Can’t wait to try my home-made splitboards!

Wow, thanks you guys! I didn’t expect such a sweet response 🙂

Let’s see, to answer some questions…
I’m not making boards to sell. As much as I love being covered in epoxy, it’s too hard to make them in my apartment and I don’t have the money to start a splitboard making company. But I definitely appreciate hearing that people would be interested in them! I would LOVE to make graphics for boards and have asked Voile if I could. But they have internal people. Glissade said that they don’t pay their artists (sad) so I didn’t want to go there. Although they did print mine for me at cost and it’s not what they normally do, so they are still cool in my book!

These boards were done as my thesis project for my industrial design master’s program. My question was could a lighter splitboard be designed to without losing structural and performance integrity. And the answer is HELL YES! Because I was working completely from scratch, I didn’t have access to all the lightest production techniques and materials, but even still my boards were lighter and quite strong. I did gain even more respect for Voile boards through testing during this project. They are just damn good boards. And they make almost everything locally.

I didn’t have a press, I made a vacuum mold. The cores were laminated by hand and tapered with this fairly janky, but surprisingly functional little router table thing I made using an idea from grafsnowboards.com. The boards I made are 153s because I’m pretty small and I needed to test them. They have cap construction over basswood and this hasn’t been done on any commercially available splitboard. The outer cap makes for buttery turns. They have UHMWPE sidewalls in the split side, making them virtually indestructible on the outer edge when you are skinning.

End grain balsa is used in lots of boards in the industry. I just made mine with longitudinal grain balsa because I was laminating the balsa and the amount of glue I would have needed to laminate end grain would have been ridiculously wasteful in weight savings and would have weakened the board. But anyway, I’ve tested two boards I made with balsa cores and I haven’t been able to break them yet. End grain balsa would be superior though to offer good crush resistance. The main purpose of the core is to separate the skins (fiberglass or carbon). The strongest board I made is thicker and with less skin layers. My balsa cores have basswood at the edges and some have spruce stringers as well. This helps with crush resistance and also provides more longitudinal rigidity.

I did talk to people at Voile while I was making these boards and they thought it was cool. I wish they’d buy my graphics though, did I mention that already?! Each board has a different sweet backcountry locale. One has Mount Tallac, one has Rock Creek Canyon and one has the Wallowa mountains (if you haven’t been there, you must!!!). The graphics work well for goofy or regular riders because forward, you’re looking toward the mountain and if you look back you see an urban scene. Any bc place could sit there right at the nose of your board. I like that. And I think Voile riders could benefit from some really sweet graphics [/rant]

And if you reallly want all the answers and photos, you can download the whole 11.3Mb of my Creative Work book. It’s here, but I’m warning you, it’s a big download:
http://www.concept.org/dai/creative_work/float_files/uphill_float_lo_res.pdf

Thanks again for all your thoughts on my boards! I really appreciate it.