foilboards from the beginning. So we have designed and engineered into the board the necessary strength to be able to handle foil loads. Our track box system does not go directly into the board, we encase our proprietary track-boxes into a hard-foam block (like a brick). This “brick” is made from a super high density foam that resists crushing, and is however still a little elastic. The brick helps spread the loads from the boxes into a larger area of the boards core. The Brick also connects to the outer laminations creating a bridge that is far more secure and solid than glassing boxes directly into the core material.
What Track Boxes do you use?
Our track boxes are made in-house using superior materials, and using a beefier design than the other boxes currently available. We have developed these boxes after testing hundreds of other boxes from a variety of sources. Our boxes are the strongest we have used and/or tested to date.
Click here for a look at our Foam Sandwich construction materials