I’m looking for a Lift mast to attempt a Tuttle conversion.
Does anybody have a Lift mast that cracked at the baseplate? I’ll get rid of the baseplate.
Or anyone has a cheap Lift mast they want to get rid of?
Ideally 32" as I will loose ~2" in the conversion.
Got a old 32 I’d let go cheap
Don’t limit yourself to lift. ANY mast will work, potting the lift fuse end is a lot easier than potting the turtle end.
Thanks, very interesting idea! I bought Maxwell’s 32" so should be set for now but if I need another mast I’ll keep this in mind.
@jondrums I’ve been following your posts and that’s what motivated me to try this conversion!
I have an old milling machine at home and plenty of aluminum stock I can use so I’m going to try to make my mold, thanks for the offer! If I struggle to make 2 matching pieces I’ll buy one of yours. They look nice!
I’ve seen the same note on Mikeslab’s drawing which says these dimensions are for the finished product and the mold has some extra clearance.
Do you know how much clearance is needed? Is 0.1mm enough?
I also notice your drawing is a bit different compared to Mikeslab’s.
You use a constant height of 50mm while they use a taper from 2.0" to 1.25".
I like the constant 50mm it should be stronger. Do they use the taper for thinner kite boards maybe?
There’s also a Levitaz drawing for the R5 which has yet a different depth, and shows the inner holes don’t have a constant spacing.
I also found this drawing from Chubanga that lists 3 standards.
@jondrums your design seems to be a full Tuttle (flat top) while Levitaz seems to be closer to the deep tuttle, and Mikeslab some kind of deep tuttle with a steeper angle?
Is that right?
I wonder how many of these turtles are really compatible. The bolt hole angles seem to all be different.
the levitaz drawing is a real shame.
they say 16mm wide, which is just wrong. It won’t fit in a tuttle box - the fit needs to be nearly perfect and the original specification was in inches at 0.625" (15.88mm). Make your mold as close to exactly .625 as you can. If anything make the mold a little bigger and manually sand back the mast and measure with a caliper until it is perfect. But with your milling machine you should be able to nail it.
The only reason the old tuttle fins were taller at the front versus the back is that they needed to fit in the back of a windsurf board that was tapering to the tail. We should not be carrying this forward to foils in my opinion.
The original GoFoil tuttle masts went about 72mm deep. And over time we’ve learned it doesn’t have to be that deep. surveying various masts 50mm is approximately a good depth in my opinion. but anything from 40-70mm seems to work.
The hole spacing is another sad story of history. I don’t really know for sure why the spacing is still weird on Mikeslab and Levitaz, but I think it has to do with 1" spacing for the back 4 holes, and 105mm for the front and back width that carried forward from the original Larry Tuttle spec. The 1" spacing was apparently because people wanted to reuse the same fin bolts for foot-straps at 1" spacing.
F4 has adopted evenly spaced holes on their tuttle and I think we all need to go this way.
To be clear though, I have only been using two bolts for a while now with no issues. And I ride hard and crash a lot. Not sure if we really need all 5 holes. 3 might be a good compromise.
