I_draw_boxes — don’t assume they’re connected, or built to survive what you’re about to put them through.
Reality check: every board maker, production or custom, has had box failures. The loads on that connection exceed the intuition of designers coming from a fin-box world.
Here’s the calibration test: set your board on the grass with the foil installed — mast down, board up, exactly like the photo below. Now climb a ladder and just stand on it. Don’t hop. You won’t. Just standing there with your full weight on that box would be terrifying enough. That single static load is a fraction of what happens in one session. A 10-mile downwind run is hundreds to thousands of pump cycles, each one hammering that connection. One session. Not a season — one session.
The engineering behind making the connection survive is closely guarded. Manufacturers don’t advertise their failures — but they should, because they’ve bled to get where they are, and builders keep reinventing the wheel.
Box design is the second most important component in a foil board, right behind shape. Dave Kalama cracked the downwind shape code. His boxes have still failed.
looks like Edo is on the new Adgate shaped Slingshot parawing board. I believe Slingshot is also making a tuttle mast that matches. Makes sense that with all the same brand gear, no adjustment is needed. The adjustment has always been necessary when matching up gear from different brands and only mildly useful for tweaking from there.
To me, the big news here isn’t the Tuttle piece, it’s that a top M2O downwind paddler (from that '25 photo finish!) moved to a brand that is a total challenger in the DW foiling space. Put differently: I don’t recall a single person in the 125+ rider fleet at M2O ’25 riding a Slingshot foil.
He’s spoken about it on podcast. With the time it takes to build molds and get prototypes. They have 3 shots to get it right before Hawaii season. Does slingshot make DW boards?
Really nice DW boards designed by SS designer Gabe! He also designed their parawing and some other stuff. Can confirm he rips the higher aspect SS foils in the surf too.
Will be interesting to see what modifications Slingshot do to their one lock design. In its current form it has a lot more drag than other DW foils, Axis brought out a completely new system to address this.
Bit pointless moving to a Tuttle system to reduce a tiny bit of drag when starting but then having constant drag from the foil system that is always in the water.
No idea. I imagine it’s built into the forum software. I tried to get Eric to elevate my user status so I can unblock them. I can edit them, but I can’t unblock them. shrugs
If they seem legit, I’ll just quote them I guess until @Eric unmutes them. (see above a couple posts)
Does slingshot make DW boards?
He also designed their parawing and some other stuff. Can confirm he rips the higher aspect SS foils in the surf too.
