This is more or less what happened to skateboards, there was a big variety of shapes at first but slowly the popsicle shape started to become the norm, and apart from small changes or details (slight changes in concave or nose/tail shape), a skateboard from a brand is not really that different from a skateboard from another brand. Yes, there are sizes and somewhat different shapes of different models, but the “perfect” shape has been acheived and it has been like that for several years. Same thing with trucks, wheels might have had a longer evolution with plastic/different urethane cores.
Getting back to foiling. It seems that there was a much bigger variety of foil shapes some years ago. Gong, for example, had several different models that were really different from each other. Nowadays, it seems that most of the foils tend to fall into the thin, flat and high aspect ratio territory. The evolution of the same gong models has gone towards that, and I see really similar stuff for other brands.
What do you guys think? I might be biased because I mostly look into prone foiling wings.
Also, even the beginner foils of today have mid to high aspect ratios compared to what was available 3-4-5 years ago.
There’s a few outliers but we’re there to some extent. Everyone makes a good foil, for me it’s just about which range matches the size, span, aspect ratio I want for the two sizes I want.
Example - I need a 900-1000 sq cm wing for small days surf foiling. 850 is too small for groveling, 1100 is too much surface area. I also want a span for this around 900mm, 850 is too small, 950 too big…all this points me to the north 930 which is where I am now
I feel like there are ~3 categories that are pretty popular right now. You’ve got you 8.0 AR mid aspects (AFS Silk, SK8, etc), ~10 AR HAs (probably the most popular right now), and then the 12+ AR super HA wings for maximum glide.
I think all three have their separate use case and it’s fun bouncing between them to feel different things. But totally agree the lower aspect wings seem to be losing popularity fast.
From what I’ve seen it feels like 10AR is becoming the all terrain wing. A lot of people are using them for surfing and connecting waves to a really high level and can double as wing or downwind wings.
I seriously doubt it. Not like Abracadabra and One-Lock converted anyone to Naish and Slingshot. And i don’t see other brands creating quick release systems that are backward compatible or durable or solid or cheap any time soon. Most of them still trying to figure out why their M6 bolts keep failing…