The Board Building Contests at the ‘Fish have been a showcase for cool designs, new materials, innovative techniques and builders willing to go outside their envelopes, whether they’re a first-timer or an old hand.  Our December ’06 contest included one such exercise in testing limits, presented by Brian Morgan of Feral Arts.  If you followed the contest, you know the innovation and the controversy.  Whether you followed it or not, we think you’ll want to read Brian’s story…

All Your Crap Boards Are Belong Teh Me

Pressing wood veneer layers to form skateboards is not hard.  Doing it well, predictably and consistently is.  But what do you tackle when you - and what appears to be everyone else - are able to make veneer boards well?  I've got this little sidewall/cap construction process developed to manage durability and production issues.  I also have access to my latest (and last, more on that later) generation small production cradle press being prepared for delivery.  How does one show off internal engineering to others who share your interest in a way that captures the imagination?

You can tell people about it.  "Yes Brian, that's all very well but, yadda, yadda, yadda....buh bye."  Done it. 

You can run around, putting people on your boards, one at a time...  Done it. 

Lastly, if you're sure it is finally dialed-in, you can enter something so ridiculously stupid in a contest and use da weemons to show it off...  Done it!

Some years ago, while getting into building kite, sand, skim and surf boards, I ran headlong into the issues that bite all builders of similar forms:  strength, durability, weight, and production complexity.  My answer was to move the stringers out to the edges.  I coined a cute name by joining stringer and rail into "StringRail" and commenced building boards.A few years later and things are coming together nicely.  The building method is mature; the internal debates concerning materials are concluded and now real products are under test.  At the same time though, the elusive, single-step, ultra-light composite skateboard production method isn't quite there.  In this case, “not there” means the end results either suffer a high failure rate - snapping under load - or are bricks that look like a one-handed short bus kid got busy in a seventh grade shop class.

Such work does not measure up to other products crafted by such as Pavel, Wefunk or most importantly (personally that is), me.  It was time to resolve that sore spot and so I decided to try something new.  Time to take the wraps off of this pig to see what has been cooking and the results are...  Garbage.

Behold, the R³7!

 No, not her! The board, THE BOARD!

Please turn the board upright Brx, thanks.  Ah, now that's better.

So what is magic about this board?  Well, nothing really.  It was designed and built as a test platform.  What better way to find out how an engineering approach and production method works than to watch what happens as it gets used?  The best way to do that is to be able to see into the work so it has to have a measure of transparency.  Since the materials aren't the key and the business hasn't invested in X-ray equipment the question becomes, “What is a cheap, reasonable performance, transparent or semi-transparent readily available construction and core material?”

I didn't have far to look.  About twenty feet, in fact.

Alan Sidlo had recently commented on work he was doing involving fiber cores, briefly touching on the fact that corrugated paper had been used as a core in the past.  Twenty feet away from where I was standing was a large appliance shipping box due for a trip to the recyclers.  Core problem solved.

Now, corrugated paper products, or cardboard for those of us not hung up on the vernacular, are great things - but nobody is going to stack a batch of box tops, one atop another, drill a few holes and start riding.  Neither will you have much success looking through a box top without some form of (missing) x-ray device.  On the other hand, set a short piece of this stuff on edge.  Look through the open cells, then stand on them.  Amazing what a change in orientation can do for you.  

A large downside exists when using open-ended, hollow cell structures to create forms:  the perpendicular interface between the horizontal surface of the form and the thin vertical material that makes up the cell walls.  Acknowledging this difficulty, many open cell cores are supplied as preformed surfaced panels that are then used within the structure.  Unfortunately, “recovered materials” do not come offered as preformed panels so, the first challenge to addressing this problem is guaranteeing a good bond at the joint without loading the cells and wasting the advantages of the hollow core.

So, how is that done?  Not much resin and don't collapse the skin into the cells.  Sounds easy right?  Go do it, then show me, ‘cause I got dumb lucky!  What?  Oh yeah, this is about how I got dumb luck, okay.  Here is how I tackled it.  Controlling resin is pretty straight forward - measure then distribute uniformly throughout the glass.  Keeping the cells from loading?  Ah, now there's the rub. 

A two step approach was chosen.  The first step was to create a surface that would distribute press loading while curing.  Two surfaces were created using a couple of layers of glass.  Once cured, additional sections of glass were sized, wetted-out and applied to the surface layers.  The paper and maple stringers were assembled atop the bottom surface while wet followed by the top layer.  This mess was then positioned over a solid mold, half within the vacuum bag and arranged while the air was drawn out.  The two step solid surface approach under vacuum prevented the pressing from driving wet glass into the cells and acted to wick excess resin out of the layup.  Once cured, the finished blank was removed from the bag, a machining template was applied, and then sized. 

At this point, the stringrails were attached to the sized blank by wrapping vertical laminated maple veneer scrap sections around the board and clamping it within the vacuum bag.  The result was sized and the edges were wrapped with a couple more laps of glass scrap.  The board was then given a final sanding and the final graphic layed down on the topside.

In truth, this is a testing prototype, which means it has an abundance of wrong turns and rough edges, but that does not bother me in the slightest.  I build boards to use them so rather than put something like this up on the wall, that little pang from the thought of the first scratch is quickly set aside and the sadistic streak is allowed to run wild.  Taking a freshly completed prototype board from the hands of an unsuspecting bystander and slamming it onto concrete is therapeutic in a way one cannot describe with anything other than a primal scream.  Bonus points are provided from the expressions on the faces of those watching you do it.  Again.  And again, and..... 

This is far from the whole story where testing is concerned, but the importance of doing this one simple act cannot be overlooked.  When all is said and done, the goal is not to build boards that hang on walls, the goal is to build boards that hit the ground and can continue doing so.  The only way to that?  Duh - have fun on it.

01-09-12  So a little over a week has gone by since the board was presented to Silverfish Longboarding.  It is scraped, dinged, and well ridden.  Several configurations have been put up, tried, torn down, tweaked, retried, etc...  Has it lived up to expectations?  Yup.  No bogus claims, wild exaggerations or other stupidity.  Many feet have stomped on it and a few blooper vids exist of some tranny and trick action.  It just works and hasn't broken.

The production run fixtures for this form and a technical deck are being finished out for the expected first run of rails coming up this weekend.  The tail sections will be re-sawn out of larger vlam blocks and the only task remaining is for the Corrugated Paper Hunter to have a clear day in which to harvest his prey.

Only one task remains where this particular board is concerned:  It is being shipped off to Sniffleless as thanks for having managed the build-off for the last few years.  You have done a great job and put up with a lot of garbage for it.  It seems only fitting that you finally get a little garbage that I hope you will enjoy.

© Brian Morgan of FeralArts, Inc. 2007/SilverfishLongboarding.com