The Complete Handbook of Kiteboard Cases

Chapter 1: Understanding Kiteboard Cases

A kiteboard case is a protective container designed to hold one or more kiteboards during transport, storage, or shipping. That definition sounds simple enough, but the reality of the product category is more complicated. A kiteboard case can be a thin nylon sleeve that simply keeps the board from scratching a car interior. It can be a padded bag with wheels and reinforced handles for airline travel. It can be a rigid, foam-lined flight case built to survive forklift impact and being thrown down an airport ramp. The differences between these are not cosmetic - they are the difference between a board arriving intact and arriving as an expensive piece of epoxy shrapnel.

To understand what these cases actually do, it helps to start with what they protect. A modern kiteboard is a laminate structure. The core is typically a sheet of expanded PVC foam or a wood composite, sandwiched between layers of fiberglass, carbon fiber, or a combination of the two. This sandwich is then coated with a thin epoxy or polyester resin skin. The result is a structure that is remarkably stiff and light for its size but terribly vulnerable to concentrated impact. A single hard point of contact - the corner of another board, a metal baggage cart edge, a dropped wrench - can crack the resin and allow water to infiltrate the core. Once water gets inside the foam core, the board becomes heavier, flexes differently, and often begins to delaminate