Inbound: LIQUID FORCE FUSELOCK SYSTEM

For your first time foiler, getting to grips with what you need, what goes where, and what to tune can be a little overwhelming if you don’t have disposable hours to throw at YouTube. Liquid Force have set out to combat this with their unique FuseLock system. Pete Mehrhof, Liquid Force’s Senior Product Designer, walked us through it…

Hey team, so give us a little overview of the FuseLock system, and what’s its USP for the consumer? 

After riding foils for 10+ years we started to notice some of the inherent flaws in all of the different connection systems out there. The best foil connection is the one that allows you to transfer all the energy from your body into the foil with the least amount of power lost along the way. The slight wiggle from the front wing attaching to the fuselage, the mast having some tolerance to fit into the mast pocket on the fuse. All these little losses here and there add up and end up limiting you to what you can get out of your foil. We wanted to change that. That was our number one priority with the new system. 

Secondary to that, we also were finding that foils and foil companies were making foiling overly complicated by the breadth of product available and the amount of tinkering within that. We wanted to become the champion of making foiling easy to understand and easy to use. So making something that was ready to go out of the box was very important. No shims, no confusing diagrams about how to tune anything, just a foil that was simple and intuitive to put together and ready to ride, right out of the box.

Liquid force has always been synonymous with wakeboarding. Does this transfer over into wake foil, and are your products biased towards the discipline? Are you seeing growth in that market sector? 

Actually Liquid Force has also been synonymous with foiling since the big shift in foiling becoming mainstream back in 2014. Through our LF Kite department we were able to spearhead and learn a lot through the early days of foiling. But yes the wake industry is our bread and butter and the majority of our product is tailored to fit that sector. 

The wake foiling market is one of the biggest growing sectors of our business. It’s growing at a pretty rapid pace and it would not surprise me if it starts passing or at least pulling even with the wakesurf market. With the new product coming out that is beginner friendly and taking some of the intimidation out of learning to foil, I think we will see a lot more people embrace foiling within the boating and lake communities. 

How did you go about testing this system, and were there any benchmarks to work from?

We had an insane test team to work on this with who were able to put it through the ringer. Guenther Oka, Luca Kidd, and Harley Clifford, who are all very accomplished athletes in multiple areas of watersports, were leading the charge here. 

The first benchmark was to see if we could create a connection that wasn't dependent on tight tolerances or screws to keep everything tight and secure. We wanted to depend on geometry rather than milling machine specs and hardware. But if we couldn’t get something that was tangibly more secure than what we currently had or what was on the market, then it was back to the drawing boards. After our first proto ride where we retooled up some of our existing wings on the new system to give them a head-to-head test, we were pretty excited as to what we were onto. When riding the same wings, we could feel a more direct connection to the foil and our bodies. When our body moved, so did the foil. As to the older gear, there was a slight delay from the body to the foil. Not only that, but at the end of the day when it was time to de-rig, everything just came apart so easily. There were no mallets involved, no standing on the fuse to wiggle the mast out, it just all came right apart. And it was stiff!! So we were all pretty amped at this point and it was off to the races. We built some bigger protos at higher aspects to see how everything held together. We tested behind the boat, in the ocean, winging, and everything just felt so solid in any conditions. 

How have the testimonials been from those guys you’ve mentioned and the public who’ve used the FuseLock system? 

Our team riders were our toughest critics. We have been working with these athletes for a long time so they are not afraid to tell us when we miss the mark. It happens! But the new system has been overwhelmingly championed by them in multiple genres of foiling. As to the general public and the general masses, everyone seems to really grasp the simplicity idea. To the people outside of the general world of foiling, the sport is very techy and almost impossible to understand. It seems that we are bridging that gap a bit with this foil and the feedback so far. There are LF customers who have been with us from the beginning and they can appreciate the fine tuning we did on the Horizon line. Making everything a touch faster, breach better, etc. Then there are the customers that see foiling, want to foil but don’t know where to start. FuseLock makes sense to them and that in turn makes them want to participate… immediately. 

What else is cooking over at LF currently? Anything you can let us in on?

Well we are so amped on the FuseLock system that we want to implement it into all our foil products. Not just the high end performance models, but everything all the way down to the entry level product. So you can expect some FuseLock Launch foils coming soon!