Bill Connell

Bill has been windsurfing for over thirty years, and surfing in its various guises for almost twenty five years. In this time he has built up an unprecedented knowledge and understanding of board designs, construction techniques and strength vs weight requirements in composites in many different fields.

Fixing his own and friends boards from the early nineties, this gradually developed into board shaping and building as a hobby. In the early years made some of the first Irish made full sandwich vacuum laminated EPS core windsurf boards using the name “BC Boards”.

A few years later, Kitesurfing took off, and with many of his friends switching over from windsurfing Bill decided to make kiteboards, supplying the then Irish Champion Jeff Williams and friends, with several boards being featured in competitions and magazines.

Bill is very technically minded and over the years has used and experimented with a myriad of different high tech composite construction resins and materials such divinnycell, corecell, Herex, EPS, XPS and polyurethane foams. He has also had plenty of experience with vacuum laminating and resin infusion techniques using Dyneema, Carbon fibre, Kevlar and hybrids, E glass, S glass and Spectra.  He has worked on boards with bamboo, wood laminates, hollow cores, Epoxy Surftechs, full sandwich boards and of course traditional polyesters, carbon fibre bike frames, lightweight auto race parts and even wind turbines.

Recently Composite Manufacturing has come to the forefront of the business and many various products have been successfully designed and constructed in Carbon and Glass fibre.

Bill has written composite repair articles for several magazines and online forums and also completed in depth training courses in Composites in the UK, hence The Irish Windsurfing Champion – Oisín Van Geldern’s nickname: “The Professor”

Bill ConnellBill Connell