I’ll use a quote by my old friend Steve Forstall. " Most of us shapers do it out of passion, the money takes care of itself, if you’re good. Sometimes our wealth is measured in freedom, product quality satisfaction, and control of our own time. Smart people who know how to market clothes get rich, if that’s how you want to spend your time. Exactly who is the surf industry and what credability do they have? " Steve Forstall
Who would of thought :).
Gotta love those Brad Domke vids, further proof that there’s something in the water here…
Greg Loehr used to tell me that he thought it was the influence of the space program, when he was growing up their dad’s went off to work to do the impossible everyday. We just try to keep that same “no limits” philosophy alive.
Mike I do think The AeroSpace industry has had a big influance on Board Building. If I were young and thinking of getting into building Boards I would go to one of the Jr Colleges that offered training for jobs in the Aerospace industry. I have long thought that Coil may have got it’s start in such a program. That is not taking away anything from what you are doing. It takes some ablity to work with a lot of the new plastics fibers and resins It also takes a great deal of innovation to take those things that are for aircraft and space production and use it in a new way, making a usable and cost effective Surfboard.
Getting involved with the motor sports arena too. The work they do with Carbon Fiber would benefit future board designs, especially for molded boards.
We have friends in both the aerospace and motorsports composite businesses. Actually we have customers in those businesses.
Yeah Mike, I figured you’d have friends in motorsports, you always have those cool shots of the fancy race cars. You know exactly what I mean about the work being done with Carbon. I’ve been watching the Formula One stuff on TV and they talked about how much of the car is now fiber. Seems like the majority is carbon. They know so much about the flex and strength. Amazing what they’re doing these days.
Carbon is king in a lot of composite applications where stiffness/weight ratio is primary criteria. The spread tow stuff has taken over in body panels, and they’ve been doing the tubs with fancy prepregs in autoclaves for decades; first in F1, then down into prototype sports cars. These are never-fail parts that protect the driver and provide the front suspension pick-ups (the rear “frame” of the car is actually the engine/transmission unit, it’s a stressed chassis member). Carbon laminates that are cured for it can take really high temps, which is another plus for race car applications. BMW is bringing this kind of tech to production cars. The new i3 is a carbon unit body, made with a proprietary process (imagine!) that reduces turnaround times enough to make this practical for production. They vertically integrated their carbon process too,; the glass fiber is spun in one place, sent to Washington state USA to be cooked
into carbon, then sent back to Germany to be woven and put into the product.
actually a few small aero bits
Fark this new format, it won’t let me edit the end of that last post…
What I was gonna say was there’s actually a few small aero bits being done with 3d printing now. It’ll be a while before the structural parts are done that way, we’ll see how that goes. Predictions of 3d printing taking over everything are overblown IMO. If it ever happens in surfboards, it’ll all be about getting proprietary recipes to get the feel right.
For the moment 3d printing is a good tool for prototype and non or low structural parts. Improvement in printebal materials is the key to development of industrial 3d printing. For the hobbyists it s a super tool, start to work on my home made one…
Except some factory, composit use in surfboards is antiquity. As an engineer student’s i work on race boat building in 1997, all was done with carbon perpeg nida core sandwich in autoclave.
Lemat, sometimes I curse you for giving away too much good info on here. We’d rather just show people a product that indicates what is possible.
Out around the edges of things it’s about the processes, and the people that know don’t talk too much about it. That’s certainly true in motorsports (try getting Adrian Newey to tell you how they build Vettel’s cars), and in aerospace (our customer who works for SpaceX won’t tell us much about how they build the Dragon capsule).
That’s the way it is in the boat building industry too. I worked in a small, very old custom sport yacht yard in Stuart Fla. When I started we were still building boats in the traditional way. Plank on frame with glass over. By the time I moved on 25 years later we were doing composite construction and using pre-preg, vacuum bagging, infusion and exotic fabrics, along with all sorts of core material. Not to mention all our hull frames and interior parts came to us as jig saw puzzle pieces from a cad cutter. All in an effort to make the boats stronger, lighter and faster. Cost of materials and labor intensity was offset by the savings in time and wasted material. The boats are so complex in construction now it boggles the traditional mind. Yet the biggest fear in the industry was the complete lack of new blood coming in. No kids wanting to learn to build boats or even repair them. We didn’t hire 1 new trainee in the last 10 years I was there. Not for lack of trying either.
I worked in a boatyard for a few months several years back, and found the owners practicing the current business model, which is maximim profit now, today, and worry about lack of quality later. Baby needs a new diamond!
IE, they switched to using regular plywood instead of marine plywood, because it was encapsulated in resin anyway and what is the difference?
While at first I was kidded as being just another surfing ding fixer, my limited surfboard skills( compared to many of those here) had me moving up quickly past many employees that had been there years. I continuously brought up ideas to make things lighter and stronger, but was always met with the
" This is the way we have always done things" and that statement was uttered shortly before I walked off the job in disgust.
It was not the fact that my ideas were not employed, it was more the fact that they were not even considered and the attitude they were met with. I don’t even think the owners were listening at any new ideas, just started shaking their heads and saying:
" This is the way we have always done it"
They were not even outlandish ideas, wouldn’t have required any new tools, just a different method and small changes in design which would have wasted less material.
