Filament Winding Technology

SLAKE is at the forefront of global filament winding technology. Manufactured by CST Composites in Sydney, Australia, who take pride in designing and manufacturing machinery in-house, giving unique capabilities that commercial winding equipment cannot match. We offer a range of masts to suit all major windsurfing brand’s sails, tested by our diverse range of pro sailors on our development team. We are also able to offer the first fully custom windsurfing masts as well as replication of your best masts (you bring it to us and we can replicate it).

SLAKE mast tubing is produced by filament winding. This is an automated process of wrapping resin impregnated filaments (rovings or tows) in a geometric pattern over a rotating male mandrel. The component is then cured under high pressure and temperature.

The filament winding process has considerable advantages over conventional hand-laid and fabric-wrapped techniques leading to superior outcomes in strength, weight and consistency.

Contrary to one of the filament winding myths, we can wind carbon fibre tows at any angle including 0 degree longitudinals. CST have been doing this for a range of products for over 12 years.

Filament winding can achieve these outcomes because of:

  • precise fibre orientations
  • straight, uncrimped fibre paths
  • high fibre-to-resin ratios
  • high consistency and repeatability

We have the capability to wind any fibre angle from 0 degrees (uni-directionals) to 90 degrees, and the ability to bias unidirectional fibres around the periphery of a tube to gain different properties in different planes.

With tapered shapes we can vary wall thickness and fibre angle along the length of the tube. By changing the number of winding circuits and fibre angles, we can produce any wall thickness and ranging tube strengths and stiffnesses.

These factors are predicted prior to production by our finite element analysis (FEA) models, and later verified by in-house testing. We can accurately predict tube thickness, stiffness and weight to within a 2% range.