The DIY-Series!

Happy 2018!  

If you have been following us a long time you may have already read these posts, however as the website got a little makeover I thought I would give myself sometime to refine these posts and update them a little too!

Welcome to the DIY-Series - these are a whole load of blog posts that will give you insight into everything about DIY-ing snowboard to building your own pneumatic press. We started from nothing and have learned a lot along the way and thought that we would give you some "heads-ups" that we wished we had.

The next blog post is going to be all about building/sourcing materials to build your own snowboard press and we thought we'd just go over some of the reasons why you need to have those things.

The pneumatic press is made up of lots of different parts, which are all integral to pressing boards: The frame

• Apart from being an enclosure to all the parts, the frame has been meticulously designed to withstand a lot of pressure

Top and Bottom Mould

• This gives your board it’s shape

• You control the camber, tip and tale dimensions

• It has to be extremely smooth as any bumps or dips will be transferred to the shape of your board when pressing

Heat blankets

• These are simply to heat your layup to set and cure the resin

• Aluminium sheets are sandwiched on the outside of the heat blanket to protect them from damage and spread the heat out evenly.

Air Bladder

• This builds up the pressure in your press

Cat Track

• This is to disperse the pressure of the air bladder evenly across the width of your board

• Due to the design of the air bladder the cat track is necessary to avoid warpage in your board

Steel Top and Bottom sheets

• This is to avoid damaging your mould under the pressure

• As the frame is very ‘skeletal’ there are gaps that unless are covered, could warp the shape of your moulds

• Steel gives you the strength whilst maintaining a low thickness

Stay tuned for the next one where we finally start talking about how we built our own press! Peace, Alice