Parabolic Stringer: Since 1991, SUNOVA has wrapped the entire outline of each of our balsa wood surfboards in a half-inch of balsa wood, creating a timber frame that allows the board to bend and twist through turns and spring back with incredible liveliness, projecting the rider through maneuver after maneuver. Whether your board is on day 1 or day 1000, this responsiveness represents the trademark feel of a SUNOVA.

 

 

  

 

The positive aspect of High density foam is its ability to bend incredibly far before it fails. This means, in a heavy impact situation, your board has greater ability to bend further under load and absorb some of the impact rather than snapping in a brittle way. With a high tolerance for extreme shear movement, it is ideal as a solid durable deck material, also offering a degree of cushioning on hard landing.

 

All surfboards bend, and as boards have become thinner and lighter the degree to which they bend has increased. The thinner they go the weaker they get, both in terms of breakage and “spring-back”. It’s about how quickly the bending material springs back to its original shape. In conventional surfboard construction, the materials have limited spring-back characteristics and the result is that energy applied in turns is lost or “sponged-out”. So, high performance board design has evolved to compensate for this through the use of deep concaves. A concave bottom will help maintain a desirable rail curve as a board bends and twists under pressure in a wave wall but the increased surface over which the water must run across the bottom in turns creates excess drag. The bottom contour has evolved from the need to compensate for a centre stringer and a flexing rail line in lightweight, high performance boards. Sunova’s Composite Construction and Parabolic Rails are designed to give a board no such compromise. The springback - or flex return - is generated at the rail. This gives a Sunova the feeling of being projected out of each turn.

 

 

In addition to its use in the Parabolic Stringer, Balsa wood is used on our decks and bottoms as a sandwich material. With the highest strength to weight ratio of any wood and nearly the lightest wood on the planet, Balsa can create space between two layers of fiberglass (by being «sandwiched» between them) without adding much weight to the board.

 

 

 

The primary source of strength in our boards, fiberglass has a tensile strength of between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds per square inch. That’s ten-times stronger than even the epoxy resin that is used to hold it in place. This is the same material that is used in «traditional» surfboards, but because our fiberglass is combined with balsa wood in a composite sandwich, it becomes capable of handling much larger loads. Same material. Superior results.

 

We use epoxy as a «glue» to laminate components such as EPS foam, fiberglass and balsa wood together. With longer chemical bonds than the polyester resin that is used in traditional PU surfboards, epoxy laminated fiberglass can bend further before it starts to fracture. That means stronger boards. In addition, just one traditional PU/PE surfboard will release more Volatile Organic Compounds than 45 or 50 SUNOVA boards. When Bert helped set up Firewire, they won an environmental award in part due to this fact.

 

In the crevices between the EPS balls, there are tiny amounts of air. Throughout the whole board this actually ends up being a lot of air. When you take a board on an airplane, air pressures at high altitudes are considerably lower than those at sea level. If the air in the board is unable to get out, it will create a lot of pressure to delaminate the surfboard. To prevent this delamination pressure, we create a vent using a Gore-Tex membrane that allows air to pass in and out of the board freely but does not let water in. The vent is always breathing. When the air pressure outside the board decreases, the board «breathes» out. When it increases again, the board «breathes» back in.

 

Our Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam is made of small «Styrofoam» like balls. This EPS is very light: even the foam in «pro weight» PU boards weighs about 3 to 4 times more. This enables us to make boards that are among the lightest on the planet. In addition, our EPS can be squished and will bounce back to its original shape through many uses. This attribute is critical to the «ride cushioning» bottoms of our boards. As one of our boards encounters chop, the bottom can morph subtly to absorb that chop rather than ping-pong balling off like some other epoxy boards tend to.

Increased strength through engineering. By using two layers of fiberglass, and separating them with a thin layer of balsa, we are able to allow load on the outer fiberglass to be distributed through the balsa so that a much larger area of internal fiberglass can contribute to bearing the stress. Thicken the sandwich material (balsa) and the increase in distance between the internal and external layers of fiberglass will spread the distribution of load and exponentially improve the strength of the total sandwich. This is why our boards can be both lighter AND stronger.

 

 

 

Cherry wood veneer fin impact plates: A common problem with most surfboards when the fin knocks into rocks or something, the fin is forced back, and the point at the rear of the fin punctures the board. Sunova’s veneer fin impact plates prevent this from happening.