All-Time Top
The most popular posts of all time.
Matt•Homebuilt Wingfoilboard - Ken Adgate Style
The shape of the board is inspired by the designs of Ken Adgate. My thanks to him for his endless tinkering to get the perfect board shape and his generosity in sharing his ideas. Dimensions:163 cm x 49 cm x 14 cm, 78 litres, 4.56 kg with padMaterials:Foil tracks: LIO-TEC US FOIL Box 32 cmFoil box: Airex T92.80 80 kg/m3EPS: Insulation EPS 20 kg/m3Sandwich in standing area: Glass fibre 80 g/m2 and ...
Hydrofoil Design using Free Software
I have recently started a quest to find the best free software for generating complex shapes like hydrofoils. Having a good level of experience in CATIA and AutoCAD under my belt I believe that scripted CAD file generation with some polishing in a UI CAD program is the fastest and most efficient way to go for hydrofoils. It makes the import of airfoil shapes from sources like airfoiltools or the U...
Foiling Power Plate - Similar to CHINOOK PowerPlate
When I started hydrofoiling I did not have a proper board that could hold the Deep Tuttle mount of my newly acquired Moses (Kit 85) foil. After several hours of searching for a board on the internet the conclusion was clear: most of the windsurf foilboards in 2022 were either overpriced, huge, had weird shapes or were just not particlularly pretty. At that time most of my boards had an unenforced ...
Carbon Skate - Lightweight and tough home-made foil pumping board
The biggest issue of my previous build, the Balsa Skate, was that it did not have a rocker. This resulted in two problems:it felt like pumping needed more energy in comparison to a board with a rockerif submerged deep in the water, the board would slowly soar to the surface while drifting away in a random direction. Often it appeared several meters away, which resulted in quite some swimming.Long ...
Fanatic Aero Fuselage Shortening
If your pumping setup feels very stubborn and is hard to pump chances are that your fuselage is too long.Adding a second position to most older aluminum fuselages is quite simple. Mount the fuselage on a mill or a drill press with the contact face of the original mounting position parallel to the clamping table and fix it with two screws in the front where the mast usually goes and one clamp in th...
Matt•DW-Board full build
Home-build of DW-board for light wind winging, paddle-ups and lake-DWThe board shape is inspired by Kalama’s Barracuda and KT's Dragonfly.Dimensions:240 cm x 50 cm x 16 cm, 115 liters, 5.8 kg without padConstruction materials:Foil tracks: LIO-TEC US FOIL Box 42 cmTrack box: Airex 80 kg/m3EPS: Insulation EPS 15 kg/m3Sandwich Standing Area: Glass fiber 80 g/m2 and Airex C70.75 2 mmCarbon biaxial 45°...
Matt•Full-Sandwich-Pumpboard
First build of full sandwich double stringer board for pump foilingAfter more than a year of pumping with a Pronesurf board it was time to build a real pumping board.Based on the construction ideas of Christian and with his extensive advice and support I was able to complete this project.The boardshape is inspired by the WKT from Armstrong.I did the construction in the apartment and bike room of o...
CNC with DIY 24h Monitoring System Part 1/2
Everyone who builds boards, hydrofoils, model airplanes - you name it - eventually dreams of having their own CNC machine. Something that turns a 3D model straight into a finished part. Similar magic as a 3D printer, just bigger, louder, dirtier and of course much cooler. This article sheds some light on CNC basics and the startup of operations of my CNC, the next will focus on the monitoring syst...
Custom M6-Threaded Footstrap Inserts
Brands like Flikka have awesome stainless steel inserts with M6 threads. I wanted something similar for my custom windsurf board and this was the approach:The basis were stainless steel drive-in nuts that can be bought in any hardware store (don't get the the nickeled ones, they'll corrode). There was another tip from Will Cyr in the Board & Hydrofoil Building group on FB to add an insulating ...
CNC with DIY 24h Monitoring System Part 2/2
It's close to impossible to constantly supervise your CNC-machine on jobs stretching multiple hours. An additional issue for me is that the CNC is in the basement compartment of our city apartment, about 30-seconds-running away from our living room. At the end of part 1 I showed an example of how easy things can go south. The described incident was the reason for the monitoring system presented he...
Custom Back Wing
Using test foils from Armstrong we learned that a small back wing increases the 'pumpability' noticeably. To this point I always had the custom 365 cm2 back wing on my Fanatic Aero foil that in comparison to the Armstrong back wings we tested is quite large. Naturally I also wanted a smaller wing. The motivation for making my own small back wing instead of buying one was the price tag for the orig...
