Carbon Composite Hydrofoil From Free Junk!

Here's how to shape a carbon fiber hydrofoil wing from a chunk of broken yacht mast.
The same techniques work for making centerboards, surfboard fins, or any other carbon thing you might want. Even propellers and windmill blades if you make templates to account for twist.
Here's the side view of the new hydrofoil blade I just made. It's a front wing for a Hydrothopter.

Carbon fiber costs way too much these days. Fortunately the free stuff is still free.

Step 1 Scavenge Carbon

Why is carbon fiber so expensive now? Stealth aircraft, superyachts, and even new civilian airplanes are using it up, and they didn't include "supply chain management" in their huge plans. So there's a shortage and a bidding war drives the price up.
The good news, you can get more of it for free than ever before, if you look in or near the right dumpsters. At the boatyard near me they have to pay people to cut the stuff up and throw it away.
Usually it's in the form of pre-cured composite structures such as broken masts.
There is more of this anywhere carbon gets made, fixed, or used. If it's fiberglass blanks you want, say for surfboard fins that have a little more flex, free fiberglass is also abundant. This same boatyard cuts up fiberglass yachts and packs the pieces into dumpsters to haul away. Those slabs of fiberglass are really amazing, seen on edge. You could make some great fins out of that.

Get your carbon and mark the outline for your blank. These chunks are a little shorter than the original wing, so I laid out a wider wing with slightly less wing loading.

Comments

[TruthHunter]

I was surprised at the end when you put this foil on the commercial one. I thought you were making this for the Hydrothopter. Did you break the factory foil?

Is the wooden Hydrothopter so bad you never rode it again after the photos?

[TimAnderson]

so many toys so little time. Actually the wooden one is so pretty I hung it up. I left the aluminum ones out on the deck of the Free Yacht, where they get abused and broken, hence needing replacement parts...

[PKM]

You've been busy with those things! The bike nut in me wants to build a pedal powered one of these, a pedalo bike hydrofoil perhaps...

There's no such thing as a permanent mistake anymore. You have entered the "java virtual machine" of bodywork.

I have a CS degree and I'm not sure I understand that >_<

[hintss]

what about virtualbox, linux, or BSD

linux and BSD are very stable, and with the good user permissions system, then you could virtualise one of them in virtualbox!

[Derin]

you have a counter strike degree?

[ohgood]

which is precisely why CS is so over rated a degree. ;) I keeeeeeed

[TimAnderson]

I had to look up my own metaphor on wikipedia!: "A basic philosophy of Java is that it is inherently "safe" from the standpoint that no user program can "crash" the host machine or otherwise interfere inappropriately with other operations on the host machine, and that it is possible to protect certain functions and data structures belonging to "trusted" code from access or corruption by "untrusted" code executing within the same JVM. Furthermore, common programmer errors that often lead to data corruption or unpredictable behavior such as accessing off the end of an array or using an uninitialized pointer are not allowed to occur. Several features of Java combine to provide this safety, including the class model, the garbage-collected heap, and the verifier."

[luis felipe rodriguez movil]

hi Tim Anderson my email is [e-mail] send me thank you for the information you need here from you thanks for helping me ....tim Riohacha City, The Guajira, Colombia

[luis felipe rodriguez movil]

hello timanderson could you give me the measurements (length, width and thick) of the piece on these developing aguaskipper on this page .. foil profile aguaskipper have a team and I have lost and I must foil manufacture propyl thank you very much for helping me

[TehLonelyOne]

Remember to wear a respirator when sanding carbon and fiberglass people, the dust and fibers are really, really bad for your lungs (like can cause chest infections and collapsed lungs). Good to see you wore yours TimAnderson! I'm amazed that so much valuable carbon and fiberglass gets thrown out!

[flio191]

lol, i didn't even know who wrote this, and when i read it, i already knew it was the guy who did the kombucha video podcast because you write like how you talk. haha!

[dacarls]

Unfortunately the cheap-charlie auto Bondo has diatomaceous earth in it, which absorbs water. (That is why it falls off your car repair if there is rust and wet underneath). Marine Bondo should have fumed silica gel in it- which does not absorb water. Or glass micro balloons, possibly resin microballoons.

[dacarls]

Use Ceramic cutting wheel not carbide tipped steel blade

[Yerboogieman]

That gives me some ideas for when i go to Westport, Also, whats the thing you're riding and what makes it move?