They are now out of business. Whether the economy would have gotten them anyway, I know not, but it was obvious to me the boats which came in for maintenance that were a few years old, were made better with more attention to longevity than new product leaving the factory at that time.
Had they been actively seeking to improve their product, I would of stuck around to learn more, but as it was, I felt there was nothing more they could teach me, that I cared to learn anyway.
One thing that was amusing about working there, is one day I showed my coworkers my cedar HWS, and they were all like,
“Wow! It is so light!”
Never heard any surfer say that before. A 13 pound 6’8" considered light, hahahahaaaaa
That is typical in the regular boatbuilding industry. When Doug Wright moved over into building race boats from building surfboards, he showed a bunch of people how much weight could be pulled out just by paying attention to lamination methods (and this was hand-lam stuff). The late Dave “Davo” Dedrick blew minds with clean, non-wasteful lams.
But there’s lots of sophisticated boatbuilders, so we can’t lump all of them together.
Sometimes resin-rich lams are desired, too. I know some guys that build carbon airframes for small jets, they use lots of vinylester and try to get a nice thick laminate because its an easy way to get the stiffness they desire without spending millions on carbon fiber.
Good article on the BMW carbon iSeries body:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-21/bmw-bets-on-carbon-fiber-bodies-for-cars#!
Surfboards are pretty unique in that there aren’t a lot of limiting factors in performance around their construction. Guys are riding the biggest waves in the world on standard boards. They aren’t limited by any engineering challenges around the boards themselves or their construction. So in that aspect I think there isn’t a lot of incentive to push the engineering limit of surfboards. Not that they shouldn’t but it doesn’t yield the same return in performance that boats/cars/airplanes do when you get much larger power/weight ratios that give big performance gains and efficiency returns.
I’d like to see more experimentation in totally new concepts like foils and different hull shapes. Look at how game-changing the new America’s Cups boats were to the sport. There is a lot to be gained from removing the drag of the hull from the water. It’s always about speed and maneuverability, if you reduce the drag exponetially you gain both speed and maneuverability. It would allow you to easily ride unbroken waves and hull shapes could be radically different from what they are now. What surffoils was doing was mindblowing to me and a really cool direction to take things.
Our mindset of what “surfboards” are right now is so extremely narrow, there is a lot of area to explore outside the current status quo.
You are certainly right. This is my teacher side. I like exchange, it helps me to understand better. If it was my business i would keep this for me but sometimes I get tired seeing people denigrate work of others out of jealousy, because they don’t understand, or worse they only think they know.
I just remember the principles of mechanics, which are free, you can find them everywhere - but they are often not easy to master. I don’t openly really give some how-to solutions.
Continue forward, keep the dream with your “magic tech”. I like to see what its possible to do, it makes me work to understand (my favorite hobby in fact).
I suspect a lot of the hype regarding composites (and other proprietary methodologies) is largely just an advertising tool. Which is understandable, R&D in chemical composites and sophisticated materials and methodologies is expensive, the cost has to be offset by sales, hence the need for advertising fodder. And admittedly its also a travesty when companies who invested in a technology have proprietary secrets ripped off or imitated by a competitor who didn’t pay the dues, hence the need for secrecy is again, understandable. The problem is that they’re not mutually exclusive - hype your secret sauce too much, and you end up giving something away. Give nothing away, and you’re left with nothing to hype. Its a fine line.
I found it interesting that when Bret posted up his truly futuristic work with hydrofoil surfboards a lot of voices went suddenly mute, although I suspect that’s as much (or more) likely to be the future of surfboards as any ‘magic’ composite to come out of a lab / factory.
At any rate the magic secret sauce talk has never hindered imaginitive backyard guys from pursuing their own vision of the future. And as long as its still fun to build and ride boards using 50 year old tech (or any tech available to them), I suspect there’ll always be someone doing it.
In the end it’s just about water toys anyway, so it’s all good, and a fun ride! That is, until the standup paddle-boats take over completely, then the fun is over for us surfboard guys, LOL.
There was a great PBS TV documentary series 25 or 30 years ago, The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke.
“The title comes from the philosophical idea that the universe essentially only exists as you perceive it through what you know; therefore, if you change your perception of the universe with new knowledge, you have essentially changed the universe itself.”
It documented that our revolutionary or game changing discoveries typically depose the current establishment. They are not usually accomplished by somebody acknowledged by the prevailing establishment. The revolutionary vision sees something the establishment cannot or will not (Copernicus, Galileo and many more).
Dreamers will continue to believe there is a better way. Inventors will continue to innovate. Backyard builders will continue to make their own equipment.
And members of the establishment will do their best to maintain power/control.
Many made wings but few could fly …
EDIT: Should anybody get a wild hair, here is a link to all 10 parts on youtube:
I was just reading an article on a line of Boards from Hawaii. I think it was surfline Hawaii. One of the owners has a degree from MIT and Wharton School of Business. They were making some composite construction boards. However on their web page I did not see any information that was newer then 2000. Seems like someone with background in Board building and earned a Ph.D. from MIT would have made so big improvement in board construction.
Anyone from Sways know about Surfline and if they are still in business?