Hey everyone, Dereck Camacho here. I have been the shaper behind all of Tona’s boards since the beginning and this week we shaped a custom foil board for fun.
All of us are stuck at home trying to collectively do our part to control this virus. I am lucky that my R&D shaping room is actually at my house and we are quarantined with my immediate family and a family friend. I have limited raw materials as most of my suppliers are closed, so I have to get creative with the materials I have lying around the shop that is left over from past projects. Tona will be officially offering custom boards again soon (look out for more info to come ) so it is good to get back into the shaping room and blow some foam and mix up some resin. For this project I had been interested in making a new light-weight low-volume high-performance free-ride kite foil board.
After a quick look around the shop I realized I had all the materials I needed: High density foam, Carbon fiber (wanted to keep it light and strong), epoxy resin and all the tools for vacuum bagging etc… My son Tyler and Dominque Harris (quarantined with us) have been asking me to show them how to build something so I used this opportunity to get them involved and guide them through the process. They did all the major shaping and building with my guidance and I let them come up with all the ideas. They did awesome!! We even recycled an old Tona Driftwood wake skate bag and made a travel bag for the foil board. We used a PVA core with 100% carbon fiber vacuumed wrap top and bottom, no inserts to keep it light and 2 regular longboard surfboard fin boxes (not ideal, but it was what I had lying around). The finish is just a primed and sanded finish (again to keep it light) with some custom barracuda artwork from Dominque and Tyler then sealed with a clear coat. The board measures 120 cm X 44cm and 2.5 cm thick. The finished weight is 4.6 lbs. (2.1 kg) Super light!. We finished the deck with some left over EVA decking I had from a windsurf foil board I had completed last month. I did a little unique magic on the deck shape to sweeten the feel under your feet and the bevel rails keep the distance from the water.
We have not been able to kite it as yet as the beaches are closed but we were able to test it behind the boat and had a great first session. We were also testing our Tona prototype 100% carbon surf foil so it was a great R&D session all-round! (more to come on the Tona foil. I may blog that development if anyone is interested – Let me know) Once our ’shaping room’ section of our website is up and running I will be offering these magic sticks to the public. This super light weight board in combination with our carbon prototype foil is quite the high end package!
– Dereck
Check out some pics below : )
