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The wings and fuselage look and feel like plastic, they look very tough. Hopefully someone has gotten one on the water

Thing is, injection molded plastic doesn't lend itself to thick sections, long fibers in reinforcement or such large plan forms ( outline) . Large outline would require huge and expensive injection molding machine totaled the pressure.

Can't imagine the tooling cost with such low volumes of production.
Very curious about production method

Ideally compression molded over a cheaper smaller version of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gz7nSG ... e=youtu.be
but if the comparison to Lamborghini/VW's tech is right, with carbon confetti in the core instead of long fibers?
Either way it makes sense to have carbon protected against abrasion and minor impacts somehow, IF the result doesn't give up too much section modulus etc.
North has got to have dumpsters full of carbon offcuts...

How do you repair such wings? Will epoxy stick to it?

airsail wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 21, 2017 10:43 pm

The wings and fuselage look and feel like plastic, they look very tough. Hopefully someone has gotten one on the water

If it is the same kind of plastic as the Shinn foil, not good. You can bend the wings with your hand and it vibrates like crazy at anything but super slow speed.

If it's PA ( nylon) it's nearly impossible to repair. It's difficult to get anything to adhere to PA without specific glues and pre-treatments.

I was in our local wind/sup/kite shop yesterday and saw a neil pryde prototype windfoil with the fuselage and wings made from the exact same material. When I first looked at it I wonder whether it might have been polycarbonate and carbon. I've used large twintip fins made from PC and glass and they were excellent. Very durable ( survived many reef hits and the site had a great video of the fins being nailed into a plank of wood and then pulled out!) and cheap ( $3 per fin). They had the same surface pattern as the foils (but that may just be from injection/compression moulding). I thought I had read that epoxy bonds to PC so might be a better for repairs.

Polycarbonate us easy to repair with most epoxies

They using what is called "forged" CF. Basically CF tows cut and mixed with epoxy when pushed into mold. Lamborghini and Calaway pioneered it few years ago.

AKA forged carbon fiber.



https://carbonfibergear.com/blogs/carbo ... rbon-fiber