Ken Winner and the Duotone Slick SLS 2023 at the AWSI // Foiling Magazine

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Duotone Slick SLS

Foiling Magazine's Steve Sjuggerud speaks to Duotone wing designer Ken Winner about the 2023 Duotone Slick SLS wing at the recent AWSI event in Hood River...

Transcript:
Steve Sjuggerud:
Hi, I'm Steve with Foiling Magazine, and I'm here with Ken Winner, the designer of Duotone Wings. But before we get to talk about this new Slick here, I wanted Ken to give a little backstory, because I believe Ken may be the innovator of winging as we know it today. So Ken, can you share a little bit of your background in winging for us?

Ken Winner:
So, about 10 years ago, I got into SUP board paddling, and I thought it might be interesting to try mating a wing with a SUP board. So I designed a couple inflatable wings, and I tried them on a SUP board, right along with Sky Solbach, and we decided it wasn't that much fun.
And then about eight years later, I saw a Flash Austin with a homemade rigid wing on a hydrofoil, and I thought, "That looks really interesting. I'd like to try that with an inflatable." So, I designed an inflatable, and I took it out, and immediately was foiling with it, and I immediately thought it would be fun to do, because I had a sore shoulder. I wanted to paddle on foil and do down-winders on foil, but it was hard on my shoulder to paddle, and the wing took care of that problem.
So, I was immediately able to do down-winders with a hydrofoil and a wing and join in with my neighbor who was doing it all the time, also. Doing the paddle foiling all the time. So, that's where I got started on it, and it took me about six months of pretty much doing it by myself. And Sky would do it once in a while and my neighbor across the street, Alan Cadiz would do it once in a while. But I finally convinced the company that it was an interesting sport to put into production. So, then we started building wings and then some other people decided it was a good idea too.

Steve Sjuggerud:
And here we are, right? All this craziness. So, tell me a little about this new Slick.

Ken Winner:
Well, the Slick is our boom wing and if we flip it over we can show the boom. So we have this boom and the reason I went to boom early on is because I tried handles and I didn't like handles. They were crappy. So, I just went to a boom right away. And turns out some people do like handles and some people like booms. So, we do both now. So, we try to keep a fairly compact wing span and we put a lot of tension in the canopy, which gives it a lot of draft stability. Keeps the center of effort really centered. We put a little bit of reflex into the strut, which helps in a gust to keep the wing well balanced.

For the full interview transcript, head to: https://www.thefoilingmagazine.com/fi...

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