@Jezza you think Project Cedrus is too expensive and would prefer to have 4 masts instead 1, that’s a different topic entirely and irrelevant to this discussion regarding stiffness. Most of my customers are trying to reduce their gear and lower their weight for traveling. I never argue with people about their budget, it’s a personal decision that I respect. But Project Cedrus is hand made in the USA and therefore has a higher manufacturing cost than those solid carbon masts produced in China or Taiwan (Axis, Unifoil, Cloud IX, SPG, etc). I don’t even try to recover the non-recurring engineering investment in the mast (which is at this point thousands of my hours). I sell the mast for a little more than the cheaply made Chinese product so this comment is a bit of #trigger for me.
My assumption that top riders don’t know about Project Cedrus is an assumption, yes. But it is based on lots of data from people who reach out to me and did not know about Project Cedrus despite it being around for 3 years now. I don’t spend money on marketing and I don’t live in Hawaii so it is actually hard to get through all the noise in this industry. And as I stated, many of these “top riders” are not going to buy a mast from me because of the price or due to their contractual obligations. I hope to get more masts out there to these riders, but it’s important to me that I treat my customers fairly and so I don’t make deals and I don’t give the away.
You’re right that making a stiffer mast is not rocket science, but the data out there suggests that these companies don’t actually know how to make a stiffer mast. These companies don’t have engineers on staff, and use contract manufacturing for their product. In fact most of them are even using the same contract manufacturer! I know because I have talked to the guy making all the masts for unifoil, SPG, Cloud IX, etc. They’re all making the same thing, and if they want to make it stiffer, it gets really heavy and really expensive because it’s solid carbon fiber. Once again you make statements with no evidence. Show me another lightweight hollow stiff carbon mast from one of these top brands that was tested at one point but then abandoned in favor of soft, solid carbon masts by their top riders.
Your statement regarding damping is actually proving my point that stiffness is critical. Yes, for one rider in certain conditions an element of damping may be beneficial. But change the weight of the rider, and especially the speed (wings) and the mast could end up hitting its eigenvalue in these new conditions. So if you are making a mast for a variety of wings and a variety of riders, as these brands do, it is best to make it as stiff as possible to avoid the potential resonant frequencies being too low.
I’m not interested in proving which mast is king. I am simply providing engineering principles and lots of data to suggest that stiffness is critical to the performance of a mast, which is what this thread is about. I don’t need to mount strain gauges to the mast to determine that it’s stiffer. I have simulated bending and torsional stiffness for a number of masts using finite element analysis, and many people have twisted and bent it first-hand the mast on the beach and said the same thing. I have 75+ data points from customers of different weights, different disciplines, coming from different masts, who all say the stiffness of Project Cedrus has resulted in better performance. Getting “3 of the top riders” would be a waste of time and actually a smaller and less diverse data set than I currently have. You are the only one providing opinions and speculations here.
Yeah, well, not yet!