Sandwich boards: lighter and stiffer

The first mass-produced windsurf boards were made of polyethylene: durable, but heavy. In the early eighties board makers looked for something lighter and stiffer, and one answer came from Thailand. Cobra began in 1977 as three friends building boards in a garage in Bangkok, and became Windglider Thailand the following year. Its King Cobra, designed with the windsurfer Klaus Simmer, was built as an epoxy sandwich: hard PVC foam over a core of expanded polystyrene, laminated with epoxy.

Cobra’s advertising claimed that the King Cobra had won the board tests of 1982 and that by 1983 it was the most copied sailboard in the world, its sandwich construction giving the highest stiffness at the lowest weight. At the ISPO trade fair in Munich that autumn, how a board was built had become a big theme across the industry: ABS instead of ASA, glass fibre injected under vacuum, epoxy or Lexan instead of polyethylene, and boards that came out lighter and tougher.

Lighter materials kept coming. At the 1988 ISPO Fanatic showed an extra-light Bee built from carbon and honeycomb, priced at 10,000 marks. Renamed Cobra International in 1985, the company in Thailand went on to build boards for brands such as Tabou, Starboard and JP-Australia, and became the world’s largest board maker.