Composites Aid in Aquatic Maneuverability

Friday, April 2, 2010

Silveira Group, has developed the Samba XRS, a watercraft made largely from carbon fiber.

Rodrigo Silveira has been designing custom jet skis for the past eight years. Now, he’s branching out and using composites to make his own line of personal watercraft.

Silveira’s company, Silveira Group, has developed the Samba XRS, a watercraft made largely from carbon fiber. Silveira notes the composite material is exactly what he needed to achieve his main goal: maneuverability. “Personal watercrafts are getting bigger, and are more about going from point A to B. If you want maneuverability, it’s tougher to achieve with big watercraft,” he says. “You see a lot of riders trying to do stunts or tricks, but because of their massive weight, the rider doesn’t have that control they need. Having a machine that is so small and so lightweight gives the rider more instinctive body control.”

Carbon fiber has helped achieve that control; as a result, the XRS comes in at about 34 pounds. “We wanted the rider to really have the most control of the machine, and we knew we had to make it as light as we could to do that. That’s why we turned to making it out of carbon fiber,” Silveira says.

Silveira notes his background as a 3D designer made the manufacturing process smoother. This was accomplished by designing a model in 3D and extracting the patterns from that model in the CNC routing process. “Traditionally, you have people drawing out and manually cutting patterns for the layup. We streamlined this process which resulted in prototyping a new machine from start to finish in about two weeks,” he says.

Doing all the work in-house has also aided the streamlining process. “From the design to the routing to the fabric cutting to the mold-making in the actual part being made, doing everything in-house really does make the process quicker,” says Silveira.

Though this current edition of the XRS is gas-powered, the company also hopes to make a splash with an electric-powered version which it will showcase in July.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Sports/Rec. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.