A bit frustrated with high prices of windsurfing board I did ask Chinese manufacturer how much it cost to build and sell one board.
It is $300 -350.
Maybe one day we ( SB community) could design our own universal slalom board, send a plans and ask to build 50 pieces for us?
Basically manufacturer could do copy of the best performing board, but due to copyright that is no the way to go.
I agree that material and internal structure could be a crap but at $400 price tag I will be happy to try XFIRE even if last one season only...
If that works I could offer free shipping from China to Brisby as I have always some space left in my containers...

Mark _australia said...
What construction?

I have no idea what is inside the board but this OEM board manufacturer do boards already that looks quite modern (not like polypropylene kayak )

it wouldn't surprise me if <$500 was the manufacturing cost of a current production board. after you take off the shop, distributor, and brand markups (which they need for profit margins), you don't have much change from the $2k price of a current board for the actual cost of the board.

so yeah, it's a pretty cool idea. but it would rely on a lot of people giving up their time for free to organise it.

Macroscien said...

A bit frustrated with high prices of windsurfing board I did ask Chinese manufacturer how much it cost to build and sell one board.
It is $300 -350.
Maybe one day we ( SB community) could design our own universal slalom board, send a plans and ask to build 50 pieces for us?
Basically manufacturer could do copy of the best performing board, but due to copyright that is no the way to go.
I agree that material and internal structure could be a crap but at $400 price tag I will be happy to try XFIRE even if last one season only...
If that works I could offer free shipping from China to Brisby as I have always some space left in my containers...

I understand what you are saying however without retailers our sport would be dead as they are the ones that we rely on to get our bits and pieces,advice etc.
Normally shops are pretty fair with there pricing and if you have a good rapport with them it is rare you will pay RRP,and no I do not own a windsurf shop

djl070 said...

Macroscien said...

A bit frustrated with high prices of windsurfing board I did ask Chinese manufacturer how much it cost to build and sell one board.
It is $300 -350.
Maybe one day we ( SB community) could design our own universal slalom board, send a plans and ask to build 50 pieces for us?
Basically manufacturer could do copy of the best performing board, but due to copyright that is no the way to go.
I agree that material and internal structure could be a crap but at $400 price tag I will be happy to try XFIRE even if last one season only...
If that works I could offer free shipping from China to Brisby as I have always some space left in my containers...

I understand what you are saying however without retailers our sport would be dead as they are the ones that we rely on to get our bits and pieces,advice etc.
Normally shops are pretty fair with there pricing and if you have a good rapport with them it is rare you will pay RRP,and no I do not own a windsurf shop

Retailes could be ok but dilema remains.
I hardly want to fork out $2800 every year on new board, but if retailers and manufacturers could adopt mass market approach and sell boards at $700 then will sell probably 50 times more and windsurfing could be popular sport not the exclusive club.
Simlarly modern smart phone or laptop is worth and was prices at $5000 but real mass market brought the prices to the real ground or sometimes below

If it is EPS and glass, it is basically the same as the cheapie surfboards like NSP.

Be lucky to last a season as it is missing the many many extras you have in a proper modern sandwich construction

you jump on here with some pretty random ideas, but this really takes the cake.

So with you wealth of experience you are going to design a board that actually works? Oh and you mentioned that you would then on sell the board... hahahahahahaaaaaa ahahhaahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa

It's hard enough to sell a well designed, name brand boards. Make no bones about it, your one off chinese rip off junk board will be destined to your shed for many years to come. And my bet that will be soon after you realise that when you pay $2000+ for a board you are paying for so much more than the pure manufacturing cost.

kato said...
I think your idea is good EXCEPT ...

I said that must be our own design but such program to be successful need to decide for one for all design - most universal. You need to decide if you want to build SUP board size , wave , speed or beginner board.
Project could not be alternative for full blood retail shop with all assortment available.

Macroscien said...

Mark _australia said...
If it is EPS and glass, it is basically the same as the cheapie surfboards like NSP.

Be lucky to last a season as it is missing the many many extras you have in a proper modern sandwich construction

Don't know but if somebody come with good plans and design then we could ask manufacturer to build exactly to our specification and materials.

