With the summer lull, I've had enough time to put together a cheap vacuum bag setup and have some fun with epoxy resin and glass.

One of my long list of projects is to do something about the tail of my Tillo Freefoil 125 which originally had a bevelled tail. It also has tracks and the then current thinking (18 months ago) on windfoil boards was to bevel the tail so it would be easier to angle the board and pop it off the water. Wing foil boards can pop even before reaching planing speed because they are often used with much larger foil wings than windfoil boards.

However, that beveled tail also meant that water would wrap around the tail and it would take a lot of power to get the board to slide on the water and get planing. With a big wing, it would come off the water pretty quickly but with my favorite - the 1100cm2 F800 AFS wing - I'd have to be fully powered to get off the water. Once off the water, I could foil in 5-7 mph less wind but I was always dependent on a strong puff to get going which made things sketchy say if I wanted to try something new in lighter wind because it meant having to wait for another puff if things went wrong - which is likely.

The Tillo isn't the only board like this. David Buckley in Charleston did a similar mod to his Naish and posted on seabreeze a while back. And, the wing and supfoil communities as they've begun using smaller foils are also on this trend to refine the release behind the board. Randy and I have had long discussions based on the stand up paddle forum wing foil threads.

So, after overthinking this way too much, I sketched out a pattern partly on eyeballing it and partly taking the section behind the fin box from my 125 l. Tillo slalom board which planes up quickly. The idea was to have about a cm of square vertical to encourage the water to flow off the back of the board and a bit more behind the foil to inhibit any ventilation.

You'll notice my board has foil tracks and a bottom handle, too. Those would seem like big sources of drag as well and they've always worried me. and While I'm sure they do increase drag some, it turns out that the real culprit all along was the back edge.

I used PU glue (Gorilla) to stick down a piece of foam. The cut was off a bit because I did a thick piece and used the side away from the pattern plus I forgot to account for the angle so I used a bit of 2 lb pour foam to make things tidy. Two layers of glass on top and one on the sides to keep it from getting banged up and a bit of paint. There are some small blems in the finish and paint that I'm going to finalize but the idea was to get it dry before the weekend because it made perfect sense to get my small board that I use with a 5.4 and down ready for 10-15 day, right?

It's a bit difficult how well it worked because it worked so well. The board now gets off the water in wind barely enough to foil in. I've lowered the amount of wind it takes at least 5 mph or more. Yesterday was a nice day but I'm blown away that I was able to use a 5.4 and fly about 90% of the time.

Along these lines, Alex Morales (Tillo) has reworked the release of the big brother to this board, the 156, and the v. 2 is getting great reviews of an already popular board. He's also coming out with a 136 l. version in January. His boards are priced very well vs the larger brands. If you are in the market for a foil board, I definitely recommend checking them out. He's shared design sketches of the 136 and it looks like a beast.

https://www.tillo-international.com/?page_id=836

Pics below of the original design and the work in progress.