Sailing again! After a visit...

Smiling Francisco G - a permanent state of affairs!

The plan today was to go back to Sprecks, but before that, we had an invite to Francisco Goya's shop and Keith Teboul's workshop - cool! It's just off the road to Hana, past Ho'okipa, up towards the mountain a bit.

We were met at the door by the man himself, who was immensely friendly and keen to show us around, but was a bit busy at that point. So we had a bit of a look around the shop - lots of Goya boards and sails of course!

Then Keith appeared, and was also apparently too busy... but not as busy as FG. So he kindly volunteered to show us around instead, which was pretty cool, as it was his workshop we were going around...

Keef explaining the initial steps and design

Never been in a shaper's workshop before, so this was all pretty interesting. Lots of pictures to be taken! Keith was pretty forthcoming about the process of board shaping - he gets the blanks CNC machined up the road, and they come back to him for cleaning up and all the other constructional stuff. The boards look like freshly bashed pistes, with that cool corrugated snow look, which is sanded off pretty early on.

They get extra foam sandwich stuck on for strength, and then get the finbox, mast track and footstrap inserts chopped out. Then they get laminated up. All the chemicals seem to be pretty gruesome, so the guys doing it all have positive pressure suits on, so they don't get to breathe any of the good stuff.

Keef adjusting his dangle angle...

Keith adjusts the fin angles manually, by eye. Just about everyone we met was saying that it's impossible to sell a single-fin wave board any more. Apparently the current hull shapes and the multi-fins are so good in all conditions that people hardly need to change down from a board that gets them going in the lightest wind. Cribby even asked how long it would be before shapers were suggesting a one board quiver would be just fine...

Christina contemplates rocker templates...

Although the boards are CNC milled, the eventual rocker details are varied by sanding and the glass/carbon layup. In order to make sure the boards for specific customers have their required rocker choice, Keith uses wood formers to check the actual rocker on each board.

So a KT custom board is around $2500, depending on the options. Surprisingly, they don't do interesting things like using goretex vent plugs, which KT claimed would add too much cost to the board. They even cut the existing finboxes and reglue them to make them smaller... presumably the cost of a die for high-volume production is too high. Dave and I had a lengthy discussion about it later that evening!

Another day comes to a close

After the Goya visit we went to Sprecks again. Pretty windy, and the aim was to get upwind and do jumps and stuff in the smaller waves over to the right. Had a good time, but pretty tired at the end, so didn't go out for the third session. It was actually quite pleasant to doze off in the van, listening to some music on headphones.