My point Macro, is the ones you saw are cheap because they are substandard construction. They are the same price as a cheap chinese surfboard because they are the same weak construction as a cheap Chinese surfboard.
As soon as you add more glass, patches for foot area, proper divinycell inserts for tracks and plugs, plus a d'cell sandwich layer etc etc you have doubled the materials cost and increased the labour by about 4 - 6 times

You have a good idea but it will not be a $500 board

Macroscien said...

aus301 said...

So with you wealth of experience you are going to design a board that actually works? Oh and you mentioned that you would then on sell the board...

You are wrong twice one this occasion
First I don't have experience to design and build a board - but maybe there is one person in whole SB community that know.
Secondly I don't want to sell anything, just offer my help if needed.

Thirdly I was wrong, assuming that somebody will be interested in such community program as building our own windsurfing board.
Community is interested in internal fight over nothing again and proofing the nothing is possible....

You said.. and I quote

Macroscien said...

For $500 i will be happy to buy every year the best board our Aussie brains could do. Ride it for a year and sell , then buy new one.

So yes you did say you want to sell your board, which I still think is laughable.

You know where you lost the idea of a community program to build a board... in the first sentence of this thread. Starting by talking prices of equipment means your driver is cheaper gear, not some community project.

You think the community is out for a fight, yet I saw an adamant defence of the sport we all love so much. A defence of the world class designers we have, a defence of the organisations that continue to provide us with innovative products, when many realise they could be far more profitable if they moved to just selling SUP's or some other surf equipment. A defence of the many hours teams of people put in across the globe to fine tune both design and production of gear that takes us faster and higher than many ever though possible. And wow, this all takes money.

You seem to believe you are the first bright spark to think of many of the ideas you seem to come up with on a semi regular basis, yet many of us have been involved in windsurfing for a long time, and have usually seen it all done before. And I'll give you a bit of advice about this one, go and have a chat to any surfboard repair shop on the Gold Coast, nearly all of them will tell you that they will not bother fixing any boards out of China... why? cause you get what you pay for and they are usually not worth repairing.

What I miss are cheap production boards like Bombora from the 80s and 90s. I remember buying a new Bombora 270 in about 1996 for around $600. Of course $600 back then translates to about $1500 in todays money so there probably isn't much difference. However the Mistrals and F2s of the day were about $1500 or more.

The other great thing about Bomboras were how tough they were. I'd love to buy a tough plastic board in a modern shape at a reasonable price. I wouldn't be interested in buying a cheap board that will fall apart after a year. That is not value for money.

Mobydisc said...
I wouldn't be interested in buying a cheap board that will fall apart after a year.

The board could be as good as we all agree, no point at all to produce crap.
But because cooperative my be cheaper to produce good result that professional worker that calculate every hour top mark price.
Community project is based on enthusiasm and sharing ideas and constructive critique in spotting weakness in design or production.
The main point is to have new board every year because something could be always improved and secondary market is also very beneficial for all new entrants onto windsurfing for very reasonable costs.
At this moment many beginners are straggling on outdated useless crap that should be already on the scrap yard or damp.
Even begginer board cost now around 2 k ! but what performance do you expect from Starboard GO ?? beside aircraft stability and resistance to harsh treatment..

Lets think constructively about material costs.
All board weight about 6-7 kg so we don't need that much glass fabric, epoxy , carbon fibre. Sourced on OEM market not retail at Bunnings the best materials money could buy shouldn't be more the couple hundreds.
I bough recently couple meters of carbon fibre textile for my repairs and is not the expensive at all. How many meters do we need for one board ? anybody know ?

If board could be made in Aussie to not in China even better because quality control could be much easier.
But I am afraid we don't have access here to modern computerized technology that allow ultimate precision in forming exact , replicable boards.

So let me get this right microskin. You want Seabreeze forum people to design/rip off a popular successful board design and get it manufactured at a vastly reduced price to current board brands?

Once this board brand is up and running and hopefully putting the other "expensive" brands out of business, you will then take over as the forum sponsor and fund all the advertisements here that keep the site admins in work and sniffing coke off hookers arses in the carribean on superyachts as they are accustomed to!

It would be hard to come up with a “community board”. If enough enthusiastic armatures could get together and build a mould and then put a board in “production” it would have to run for several years without continuously coming up with next years model. It would also need to be decided if the board is going to be for beginners, slalom, wave or other discipline. Once that has been decided do you make one or several sizes. Then once the expensive mould(s) have been made, do the boards get made local by employees or volunteers or are they shipped to China. Then there are warranty claims, distributions etc. Also as with most groups who aren't in it for the money there will always be the bitching about how much I have put into it & you haven't. Having said all that, it would be an interesting project to get involved in.

