Why? To be honest, pure curiosity. We know that surf is a very volatile sport. Surfing depends on so many factors - like ocean conditions, surfer form and experience, weather, surf gear, and so on, that measure the efficiency of Van der Waal is always complicated. But we wanted to know, anyway, if our new version would behave better in 2 situations: bare foot and wetsuit grip. And we are really proud to announce that yes, it's better and has more grip.
How did we test it?
We used a box with 20kg as the object to slide and as a ramp with the anti-slip materials on it.
We started to use a surfboard but we noticed that the convex angles of the surfboard didn't allow us to measure correctly friction angles. So later on, we change the surfboard for a clapboard covered with vinyl.
We started to do 2 kinds of tests to analyze the friction between different materials, with a spring scale model and with a tilted plane. As our scale was not precise enough to get accurate values, after a few tests we decided to drop scale tests and focus on the tilted plane test.
Finally, we measured friction using the box lined with 2 different materials. A soft skin to simulate barefoot and with neoprene to figure out how the new materials would behave when paddling.
All tests were performed, measured and recorded several times.
The results
Either on dry or wet surfaces, our tests indicate that a new material, that we call Van der Waal PS 2.0, have a grip increase of 44.25% when compared with Van der Waal 1.0. We take on consideration also a survey we run last month (and some feedback we have received on the past), and we looked very closely to wetsuits vs Van der Waal behavior and we are more than satisfied to announce a grip increase of 64.88% on that case.
With rEvolution Series we did a huge improvement, not only in skin confort as being wetsuit friendly. Despite the grip levels are almost the same as performance series, the new version is lighter and much thiner than the previous ones.
The conclusion
After all the surveys and tests, we needed to place Van der Waal in water. So we gave it to some friends and partners to test it on the ocean. This new version of Van der Waal was tested by several surfers in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Portugal, Las Palmas and Tenerife.
The feedback was positive and the grip increase confirmed, so we decided to launch the new version. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
Cheers, and good waves!
