WindsurfingUK Issue 9 December 2018 | Page 54

54INTERVIEWBOUKE BECKER Are you looking mainly at market trends or do you take a steer from your own customer needs? Mostly when thinking of a new shape I will have a particular sailor or type of sailor in mind and trying to figure out how I can improve their sailing. But what they want can also be influenced by (the marketing of) other brands. Do you use influence outside of windsurfing to come up with new designs? Yes. I like to use science and look at designs of other devises which use wind or water. For example, the amount of water or air or water that is in contact with a board or sail (so the wider a board or the longer the luff of a sail) is at least as important as the planing area of a board or surface of a sail. Which is why sail planes have such high aspect wings. I also look at other foils and if they show "weird" design traits like a twisted wing of a wind mill or propeller, I will find out why and learn from this. As accidents can happen and other materials like rocks are still much harder, repairability can make the world of difference for the durability and cost of maintenance of a board Tell us about manufacturing materials used in WC boards – how do you decide what to use and when? We use Dyneema, carbon, a high grade glass fibre similar to S-glass and various types and thicknesses of sandwich foams. The whole build up and mix of materials is quite complicated as we need to withstand lots of different types of forces and this varies through the board as well. First of all you need to look at mechanical laws. Making use of mechanical laws can be very efficient, more than any high tech material. Then I also look at the properties of each material. For example, carbon is strong but also stiff and thus brittle. This property makes it good for compression but not useful for impact resistance like on the nose. Also you need to look at the modulus (elasticity) of each material. The stiffest material will always take the most force. If a steel cable is not strong enough to lift a weight, you are not going to put an elastic next to it. So materials like Carbon-Kevlar or Carbon-Innegra are far less good as you may think and even not better than glass fibre which costs 1/10th. Sometimes you need to mix materials for different purposes or to make a gradual change from one purpose to another but then it makes sense to put the most fragile material on the outside so it is easy to replace without first having to remove material which in fact was still fine. As accidents can happen and other materials like rocks are still much harder, repair ability can make the world of difference for the durability and cost of maintenance of a board. For this reason I like to keep the bottoms of the boards white, easy to touch up and the least issues with solar heat. And manufacturing techniques: could you tell us how WC go about producing their boards in terms of mouldings and lay up etc? We use CNC shaping and vacuum bagging like custom boards. However all shaping work is done by CNC; the outline, the bottom, the bottom reinforcement blocks, the rail, the deck, the deck reinforcements parts, the PVC deck uk WIND SURFING and bottom sandwich fold outs, all inserts. Especially doing all reinforcements and inserts by CNC saves a lot of measuring time, it is also much more accurate to the 1/10th of a mm so you save weight as well. Each board is vacuum bagged four times.