New 2023 Gear - Evolution not Revolution

Ben addresses the issue at 1:00:18

As an aside, it's human nature to tweak stuff. It's not just the windsurfing industry. Wikipedia lists 70+ sub-genres of heavy metal.

Epic vid

Skills

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Sandman1221 said..
Boy, ZFIN foils were used by most of the top foilers at Sylt, but just saw a promo video from AFS (English subtitles) that said they were focusing on leisurely foils (that was the translation, but guess freeride), and that is good to hear, was worried their new foils would be too technical for me, really wanting the 95 mast/94.5 fuselage T-bar and 900 cm2 wing just for light wind, my current W95 mast/88 cm fuse. T-bar is great for higher winds with F770 and S670 wings, and good for light winds too with F1080 wing but thinking higher aspect 900 wing will be faster and glide through lulls better.

I'm not sure about that.
7 minutes of video and I'm not exactly sure what they are doing with "AFS Advanced", but the gist I get is enhanced customer service experience, smaller production runs of kit with the latest trends. In the past AFS/AHD have had a design which runs for 5 years or so. eg their FSW Expression came out in 2016, Surfmag tested it in 2018 and said it was a top allrounder, and its still in their current line up of boards now. It helps to keeps the price of the boards down.

They havent bothered with paying loads of money to be part of the PWA scene either. But it means no bragging rights, like 6 of the top 10 use ZFins or whatever it was.

This year they took on Jean Marie Guiriec who used to work for Exocet as their shaper, then set up on his own doing custom boards. The new Compact 91 board is one of his. I've seen a Topaz freeride fin board, and the bottom shape looked very flat, not for me. I bet JM's shapes will be a lot different, and I'm wondering if there will be an AHD Advanced board range.

At the end of the video its mentioned the boards will come out of France, I took that to be built in France, not just designed. The cost will go up, but for Europe the boards wont be shipped half way around the world with the issues we have seen with shipping the last few years.



Whenever I look at their website, it always seems to take ages to load first time of the day, but subsequent visits load from cache quickly. The English language tab has moved to the bottom of the page.
foilandco.co.uk/afs-foils/

Its also good to see a part-ex service, where they then refurbish you old wings. That means if I want to buy a F1080 wing in 5 years time, there might be a decent secondhand option even if their new design has moved on.

I think nobody knows Starboard will have new mast foil, called SLR C800, oriented on foil slalom. I have spoke with the tester, and is thinner and stiffer than the original shape of IQ foil. Here's the session on GPS Speed Foil. It's a great speed, because is in open sea, not offshore wind and flat water.

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XavierFerrer said..
I think nobody knows Starboard will have new mast foil, called SLR C800, oriented on foil slalom. I have spoke with the tester, and is thinner and stiffer than the original shape of IQ foil. Here's the session on GPS Speed Foil. It's a great speed, because is in open sea, not offshore wind and flat water.

Supposedly a 1-for-1 copy of the Phantom R mast.

So the new Phantom infinite foil set with reduced chord that allows for a 4% reduction in wetted surface area compared to the R95 PWA, costs between $7.5K (2 wings) and $11.3K (4 wings / 2 fuse).
www.phantom-foiling.com/infinite

The move to thinner low drag mast sections by some manufacturers (Phantom, Starboard) require more exotic high modulus carbon material (C800 etc) to achieve the tortional and flexural stiffness required to maintain control at high speed, A possible issue over time is the relationship between stiffness and tensile strength in carbon fibre means that some strands in higher modulus carbon may break when worked hard causing these expensive high end masts to become more bendy over time. This is already happening with the IQfoil masts which are thicker and only using C400 carbon.

I enjoy blasting around the bay on a foil, but it seems a high price to get an extra knot or so of speed, unless you are competing in the PWA.