Ben Severne said...
As for innovative materials, I've developed sailcloth that is half the weight of monofilm, colourful, and strong enough to deal with the conditions in OUR backyard. (OK, I'd progressed a bit beyond the backyard when I developed e5 sailcloth - I'll give you that. But without the backyard days there wouldn't be any 3kg wavesails... we'd all be on 5kg Nerds and Euros)
hmmmmm....... we were building and selling windsurf sails made from lightweight technora (amongst other fibers) laminates in
1993 and kevlar versions of the cloth in the 1980,s............. In fact Technora sailcloth after first being introduced in the early 90's was dropped as a fiber by Dimension Polyant and reintroduced in the early noughties. I had a technora wave sail with me for extended stays in Taranaki in 1993, that one weighed in at 2.4kg for a 5.2.
Since 1984 we have specialized in building innovative windsurf sails form lightweight laminates, we even used to be "unfashionable" becasue people used to think we should be building sails from monofilm... as "thats the cutting edge fabric", that was a laugh!! remember this was the early 90,s and we were building 7.5 race sails that weighed 3kg, with 6 battens, 5 cams and lasted 5 years+ of racing use.......
As to 3kg wave sails... we havnt built a 5m wave sail heavier than that, ever, and we started in 1984...... :-)
here is one of our latest wave sail protos, 3 batten, FULL WIND RANGE wave sail, laminate construction, superlight. Radically different load path design.
The innovation in this sail isnt the material( the laminate styles have been around for 20 years) its the USE of the materials....
anyone interested can check them out at the websites, www.demonsails.co.uk and www.5-oceans.com
cheers all
matthew