Broken Prototypes, The Cost of New Technology
We’ve been testing our Sea Mink and Pogy surfboards for over a year now. It’s been amazing to get to surf all these new shapes and constructions, but at times it’s been super frustrating.
When our surfboards have broken, they’ve done it in totally different ways than a foam board. Our surfboards don’t ding, dent, or puncture. We had a prototype fall from pretty high up and land with its rail on a railing, and instead of getting a huge ding, the composite skin delammed around the impact area. The plastic core of that prototype looks fine, but now when we shake the surfboard we can hear a few little plastic chunks rattle around. I’ve surfed that surfboard a bunch since then; it still works great and hasn’t broken any further. It’s definitely a little embarrassing when the other surfers in the parking lot ask to see the prototype up close, but there’s no difference once it’s in the water.
Two of our lowest lows have happened when we brought prototype surfboards on trips. In trying to make our surfboards as light as possible, we added a bunch of holes to each strut and stringer in the plastic core. We assumed that if any plastic was going to break, it would be the thin parts that are attached to the composite skin, so we tried to remove as much plastic from the middle of the surfboard as possible. That made the 3d-printed columns in the middle of the board super thin (see photos). We didn’t ever consider that a surfboard could break from the inside out.
Big holes through each strut led to a fragile connection from the deck to bottom of the surfboard.
The current surfboards use smaller holes through each strut, and the columns connecting the deck to the bottom of the board are much more robust.
Mike took the first one of that batch of surfboards on a trip to El Salvador. It was super light, but as soon as he popped up on a Central American wave, Mike felt the structure fracture. He surfed it for a whole session since it stayed water-tight, but said it was like surfing an under-inflated pool toy. He also might have punched it and stomped on it a few times in frustration. He brought the board back to Maine for an autopsy, and we found that those thin columns had literally exploded under his feet. Then as he sat in the water on the collapsed tail of the board, the nose “inflated” with so much pressure that it ripped apart the thin columns in the nose of the surfboard.
Originally, we thought that El Salvador prototype broke just because we didn’t make the core strong enough in general. We didn’t realize it was that one specific part of the structure. So when I took an updated version to California recently, it was a real gut punch to feel another surfboard break on the first wave. I surfed 2 or 3 more waves with it, but paddled back in before the damage was too extensive. The whole structure along the skin was intact, but the surfboard felt pillow-soft and the broken plastic inside made it sound like a rain stick. That’s how we figured out that, even in a stronger, denser core structure, those columns can still break if they’re too skinny.
So we don’t make them too skinny anymore. It took a while for us to get back on track emotionally after those surfboards broke. Mike put in two weeks of “midnight +” sessions in the workshop to get each of those boards ready for its trip. When they broke he was understandably super frustrated, as was I. It also forced us to surf the rest of those trips on surfboards made from foam blanks, which obviously all worked awesome.
Sigh
We definitely aren’t doing this the easy way. But we’ve learned so much, and seen so much potential for real innovation in terms of performance, there’s no way we can stop. We have great designs ready for customers that are durable and surf well, and every time we push a prototype design past its limits, we learn something that makes the surfboards for our customers even better.