Hey guys Jon from Surf FX and we're having a look at the new North Swell foil board.
This board's got a lot going on so I'm going to try to cover quite a few little
features of it starting with the way it looks. It's a pretty awesome finish
they call it titanium finish and well I think this looks really cool, my feedback was to actually
put this look on the rest of the surfboards in the north kiteboarding range too it really looks quite
nice. Let's talk about some features, we got a full-length deck grip really nice means you don't
have to buy one it comes with a really nice grippy one it's got a corduroy finish to it so it's,
you can move your feet on it it's not like a full diamond cut where it's like a bit too aggressive
and it's quite comfortable to lie on and paddle it's not going to chew you up too bad.
You can see it's also got foot strap inserts a lot of guys are putting foot straps on the boards
using them as toe boards as well sometimes they're kite boarding on them sometimes there's guys
who are even using these little ones as wing ding boards as you know sinkers they just get
right down in the water. That of course gives you a little bit of you know a bit more
security when you're riding and when you're pumping as you pull up on your front foot.
You have a ridge down the middle which essentially makes this like a bit of a double concave board,
it's not a hard ridge but it's just something you can really locate your feet on , if you're foiling
you know if you got your foot too far to one side you're coming off straight away and you can't
really shuffle around too much to reposition it so that ridge just helps you locate it just by feel
they do have these marks here that are you know there to help you kind of visualize and know
where your foot's normally going you can kind of look down have a quick peek and you can see
just quick reference there of where your foot should be. Coming through the back the tail pad
it just stays in the same kind of flat with the ridge and you'll see that it's a bit cut out on
either side of the kick. Why'd they do that, well they did that so when you're lying on it
your legs can go on either side and you don't have that just pushing and kind of lying with
your legs splayed on either side, just allows you get your legs a bit closer together. Pretty cool,
now on the bottom we get a bit more shape going on so we've got big chimed rails
to help you from grabbing when you touch down we've got a double concave with quite a
quite a progressive V through it so again when you touch down it's there not to suck onto the water,
it's there to kind of just pop down and you can pull it back up and try to recover
and then you come back through a nice flat section where the fin boxes are and you've got quite large
cutaways. So what they've really done with the cutaways is actually try to get a bit of the board
volume out of the back of the board so that it's not floating kind of wanting to push your
head under water that's so taking volume out of there pushes the center volume further forward
to the area kind of up on your chest and able to keep you up on top of the water.
There's a usual kind of step tail for clearance for pumping and something you'll notice straight
away these boxes here look pretty different because they've got it set up so easy mounting
you can just drop your foil in and adjust so you don't have to feed your bolts in one at a time
these are spaced nicely so you can just keep your bolts on your foil and just put them in and slide
them around, so pretty cool that they allow you to do that gives you a bit of range and you got
markings here for reference you can you can always write on there with a pen if you have different
wings you ride on different positions you can swap it around and go by those markings enough
to set it up every time pretty cool. Construction wise these are a hybrid carbon so you've got a
EPS core and they use a carbon and E-glass wrap on it and then pretty cool they have a
double layer of bamboo up under the standing area to keep it tough, so strength on these boards is
pretty high and that's something that you want in a foil board is you want something that's
particularly stiff and reverse it gives a bit more strength too because you don't want it flexing
it's not like a regular board where you know PU boards got that nice flexy feel you want it to be
rigid because if it's more rigid you get better response and transfer of movement to the foil
and better response in your steering and pumping and things like that, pretty cool setup. With the
internal core they've got PVC blocks that are laminated onto either side of these foil boxes
which go quite far up and and back down the board and also in the top in those fin inserts,
not fin inserts, in the footstrap inserts as well there's big PVC blocks in there,
of closed cell PVC to add another bit of strength in the area and the ones in the back
run through to make PVC stringers up the guts of the board again increasing that stiffness
so pretty cool little shapes. That is the 4'4" underneath it I've got the bigger one the 4'10"
on the 4'10" you've got the same basic design
just blown up a bit with a Gore-Tex valve you can see that this one is in the middle that the
4'10" is a little bit further forward so it's a Gore-Tex breather so when these boards get warm
the air and pressure can expand and escape and not blow up the boards, pretty cool.