Blog

Bob from Bay Area Machinist, the best machinist I’ve had the privilege of working with. Kudos for taking the biggest risk of anyone and starting your own capital-intensive machine shop. Thanks for not charging me aerospace rates for molds and parts, or this project...

Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is valuable at early phases of product design, when the design space is wide open and you are not focused on the nitty gritty problems involved with actually building the product. However, at no point of the design process does...

Arguably the most over designed components on modern foils are the fuselages. Whether carbon or aluminum, the solid section is far stronger and heavier than needed. The excess weight is especially critical given that it’s cantilevered at the end of a meter long mast....

As an engineer, I simply want to work with others to design and build the most elegant structures possible. I don’t have the time or skills to market, sell, and manage distribution or customer service of a hydrofoil. With that in mind, my initial goal for this project...

Wings are extremely subjective, and not something to be “optimized” in the same sense as a primary structural component like a mast or fuselage. What is stable and smooth to one rider can be slow and difficult to control for another. Like surfboards, fins, and kites...

Foils are essentially airplanes in water, and aerospace is an extremely diverse industry. You can focus on structures as I did, or be a software engineer developing flight control systems, or spend an entire career reducing the drag of a winglet. Admittedly, I'm no...

Throughout most of my career, I’ve been fortunate to have really smart aerodynamic & CFD engineers tell me how stiff and strong I need to make my wing, or reliability engineers how high an iPad must be able to fall without breaking. Designing a foil from scratch,...

From afar, Project Cedrus might not look that different from other foils on the market. But it is, thanks to unique architecture that allows for a range of manufacturing processes. Material and process are integral. The manufacturing processes you use for carbon fiber...

“Black aluminum” is a term used in the aerospace industry to describe composite structures or components that are not optimized for the material and process. Essentially, it refers to taking an existing aluminum component, and making the exact same design out of a...

Comprised of cellulose fibers in lignin matrix, wood is the oldest and all natural composite material. Exploited by our earliest ancestors for tools, shelter, and energy, it was the west coast First Nations who harnessed the most raw form of felled cedar trees in the...