The problem with a sailboard for beginner is, that you normally improve fast and you want a new board soon. For this short time of use it is just much too expensive. To be still able to offer a beginner's board to my family and friends for learning this amazing sport I decided to build one by myself. Due to my lack of experience with shaping styrofoam I decided to use CAD-generated templates, which would garantee a symetrical shape.
April 2007 I finished drawing the board in Catia V5 so the manufacturing could start. Generally the board is build with many layers that are 10cm thick each. Those were shaped by using the templates and hot wire and then glued together. After several hours of grinding the blank got covered by 3 layers of 160g/m² glass fibre mats and some reinforcement layers at the standing area and the nose of the board. The mast- and fin box were included as described by the company bacuplast on its website. Finally the board got colored with UV-light resistant color and a soft cellular rubber was added.
On this project I worked about 3,5 years including some breaks in between, the hours of work are approximately one month.

A special Thanks to my neighbour David and my brother Florian for the help!

Data: volume 160l, weight 15kg

First tests: It has been shown, that this sailboard does make a lot of fun and work well. It starts easily to glide, goes well against the wind and stays quite calm in choppy conditions. One problem so far is the soft cellular rubber, that especially when wet does not provide enough grip barefeet. Using Neopreneshoes prevents this. Furthermore a friend did criticize that the board tends to luff and that it could feel more free when gliding. Soon, possibilities of optimization of these and other things will be checked, for example by changing the position of the base.