Foil Drive Assist, DIY

The board by itself is 5.4 kg, 10.8kg is the total weight ready to ride, including battery, foil, mast, board, leash, etc. My friends that have the FD gen 2 max setup are all around 13-14 kg on a smaller 11s2p battery.

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Good job, what is your use case for it?

I use it for prone surfing.

Really nice ‘pro’ setup Tim. Assume internal divinycell lined battery box for battery and electronics. Are you using XCross esc? Wondering about heat issues with no external heatsink.

I am using a castle creations edge 60HV esc. I have had very good luck with them, no external cooling needed.

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Thank is very interesting… Thanks.
That 742w is enough to get up …

These are the conditions, right?
78kg + midlength? board + 1300cm2 wing + flat water.

How did you measure?

I was thinking about Nolimitz mast, it is so lightweight, but then the adapters… I would like to probably buy Gong wings…

This is pretty interesting. I wonder how small you can go on the foil before it can no longer get you up?

Or alternatively using a 5065 140Kv motor…

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I managed to make a working setup with a 5080 (140kv i think) years ago,

unfortunately it overheated quickly and the efficiency seemed really low compared to a 63 motor, i am 66kg and it was difficult to get on the foil even with a 100L board (@12s)

Also the bearings where to weak because of their small diameter, same for the shaft (8mm)

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Yes, flat water lake, 50ish liter board, 1201, no limitz 85 cm mast.

This was measured using the built in data log function on the esc. I rode an axis 939 v2 at 900cm2 and was using 1867 watts to get up on foil with the three blade prop but never tried it with the two blade. I have found that this motor likes the two blade prop much better. The smallest wing I have tried has been a spitfire 780 which is 902cm2. I am able to flat water start it without a problem but I am not sure if I could go any smaller.

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It’s interesting that this works but that it didn’t work for you with the Maytech motor. I doubt the actual motor specs are a lot different. Could it be the castle esc is matching the motor better than the vesc?

@s9tim how much motor current do you see?

The foildrive blades are a lot more efficient than the 3d printed ones. Unfortunately I haven’t had time in the last few months to test much. I have about 5 sets of blades that need good testing, but just haven’t had a chance yet.

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Are fd blades more efficient because of the shape or because they are made of aluminum? Or both?

I do not have a way of testing the motor current as the data logging doesn’t save this info. Here are some screen shots from today in knee high surf. Same setup, 1201 wing, 6362 motor, two blade FD propeller. I had a 31 minute session then took a short break and had another 27 minute session. Same 12s2p battery. This is all efoiling out to the waves, not using the wave to assist with the get up process. I see the numbers are very similar to the lake session I had a few days ago. For reference the data logging does not record below 5-6 amps which is about the amount of current I am using once up on foil. I think the stiffness and ability for the aluminum blades to be made much thinner contributes to the efficiency of the FD blades over 3d printed ones.



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They are quite a bit thinner and they have a slightly lower pitch compared to the 3D printed ones.
I have FR blades too which I am really excited to test against the FD ones. They are very different shapes so will be very interesting to see how it affects things.

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If anyone can do an iphone scan of a FD prop, using scandy and face-id cam, that would be a very good base to compare the prop to other designs!
Anyone :pray:

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The blades are really easy to draw up with one of the prop tools. You just need measurements.

How do you measure the pitch, back sweep, blade area?
Drawing something similar is easy, drawing something as close as possible is harder :wink:

Considering purchasing two FD aluminum blades priced at $138 and 3D printing a custom hub. What do you think about this idea, and are there any potential problems?

Which motor are you planning to use them with?

Flipsky 6374 waterproof