Help the Water Sport Design Club Make High-Performance Sport Gear
Description
The Water Sport Design Club at Cal Poly brings students together through a shared passion for watersports, engineering and hands-on manufacturing. Our goal is to create opportunities for students to design and build high-performance sports equipment using advanced composites, while learning practical skills in CAD, mold making, carbon-fiber layups and testing. We want to grow a community where students can explore ideas, work across disciplines and Learn by Doing.
Our current senior projects use high-performance hydrofoils as a testbed for this mission. Students are developing carbon-fiber masts and wings while focusing on the process behind each prototype: making molds more efficiently, comparing composite manufacturing methods and reducing the time and cost required to move from a design to a finished part. By improving how prototypes are made, we can test more ideas and learn from every iteration.
What we learn will reach beyond hydrofoils. We hope to develop repeatable, lower-cost composite manufacturing methods and share that knowledge through future club projects, so more Cal Poly students can participate in creating advanced sports equipment without needing an industry-sized budget. We see this as a way to make high-performance composite design and manufacturing more accessible to the wider campus community.
Our $3,000 fundraising goal will support carbon fiber, resin, core materials, 3D-printed molds, vacuum bagging supplies and assembly and testing materials. Your support will help us build and improve prototypes today while laying the groundwork for students to pursue new composite sports-equipment projects tomorrow.
Thank you for supporting the Water Sport Design Club and Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing spirit!
$25
Basic Safety Equipment
Help purchase gloves, safety glasses and other essential protective equipment so students can work safely while learning composite manufacturing.
$50
Consumables
Help purchase resin, vacuum-bagging supplies and other consumables for hands-on composite manufacturing and student-led fabrication.
$100
A New Mold, A New Idea
Support 3D-printing materials and mold-finishing supplies to create a new prototype mold and make design iterations faster and more affordable.
$250
Lay the Foundation
Fund carbon fiber and epoxy materials for a full composite layup, helping students turn a hydrofoil design into a physical prototype.
$500
Get a New Design in the Water
Help fund a completely new hydrofoil prototype, from mold preparation and carbon-fiber layup through finishing and assembly, so students can build, evaluate and improve another design.
$1,000
The Ultimate Foil
Make a major contribution toward a precision CNC-machined aluminum mold for our ultimate hydrofoil prototype. Reusable high-quality tooling will help us develop and produce increasingly high-performance foils, pursue industry leading results and share our advances with the broader hydrofoil community.
