Hey Vince, thanks for chiming in. I stand by my earlier comment about not hearing about breakages at the OP’s weight. The only 2 breaks I, personally, have heard of were with bigger guys, one with bigger foils and one was jumping. Of my 15 sets of friends who ride AFS locally none have broken anything. One even had a high speed crash into a rockbar, absolutely mangling his foil, but nothing broke.
I am very curious about foil problems and I am very detail oriented when looking at the MOI with the failures. When a piece of gear breaks I want to know the rider details, board dimensions, foil, fuse, tail, event location, everything. I think that every detail matters. This probably comes from my history working with engineers in the recreational and industrial climbing industry where we did lots of destructive testing to equipment. I also climbed bridges, towers, dams, doing all kinds of non-destructive testing on structures for engineers. Fun stuff and as you’d guess, every detail mattered.
I could be wrong, but I think in all of your pictures those are UHM masts? When I look at the AFS philosophy of wanting to build and ride the most cutting edge gear (they don’t seem to be advertising as the unbreakable brand) it leads me to wonder. These masts, all the UHM ones, are thinner with shorter chords than the vast majority of masts on the market. There’s only a couple that come even close to the dims AFS is producing. So, I see it as AFS is pushing the limits of what foils can do and when you do this, weird stuff can happen, things can break. I have no data on % of breaks vs any other brand but I do know that we can dig up issues from any company. I applaud the AFS customer service and support of free speech in their moderated groups as well as in the forums. Allowing people to discuss these issues without interference is how many of us learn.
For your comments, I think it would be easier for people to hear you if you tweaked your language just a touch. If you were to say something like “Hey everyone, I see a lot of reports of the UHM masts having problems in my social media groups. I don’t know that I would recommend them as durable enough for dockstart.” That might invite more conversation and collaboration in responses from people than when you say:
Because that comment is too far into the extreme. It sounds like a blanket statement applying to every product they make instead of just a specific mast design.
To add to the reference pot of experiences I’ll share my gear with notes on why I think it doesn’t have issues:
86kg rider on foil 3000 miles a year in the Columbia River Gorge in 10-60 knots of wind. I pretty much only surf swell all day long
I ride narrow boards (18” and 20”) that have low leverage over the mast.
My foils are 916mm span or less for minimal leverage over the mast
I use the 75cm skinny UHM (2000+ miles no issues) which is the most maneuverable of all AFS masts. I found certain combinations of fuse, front, tail to be uncomfortable and don’t recommend them.
All of my AFS problems have occurred using third party masts and tails so I stopped using them and the problems went away.
So, I’m down. Let’s have challenging conversations. Let’s also be as accurate as possible when we are pointing out problems. Let’s do that so that we can skip the emotions and focus on finding patterns in the failures which lead to solutions for users who are trying to use gear that is on the cutting edge of what is being built right now.
