​Duotone Slick Wing Overview

Hey everybody, welcome back to MACkiteboarding's Wing Wednesdays. I'm Tucker and today we're going to talk you through the new Duotone Slick Wing foil wing.

I've been testing the 5.0 out here for a few weeks. I'm really excited about this wing. There's something unique about it in the market and lots of people are anxiously anticipating this wing. So we'll get you in there, give you the what's-to-know about this wing, and then get into what we thought about it and a bit of a personal review from me. So let's jump into it.

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So, the Duotone Slick: this is the fourth wing from Duotone and they're kind of merging some of their previous designs but also going with something completely new out there. I'm really excited about this design. Ken's been testing these like crazy in Hawaii with his team and I think they've come up with something really unique that a lot of people are gonna be really excited about.

As with any design feature, it has its positives, it has its drawbacks, and we'll walk you through some of that, show you what's up with this wing, and get you going on it. So it's getting blown around a bit right now, but let's see if I can get it to stay in position here. Looking at the wing, as you can tell, it is very square wingtip-wise, and the total outline is pretty rectangular. That keeps everything very compact, reduces your wingspan, makes it a little easier to handle, especially in the larger sizes, and really just gives a pretty nice, balanced feel to this wing.

You can tell they've got some generously-sized windows here, kind of straight downwind of where you hold it. That'll allow you to see stuff that's straight downwind. Personally, I like to see windows a little further forward than that so you can see where you might be heading if you were to arc in that way, but this is going to give you the option to see what's straight downwind of you, and it's probably a more useful position for looking through the window when you're back winging or riding and wanting to see what's straight downwind of you. So that's the front end of the wing.

As you can tell, it has the legendary Duotone craftsmanship. Really nice Trinity ripstop on the canopy to help reduce any kind of damage or stretching, and all Duotone products are just beautifully made, so I'm pretty excited about that.

So here we have the operating end of the wing. This is the new mini boom. This is a different boom than what you have on your Echoes or foil wing in the past, so you'll need a completely different boom: it connects differently here. It is removable with these straps and it seats into there. There's no adjustability; it's just one solid boom. They're going to make it in aluminum and carbon; currently we have the aluminums available through summer with the wing purchase, and the carbon will be available at the end of summer for the first shipments, so keep an eye on that. The carbon will be maybe just slightly lighter, but will have a little bit of flex in it, I'm told, just to give it a little snappiness. So it'll be interesting to try that out and compare the two, but I think for most riders the aluminum is the easy choice. It's still rather light, especially in the one-piece design, very rigid, and kind of an oblong design. I don't know if you guys can see it in the video or not, but it's kind of oval-shaped. It's not round; it's sort of oval-shaped so it fits your hand nicely. It's real comfortable, easy to grab onto, and it gives you that ability to twist the wing in your hands as you're flying it without having to really death grip it, which is cool.

In the front here we have a nice luffing handle with some neoprene underneath. As you can tell, this handle isn't huge so it's nice to have that neoprene underneath so you're not scratching your knuckles on the Dacron and on the stitching. The smaller handle will actually give you a little bit more control over the wing; it's just a little harder to find when you're searching for it. It's nice that they have that in there; it'll be a good control, and we'll talk more about that later with the surf performance.

We have a front wing leash attachment here. The leash is not included with the wing; you're going to have to buy that separately. This here- I'm just using a leash from another wing I have. It's not a Duotone leash because I don't like the coil leashes, so this has been working great for me. Any normal length wing leash should work great for that if you already have one or if you're just looking to buy a separate one, or you can buy the Duotone coil leash. It's meant to go with it as well, but it is not included with the wing purchase like most are, so it's good to know if you don't already have one that you're going to need to buy a leash.

Coming down here, we're getting to the inflation system. It is using the Duotone Air Port valve on the inflation, which does its job. It can be a little confusing; as you can tell, it's hissing at me right now because it's not wanting to fully close--probably a piece of sand in there or something--but when you secure this cap that'll get locked down. Again, I'll talk more about the inflation at my review and what I think of that. We've got a dump valve right here on the strut to dump the strut valve really quickly and help you evacuate that air and pack down fast.

Looking at the strut in relation to the boom, you can see it bends out at a pretty aggressive angle and then comes back and has this bulbous bottom here. What this is doing is supporting the canopy here; it's got a little bit of a baffle behind the strut here, and that helps shape the wing and support it, keep it rigid, and that's a really important portion of this design. You can see that section of the canopy is super tight, and then it further reinforces it with the boom here so that it is really solid.

Now this bulbous part on the bottom....that gives you a more solid connection to the boom where there's a nice gap here. You can still fit your hand in there really easily, but also having a larger section back here gives it a little bit more float when you're pushing it on the water when you're getting up or if you're doing a sinker start or something like that, which can be really helpful, But I think that the chief purpose of that is just getting some distance here between the boom and the strut so you can get your hand in there easily.

It is a one pump pump-up system. You've got a strut tube here: pump up the leading edge and it pumps up the strut. Just make sure you're closing the dump valve there. On the trailing edge, you'll notice we have some battens here; they are removable. They seem a lot more durable than the ones that had issues with cracking which they used on their version one foil wing and they're really easy to replace. They seem really durable; I was really bending these things getting them in and out the other day while playing around and didn't have any issues, so those should last a long time. But if you do need to replace them, you can do that, or if you need to remove them for some reason.

All right, so that's a quick look at the Slick Wing. This has been Tucker with MACkiteboarding.com. This is the Duotone Slick Wing foiling wing and mini boom, and we will see you next time.