I wanted to show off my latest home crafted board now that I've had a chance to get it out on the water and put it through it paces. Its a 137x41 cm wake style board with a paulownia wood and PVC foam core and ABS rails.
The thing that really novel about it is that I used 300gm Basalt Fibre in the layup as an alternative to carbon and glass. As far as I've seen so far this is the first time Basalt Fibre has ever been used in a kiteboard - there you go a world first and you heard it first on Seabreeze
Basalt Fibre is quite impressive stuff. Its got around 70-80% of most of the physical properties of carbon with one major exception in that it stretches around 3 times further before it breaks so none of the brittle failure you see with carbon. Its also about 40% cheaper than carbon.
It is literally molten basalt rock. The basalt is dug up from old volcanic pits, crushed, melted and drawn into a thread.
It get some use in composites but as I understand one of its big uses is in fire resistant clothing like firefighter suits. Until recently when www.playwithcarbon.com.au started to sell it you could only get it in industrial quantities. These guys sell it by the meter.
Without resin its got this amazing metallic sheen to it because of the high metal content of it ( its once was magma in the earth!).
Unfortunately, when you wet it out it looses that luster and it more an amber color which has a different but not as great impact as the black of carbon.
The board has got loads of rocker in it. 50mm. I was aiming for 40mm but it didn't spring back like I though it would. This has turned out to be a great asset as it pops off chop and makes for a edge that is really easy to engage or fully disengage with relatively little effort. It carves like an absolute champion and the extra stiffness in the board makes it lively on the water compared to my other attempts that are very thin and so they flex all over the shop for a smooth ride but a mushy feel during any tricks. The big amount of rocker does reduce the the upwind performance but overall I think this is the best outcome so far.
On the next board I want to have a crack at putting some channels in the tips. The tips are a bit slippery (fins a long way towards the center in order to get then as far from the heal as possible) so when you come off the lip of the wave the tail can spin out unless you are edging hard. I'm hoping channels will give that extra bit of grip to see it to the end.
As always, the whole guts and glory of the build is on boardbuilders.co
[URL]
boardbuilders-forum.1077691.n5.nabble.com/Franken-Board-td963.html[/URL]
