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Custom Sail material

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Matty V
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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby Matty V » Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:05 pm

Kite companies don’t use enough fabric to have it built exclusively for them, it will be available from any sail maker (yacht sails) that use/supplied by tejin.

They may have an agreement no to supply it to another kite brand but that’s it.

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby Da Yoda » Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:37 pm

Matty V wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:05 pm
Kite companies don’t use enough fabric to have it built exclusively for them, it will be available from any sail maker (yacht sails) that use/supplied by tejin.

They may have an agreement no to supply it to another kite brand but that’s it.
When you go into a contract to co-develop a product, it can come with some stipulations. North collaborated with Teijin on the development of the D2 ripstop years ago. Again North collaborated with Teijin on the development of the Trinity ripstop. As a result North got exclusivity to the fabric. Like D2, I'm sure Trinity will be made available to the rest of the market soon (if not already since it's been nearly 4 years now). :thumb:

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby Matty V » Sun Oct 11, 2020 7:01 pm

So why can I walk into any sail loft (that uses Tejin) in the U.K. and spec that fabric for a spinnaker on my boat?

The quantities used by kite brands vs sailing industry are minute

We looked into developing an aramid strand LE material with a kite brand years back and the quantities and return were not viable

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby leeuwen » Sun Oct 11, 2020 7:01 pm

Da Yoda wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:37 pm
Matty V wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 6:05 pm
Kite companies don’t use enough fabric to have it built exclusively for them, it will be available from any sail maker (yacht sails) that use/supplied by tejin.

They may have an agreement no to supply it to another kite brand but that’s it.
When you go into a contract to co-develop a product, it can come with some stipulations. North collaborated with Teijin on the development of the D2 ripstop years ago. Again North collaborated with Teijin on the development of the Trinity ripstop. As a result North got exclusivity to the fabric. Like D2, I'm sure Trinity will be made available to the rest of the market soon (if not already since it's been nearly 4 years now). :thumb:
I think the trinity one is a 3 and 2 strand which is “new”.
But we do have coretex which is full triple ripstop exclusive to Core for a long time.
And we have Quad Tex exclusive to Naish which is, surprise 4 strands.
I don’t think you can call any of these new materials or ground breaking.
They all still stretch like crazy diagonally and I think it’s mostly just marketing.

Now a kite with a lighter/thinner version on aluula would be interesting, they have been hinting that this would be possible.
Super tear resistant, water repelling and near to no stretching would make this the ideal material.
Let’s hope they can put out something like that soon with low enough costs.

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby jumptheshark » Sun Oct 11, 2020 7:55 pm

nixmatters wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 4:10 pm
Spot on, Sharky!
But the discussion here is about the canopy cloth
OR were at one point talking about the new material for bladders, I'm pretty sure they have considered it for the canopy, but likely the cost to weight saving ratio becomes illogical.

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby nixmatters » Sun Oct 11, 2020 8:16 pm

I don't think the aluula tech can be easily tuned for a canopy. For proper weight saving (on which I agree makes little sense) it needs to be less than 40gsm. Shaving off 35gsm will be a true challenge!
Low bias stretch is even bigger challenge, considering that the current aluula doesn't shine here when not tensioned in warp or weft (inflated LE/strut).
But if they managed to laminate a woven UHMWPE cloth, they may succeed in doing so with a lighter, dense woven one.
Interesting times ahead...

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby dracop » Mon Oct 12, 2020 12:34 am

I thought I read Aluula was a treatment process more so than an individual material that could be used for LE, canopy, and even bladder material.

Details are scarce at this moment in time as is inventory of Aluula material.

Experienced riders demoing Aluula kites here on Maui have been extremely positive about the material. Riders I know personally who not affiliated with a brand promoting Aluula kites.

Best already worked out the kinks (pardon the pun!) with cf for kiting and the material has been developed in other applications (cf did not simply die out as a material, on the contrary its popping up all over the place, from tents to backpacks, etc) so the design constraints of 2007 are history. Mind you if I had a Hellfish i could recut the canopy to a smaller modern kite (eg replace 10m Torch canopy by cutting the canopy from a Hellfish to match the canopy panels of the Torch and sewing it on the Torch Dacron structure in place of the ripstop panels). Alternatively I could buy a big roll of cf sailcloth and cut it to the Torch.

I am NOT familiar with the stretch/shrinkage issues that could occur and this thread has been giving me info to at least go and research (thank you all for your knowledge on the issue). So far my research on the Hellfish is that it was a big disaster (with an entire forum here on kiteforum) but mostly related to exploding LEs, not the canopy having problems. Later kites seem to have made the cf LE work.

CZ is totally new on my radar.

I love the idea of a stiffer and denser canopy to get more traction out of the wind. Lighter weight helps too but is only one area of improvement. Light wind kite improvement is nice - but a 10m that gets more traction in 25mph wind would be awesome for me.

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Re: Custom Sail material

Postby Ozone Kites AUS » Mon Oct 12, 2020 4:32 am

Da Yoda wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 5:30 pm
Matty V wrote:
Sun Oct 11, 2020 3:34 pm
Tejin manufacture and sell the material. Duotone are a customer
Yes! Teijin makes the Trinity 3x fabric, but it's exclusive to Duotone (for now) and I've only seen bulk fabric available from them at this point.
Teijin makes a huge variety of sail cloths and other fabrics including bonded dacrons used on the Leading Edge of kites. North got an exclusive for the D2 stuff and when that exclusivity expired they just went one thread more and called their version Trinity, but other brands have access to Teijin triple ripstop canopy material and also the Teijin triple ripstop dacron which is superior to anything else available as far as I know.

Cuben fibre sailcloth and leading edge material was tried by Best in their Hellfish model, and it failed miserably. The material did not live up to any of the claims Best made about it and the Hellfish was a nightmare of a kite extremely prone to backstalling. The leading edge exploded on all of them because of the way they sewed it, and they were using a 2 piece LE design that required a front and back seam, the back seam was stitched flat on flat, and Cuben cannot be stitched like that, same with Aluula.

Aluula is a composite material like cuben, but I suspect the OR/Aluula team has developed a superior cloth and has also created a way to sew it and not expose any of the material's weaknesses.
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