Hydrofoil Profile Selection
Some simulation scripts to find the ideal hydrofoil profileI wrote this collection of scripts sometime in 2022 to get an educated guess about the ideal profile for my homemade carbon pumping mast. Surely, with some tweaks, such as segmentation of the wing, you can use it to optimize a whole wing design too. Feel free to use it any way you like. I would be extremely interested in the experimental v...
Balsa Skate - A Wooden Pumping Dream
After seeing a friend's Balsa surfboard I was immediately hooked and had to build my own for pumping. The first sketch outlined a small and flat (no rocker) pumping board that I could easily transport with public transport or put in a travel bag without loosing too much space.This was the first pencil sketch of the board (Sperrholz = plywood, Styro = 30 kg/m3 EPS foam):To aid in building I decided...
Armstrong Fuselage A+System Upgrade
The latest Armstrong A+System promises a better rigidity between mast-fuselage and fuselage-front wing. For large wings upgrading my old fuselage to the new A+System did indeed improve the firmness of these connections.If you already have a A+System fuselage but an old mast or front wing you need the Armstrong upgrade kit to drill two additional holes into the mast and one into the front wing. Arn...
Copying a Hydrofoil - Sabfoil Balz Pro 799
Fresh out of the mold 🥰Works just like the original but is 100g lighter.Self-made super stiff EPS core with 4 layers on each side:275 g/m² carbon top-layer 0/90°400 g/m² biax carbon ±45°200 g/m² unidirectional carbon240? g/m² glass fiber 0/90°Since there have been many questions how we do the EPS foam core: It's a simple but messy process, that is also why I don't have any pictures at this point....
V-Tail for Pumping - Rapid Prototyping
This v-shaped stabi has been in my head for quite a while already: 240 mm span, 82 sqcm area, GOE599 profile at -2deg AOA.It feels similar to pumping without a stabilizer but it's a more reactive."6/10 would not build again 😅 but it paved the way for an improved Gen2" is what I've said in the beginning but it has actually become one of my favorite stabs :)Here are the STLs:WingMold topMold bottom...
Fanatic Skate 101 Foil Edition
In this post I show you how I made my Fanatic Skate 101 foil-ready. Almost all windsurfing and racing foils come with a deep tuttle head. So the first step was to make a positive of such head. One of the difficulties is that each manufacturer seems to have its own interpretation of what the dimensions of a deep tuttle head should be. It is common that the height or the thickness of the head varies...
Making a windsurf board foil-ready (JP Magic Ride 116)
Converting a freeride board, in this case a JP Magic Ride 118 into a foil-ready version can be done by anyone with a little bit of patience. Freestyle windsurf boards are even a bit easier to convert since they don't have a fin-box that is laminated both the lower and upper deck which makes the removal a bit easier. The original screw hole for fin mounting was reused as the aft mounting hole for t...
Windsurf Board Repair (JP Magic Ride)
I damaged the nose of my JP Magic Ride 118 in one of the famous catapults. The damage didn't look that bad at first but the board's surface felt soft at and around the spot on the railing where the boom hit the board, indicating delamination. Here is how the board looked after the catapult:The last picture above showes splintered paint where the boom/mast hit the board. The larger wrinkle on the s...
Deep Tuttle to Plate Adapter - 675 g of Carbon, Glass and Epoxy
To use a board with a rail system or the foiling power plate with a deep tuttle head foil mast an adapter is needed. Most manufacturers sell them as accessories to their foils but since I had plenty of time while waiting for my recently ordered foil to arrive I decided to make one myself. The design is somewhat similar to the GROOVE Deep Tuttle Adapter as you might notice.There are nice forum post...
Steel Inserts for Moses Mast
Many Moses foil owners I have talked to have had problems with ripping out the thread of the brass inserts of their deep tuttle masts. Both of my inserts broke after about 20 sessions and ruined what could have been a nice afternoon on the water.This picture shows how the insert looked after it was removed from the mast with a hammer and a screwdriver. Clearly visible is the damaged thread.Instead...
Axis Wing Set - Copying Hydrofoils
After dozens of severe impacts it was about time to replace my old home-made 1150 Axis front wing and my 460 back wing with a new pair.I've decided to go for ECC eSpread275CHT carbon fiber deck layer because it looks awesome 💪 For making the wings I re-used my old molds of the original 1150 and 460 Axis wings shown in the pic below.The molds are not really our best engineering effort (there are s...