Macroscien said...

Mark _australia said...

Macroscien said...

Mark _australia said...
If it is EPS and glass, it is basically the same as the cheapie surfboards like NSP.

Be lucky to last a season as it is missing the many many extras you have in a proper modern sandwich construction

Don't know but if somebody come with good plans and design then we could ask manufacturer to build exactly to our specification and materials.

My point Macro, is the ones you saw are cheap because they are substandard construction. They are the same price as a cheap chinese surfboard because they are the same weak construction as a cheap Chinese surfboard.
As soon as you add more glass, patches for foot area, proper divinycell inserts for tracks and plugs, plus a d'cell sandwich layer etc etc you have doubled the materials cost and increased the labour by about 4 - 6 times

You have a good idea but it will not be a $500 board

Have you got any dissection what and how much material do we need for 1 quality carbon board ?
Epoxy resin - 5 kg ?
Carbon textile - 20 m2 ?
divinycell * what it is ? m2 or kg ?
Insert ?
track ?
plug?
Then we could calculate costs of materials at OEM prices.
That is why building 1 board is 5 x more expensive per unit that building 100.
If all the best material cost more then $500 we could give up the idea alreay, but I will be surprised if cost more then $200

You STILL miss my point.

You are all excited because you saw a Chinese place can make something that looks like a windsurf board for $500.
But it is NOT - It is a piece of sh!t.
A hunk of foam with 2 layers of glass on it that is in no way the same quality as our WS boards.

You are talking about adding on the cost of components... no, it is not that easy. It is the labour cost that is the major one here. They have a $500 board because it is just a hunk of foam with glass slapped on (like surfboard construction). Quick n easy, half an hour to make one.
If you look at a windsurf board construction with routed out areas for d'cell blocks and stuff - oh fk it, go look at it yourself and you will see that there is no comparison.

swoosh said...

Mark _australia said...
You STILL miss my point.

You are all excited because you saw a Chinese place can make something that looks like a windsurf board for $500.
But it is NOT - It is a piece of sh!t.
A hunk of foam with 2 layers of glass on it that is in no way the same quality as our WS boards.

You are talking about adding on the cost of components... no, it is not that easy. It is the labour cost that is the major one here. They have a $500 board because it is just a hunk of foam with glass slapped on (like surfboard construction). Quick n easy, half an hour to make one.
If you look at a windsurf board construction with routed out areas for d'cell blocks and stuff - oh fk it, go look at it yourself and you will see that there is no comparison.

I think you are missing his point.

A production board from one of the major brands would cost them <$500 from the cobra factory. There is no way that windsurfing companies and retailers would be able to make money if they costed much more than that.

What macroscience is saying is, that if someone clever could design a board, and enough people preordered the board to get cobra to build a plug etc, they could punch out a bunch of boards for "factory" price.

As for labour costs, don't know if you've checked lately, but they don't exactly pay them much in thailand.

Obviously, there's a lot more that goes into the the boards we ride, including R&D, retail support network etc. But whilst there is the local stores that the industry supports, don't kid yourselves that the entities up the top aren't your typical multinational corporation.

Anyway, just thought I'd step in and put it on track, seems you are taking the discussion off on a wild tangent because of macro's unfortunately tenuous grasp of english... a top of the line production windsurfing board would cost <$500 from the factory, the discussion really is about the pros and cons of cutting out the middle men in the industry.

It's already happening, for example, a lot of local shops etc, are cutting out distributors and importing gear themselves... think of the poor distributors who no longer get their cut.

Could - maybe - etc

I am not off on a tangent, I seriously doubt we could get a whole bunch of people to commit to buying the same board.

Cobra will do a board for $500 for JP or RRD or Starboard - they will surely not do it for $500 for a group of, say, 100 aussie sailors. What Cobra charge to make a board is irrelevant as they'd not do that price for a group of dudes from seabreeze.

Macro said he asked a chinese mob and they quoted $300-$500. The pics posted clearly state it is EPS and glass construction which is rubbish. He may not realise that, as he is a relative newcomer to the sport......... nothing to do with english skills.
So we are back to (1) buy a production board or

(2) we all design a board and ask somebody to build it. If we are ordering 100 or them it will not be $500 per unit IMHO.