Longboard #1: HighFish

Well, not much to explain here. If you live in a city which has not only level roads but also mountain sides and steep slopes and you are definitively too old to be taken serious as ordinary skateboarder, the solution is a longboard.

These photographs document the manufacturing of a birch-plywood longboard with strong pre-flex, made of three 4mm plies glued together using L285 Epoxy resin under vacuum bagging. It is 980mm long and 245mm wide and has enough stiffness for a 80kg rider, without any glass filament reinforcement.

This is a styrofoam rocker-shape after hot-wire cutting. It should be noted that normal styrofoam starts to collapse below -0.6 bar underpressure.





Here you see the result of 3 plies of 4mm birch plywood. Surprisingly, the rocker curvature did not relax significantly after unbagging from the vaccuum. Also, for a 70-80kg rider, I would propose to use less or thinner plies and better add glass-fabric uni-dircetional plies to adjust the stiffness if required.

Cutting some self-adhesive deck tape and getting some off-the-shelf axles and the rest is self explaining...

[ Back...]