Cuben Fiber® and America’s Cup® Sail

It’s been a few years since I wrote a blog post, so I figured I should get back on it! It’s hard to write and act like everything is normal in the world right now, with the folks in charge of our country attacking our closest friends and imposing tariffs without any logic to them, but I’ll try.

I’ve been making bags from high performance materials that would otherwise be discarded for about 16 years now, and over the last year I’ve gotten some really special fabrics.  After visiting the main manufacturing facility where North makes their best sails (and all the sails for the America’s Cup® boats) as well as their new Cuben Fiber production line. They ended up sending me a big box full of the first rolls coming off that line, as they figured out and refined the production process, perfecting the fabric. The stuff I got has some missing fibers here and there, some slight folds, that kind of thing - not good enough for making expensive sails, but absolutely plenty strong and durable to make some bags. Like a lot of the other fabrics I get as ‘B grade’ or mistakes from the production floor, I find these imperfections add character to the fabric - and if you’re not relying on them to be aerospace grade, they’ll still outlast us all. They sent me a whole bunch in undyed white, and a smaller portion of the nice blue. It’s a crazy light, crazy strong fabric that’s somewhat translucent and see-through, so it’s not for everyone. For those folks who love the look and feel of DCF Dyneema® though, it’s spot on. I’ve been making all sorts of different bags from this Cuben Fiber for about a year now, it works so well for everything from sling bags to backpacks and duffles.

The other, even more exciting fabric I got in the shop this year is from the British challenger in the latest America’s Cup race. They ended up losing against the New Zealanders in the finals, but you can’t blame them - the Kiwis have been unstoppable for quite a while now.  The sails I got from someone on the team there feature the America’s Cup logo, giant logos for Belstaff and some other sponsors, as well as some fat orange draft stripes. To see how North makes these sails you can check out my YouTube video titled Touring the World’s Best Sail Loft where I show the process from fiber to finished blank, before they send them off to the teams for finishing. It’s a crazy impressive process involving intricate molds, vacuum bagging and resin activation with precision heating elements. Needless to say, these sails get crazy expensive, and will last longer than a lifetime. But for the high performance sailboat racing world, they only last as long as the campaign - the boats change from one event to the next, and so too must the sails. Thankfully I’m not the only one repurposing these high tech behemoths, but the bags I made from the logo section are probably the coolest I’ve ever made.