Superiority of "premium" brands is a myth. The direct 21st century sales model has been there for decade and a half since Best Kiteboarding, and their kites were proven as good as the competitive brands sold in stores. It is remarkable, that since then no other direct brand emerged taking significan...

If it's your first time repair, I would remove the half of leading edge bladder in order not to risk puncturing it.

For small tear you don't have to sew. Just insert oversized dacron patch into the hole and apply glue into the gap, press, cure. Then a patch of sticky sail repair tape on top. That's right: non-adhesive dacron is easier to insert inside the leading edge -- the adhesive one would stick prematurely m...

My foil session count is probably approaching couple hundreds, but I occasionally struggle with this issue too. I'm specifically interested in scenario where you crank up TT sized kite for the conditions; which is essentially what racers do... Now, the upwind legs are phenomenal, as you literally sa...

Torsion is proportional to the beam length. For fuselage we are talking about 20 cm or so of the length between the main wing attachment point and the mast. I have hard time believing that this fuse section, which is supporting the full rider weight, might be weak on torsion. Second, what is the cau...

That's right: tubes; 6mm outer, 3 mm inner diameter. It is the common structural engineering wisdom that the inner part of the bar/tube/strut is useless for the bar strength. Then, you may ask why not to use just a larger diameter tube? This is because I can glue relatively short 500 mm rods in over...

I'm assembling fuselage from pultruded carbon fiber carbon rods . I have also bought black glass fiber rods, because you can never trust anything from aliexpress, but carbon fiber items are indeed much less flexy and also are about 30% lighter. I have bought 6 mm diameter ones. After gluing them int...

Would you consider Svante Arrhenius as an acknowledged expert? Oh, that was 100 years ago, so he didn't actually know what he was writing... But then, why are you so sure "the scientific consensus" today is any better at predicting the future centuries from now? (Every now and then new arrogant youn...

Homogenization pundits are often asked "Wouldn't it be more reliable to just throw away unreliable stations (and data), instead of adjusting them?" There is never a satisfactory answer to that question. But those pesky critics are not professional climate scientists, so how would they know?

Send it to ifixit guys to cut the mast to witness the internal ribs.

Seriously, what about the noodle mast buzz test -- I wonder why almost none of foil reviewers perform it.