Thanks for the stoke!
Regarding open source: At this point, we are keeping the design proprietary. As a grassroots startup without outside investors, we took a big leap to quit great jobs in the industry to start Hydrocraft. We went all in. I won’t bore you with the details, but getting to this point has been quite the journey. If you look at the regression of our hairlines from nine months ago to now, you’ll understand! Haha. The costs and time to develop this connection were significant, so we have filed a patent to protect that work, purely so we can afford to continue on this journey of trying to build great gear.
That being said, we know foilers love to build and tinker, and we want to lean into that. We’ve developed an aluminum fuselage system that allows for bolt-on wings. We use it for our own prototyping, and it has exceeded our expectations. We’ll share more on that soon, but it will be a great platform for people who like to get experimental with their equipment. More to come!
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Very interesting joint connection! Looking forward to seeing the finalized version. Do you have any specs on the mast yet (thickness, chord depth, mast lengths, UHM vs HM) or have you not finalized them yet?
The mast in the video above is 14mm thick 119mm chord non-tapered with UHM layup. But we’ve got much thinner tapered masts that we’re testing currently. Long story short, we’re all in on the thin masts arms race! We’ll have a variety of masts on offer.
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That makes plenty of sense. You are a business and gotta make money. Unfortunately I don’t see any foreseeable way we’re headed towards a standard mast/fuse connection system. Nobody adopted Cedrus standard, though that could be because it isn’t perfect either. I know it makes more business sense to make that joint proprietary both because each brand thinks theirs is the best, but also because every foil sale also nets a mast sale too. One can dream though…
Nice work on what you’ve come up with. The simple addition of the two cross-bolts just makes so much sense yet nobody else thought of it before.
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