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.