I’ve been doing some reading and really trying to understand the technology and the work at hand in building your own Efoil.
I see these kits for electric longboards and you can have really good working board for about $500.
Without including the cost of the foil and the board. What makes an efoil so much more expensive then a electric longboard?
Everything is so much harder when you do it underwater. Having a solid board for an efoil is a challenge in itself vs a skateboard where you can get a Meepo for $400 with enclosures, battery, ESC, remote, and wheels/motors. eFoil motors require way more power, higher voltage batteries (barely). It’s just next level compared to skateboarding. I love both sports though!
Efoils dont carry momentum like a skateboard. Resistance through air vs water. Imagine using your eskate on a 20% grade all of the time. It wouldnt last very long. Kinda why efoils require more power, bigger batteries, electrics etc.
Love my Evolve GTR btw. Not sure I would trade it for my foil though.
Prev posters have good points. There’s less people demanding efoils than eskates. So there’s less companies making efoils, so there’s less competition and costs stay high. Raw material cost is greater for efoils than eskates too, but I think this explains less of the price difference.
As far as I can tell, Efoiling is a much more power hungry sport. I can tell that just from the massive battery packs some of the forum users are showing off, which wouldn’t even fit on the biggest of longboards.
Then, as previous posters said, there’s the waterproofing aspect. Adds another technological barrier. So you need extra tech compared to eskates, extra batteries, and then you need a foil, a mast, and a board, which could be made from cheaper material like plywood and fiberglass, up to the more expensive aluminum or carbon fiber. Finally, demand for efoils is less, and since (mostly) only rich people who live on the coast are gonna have a need for them. Every poor college kid wants an eskate board so there’s been lots of companies making them, and they’ve gotten fairly cheap.
Whats interesting to me, and what I want to incorporate in a build, is the efoil motors are longer and lesser diameter: but their internal real estate is shared with waterproofing stuff. That means less coils of wire and less power, I believe. I wonder if a skate motor could produce more power. I looked at motor wattage to determine this: a 6380 eskate motor is 4.5kW, while the SSS 56104 is 14kW. I feel like this may be misleading, as I want the eskate to be more powerful… perhaps it isn’t, but perhaps the two companies use different measurement standard(peak vs continuous for ex)
Power are correct , even if it’s peak for a couple min depending on cooling
6380 outrunner will produce about 3 time more torque then sss56 but rpm is limited , and yes you can pull 200A on a sss56 ( matching the power ) but at high rpm , so a gearbox is needed for Efoil prop application
Outrunner 63-80mm can be used almost at their full potential
Sss56 ( even the lowest kv) 1/2 of its potential and still missing torque due to its size and conception