I love the concept, but I absolutely hate how shallow that thing is. There is pretty big stress on that connection and it doesn’t go very deep into the board. We know tuttle works great and I’m skeptical of anything that would be less deep into the board than that. Certainly the box itself would go through the entire board and tie into the deck for stiffness, why not send the mast carbon as far along that path as possible. It could still be adjustable, which is a nice upgrade over tuttle.
And somewhere up there in the thread there is mention of an adjustable tuttle box 10 years ago. Anyone know more about this?
Nah, we can just use our regular boards and choose which track we fire that thing in. It’s a foil version of an asymmetrical surfboard. Offset stance, offset mast…
Gotta give them a chance to sort it out for the next few years. It’s a pretty big investment for every brand out there to learn to make a new board and mast and then share what’s learned across all brands to see if everyone agrees before an industry standard came about.
I have several friends with Sirus and UT foils that routinely shear off their front wing bolts so something mustn’t be quite right with this design.
It’s very odd that your fix was non-stainless steel bolts, I would expect stainless and non-stainless to bend / shear the same.
non-stainless is significantly stronger than stainless. And there are two main grades of stainless with the cheap ones being quite weak. An easy thing to remember - stainless steel M8 (even a high strength stainless) is weaker than an alloy steel M6.
typical hardware store stainless bolts (18-8) are often around 70ksi
A286 and 316 Stainless around 110-120ksi
Typical alloy steel around 170ksi
this was my first impression too, I guess from mast/fuse connection we can see that you don’t need as much as you would expect. I wonder why they didn’t make it at least as 2-3 inches deep, but maybe it’s to cater for thinner boards or something.
lmao same, following foil tech changes feels like speedrunning what the mtb world has been doing. Theyre very similar things where the both systems are modular and using refined high-cost material with tight tolerances.
Some changes are innovative and some feels like standard shifts to keep us spending money
I don’t see this connection being an easy switch for board manufacturers, especially while trying to keep the board weight down. Seems like the flat plate against the bottom of the board meets out needs better.
I’ve been thinking about Foil drive recently. If everyone is building trench boards to hide the battery pod, wouldn’t it be better to just go back to the lunch box, then hide it where ever you want in a compartment somewhere in the board? - No mast/battery comparability issues then either…
What is stopping you (or Cedrus or Stringy) machining your own titanium foot for any existing mast, that can adapt to other front foils and tails? $300 region for a nice adaptor for your favourite mast, to get onto your favourite foils
You could make adaptors to work on any of the following brand front foil and tails, and equally machine the titanium foot to connect to any existing masts.
Flitelab…
Armstrong
KT
AFS Enduro
Axis race and older
Starboard
Gofoil
Gong
I guess you end up just changing out the front foils, and keep a common tail setup?
Kane makes a good point that the mast base is the heaviest single part of the whole foil, which makes the mono track approach really interesting.
The dual tracks also need to be extremely well reinforced, so I can see the “overall poor design” critique of what we are using now. Hugely reinforced mast base, hugely reinforced tracks.
Appletree goes futher into it here.
I’m personally very keen on something better, you can super easily attach that mast to a baseplate ala Axis, so the backwards compatibility knee jerk is a non issue
backwards compatibility knee jerk is a non issue