Now that the riding season is over I have several months to get ready for next summer. I am disassembling my first build to salvage what I can. I had my share of problems but it did work and I could ride on the foil for about 20 seconds without falling.
First Build summery and lessons learned.
It was made from a 8 foot long “foamy surf board” , which I don’t recommend because it will was too flexible even with reinforcement. There are 3 wood ribs that are inside the foam surf board and I drilled completely threw one of them to run my wire through. That did not help.
Chinese carbon foil with hollow aluminum mast. Lots of other guys are using the same thing here. I like it.
I think maybe I will consider shimming the rear wing because it was hard to keep the nose down.
Dry pod modified APS 83100 out-runner with internal core cooling rewired to about 116KV. I don’t believe I ever had any motor over heating problem with this set up. I did run about of spoonful of mineral oil in it. Silicon wire jackets and some rubber swells up when exposed to mineral oil. So I had tears in the wire jacket, and the rubber bladder that I used to seal the motor leads in. This let about a spoon full of water in the pod each time I rode. Once the water as in the bearings they would rust overnight.
ESC APS (about 180 Amps) first one was fried when I got into weeds. Now I have APS (16S 300/400 AMPs) One behavior I observed is they get hot when running in the battery box all closed up. My box is quite well insulated to hold things firmly. If you kill the power to the ESC while it is hot. The ESC will not restart until it cools down. Takes about 5-10 minutes. In my case, my safety lanyard kills the power to the ESC. So I end up floating around until the time pass’s.
Prop. I have always use off the shelf aluminum prop. 5" or 6".