JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #118 - January/February 2018 - 44

SPORTS AND LEISURE
surfboard

The history and future of surfboard design

danu ChotikaPaniCh,
CEO
Cobra International

T

he earliest surfing references are
said to date back to 6th century
Polynesia, when surfers used solid
wood boards, some as long as 8 metres.
From solid wood giants to featherweight shortboards
Nothing much changed in terms of
materials or board design for hundreds
of years until lighter hollow balsa wood
boards started to appear in the 1920's
and 30's. Shapes evolved to be more hydrodynamically efficient, and fins were
added to improve manoeuvrability and
control, but the breakthrough moment
came just after WW2 when composite
pioneers shaped PU foam cores (known
as blanks) and wrapped them with
lightweight woven fibreglass cloth and
polyester resin.

Today, the surfboard market is an even more rapidly evolving and
innovative test bed for composite materials and processing techniques than when the first fibreglass boards started to come to
market in the late 1940's, as well as providing experience and input
to other newer board sports such as windsurfing, kitesurfing and
stand-up paddleboarding.

From the 50's, these PU and polyester
boards established themselves as the
default construction for nearly every
surfboard made until a new expanded
polystyrene (EPS) core material arrived.
The PU supply chain abruptly stopped
with the sudden closure of Clark Foam,
the world's largest distributor of foam
board blanks, in 2006. EPS-cored boards
were still typically laminated with fibreglass cloth, but polyester was no longer an
option as styrene dissolves the EPS foam,
meaning manufacturers turned to higher
performance epoxy resins. Ultimately,
this shift to EPS and epoxy produced
much lighter and more durable boards
with core weight reduced by around 65%
and the new resins' flexibility allowing
boards to snap back into shape better
than polyester versions ever did.
With surfing's growing global popularity
in the 90's came an increased demand

Surftech Fusion Dual-Core construction
combines PU and EPS foam cores

44

jec composites magazine / N°118 January - February 2018

for high-volume production of competitively-priced boards, and it was
at this point that Cobra International
(Chonburi, Thailand) entered the market. Established in 1978 as a manufacturer of windsurf boards, Cobra is now
the leading composite board producer
for a wide range of OEM water sports
brands as well as a supplier of advanced
composite solutions for architectural,
luxury goods and premium European
automotive brand customers.
The company's serial surfboard
production started in 1995 with the
Surftech Tuflite, bringing windsurf
board PVC sandwich construction to
surfing in a ground-breaking tough and
lightweight board.
Continued innovation
Cobra continued to innovate, researching and testing new material solutions
and ever lighter constructions. Notable
highlights included the first EPS-cored
board with a full plastic skin and
foamed epoxy construction for NSP in
2002, the hollow extruded polystyrene
(XPS) cored board for Salomon in
2004, the first dual-core boards combining a traditional polyurethane foam
core material with EPS core materials
to utilize the benefits of both materials in different parts of the core for
Surftech in 2010, then the first 1.80m
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #118 - January/February 2018
