Snowboard base Grinder

You can see by the picture that this small beat up piece of equipment serves many functions.

1. The edge grinder polished and finishes up the sidewalls and steel rail.
2. The stone grinder puts a texture on  the base.  This texture can be either a diamond shaped texture or a linear texture.  The type of texture we put on boards depends on the needs and wants of the customer.  this texture can be fine or dramatic and is adjusted by the speed of the diamond bit that travels across the stone to “dress” it.
3. The Sander is the sanding wheel that takes all the excess resin and imperfections out of the board.  Sanding the board is a very important process, you must be aggressive enough to take off all the excess resin without sanding the base down to the core.  We always start out with an 80 grit belt, then move on to a 100, 120 and finally a 180 grit belt.
4. The feed wheel spins and feeds the board through the sander and stone at an even pace.  This speed is adjustable and help to keep the grind consistent and the operator from fatiguing quickly.

Base grinding a board takes lots of time, in fact this one machine with a skilled operator can only grind down about 30-40 boards a day.  It typically takes someone about 200 boards to get good at base grinding and it is one part of the process that must be constantly monitored.

Base grinding sometimes does require additional hand love.

Sometimes it does take hand work!

Board passing through the grinder

Ule has been base grinding for about a year now, and is very good at it!

Ule running the grinder

Let us know if you have base grinding questions!

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Wakeboards are constructed a lot like snowboards, but instead of a wood core foam is used.  This keeps them light and buoyant.  We use a slightly heavier tri-ax glass to help with strength and a PBT top and base sheet.

Earlier today we showed you a direct print top, here is a base coming off the printer right now.  This is being printed on ISO 1500 extruded material.  Though this material is soft, it is extremely fast on the snow and finishes up like glass!

We often print on Durasurf, and ISO sport 7500 sintered materials.

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Over the past year, we have been developing a way to directly print onto the snowboard plastics.  Sublimation is great, but on softer materials like bases the image gets blurry and fine lines disappear.  We wanted a way to get the quality of digital with the cleanliness of screen printing.  So after months of testing and modifying we have done it!  We can directly print on base material or top sheet material digitally, achieving photo like results.  This eliminates the need to burn screens and gives the customer the opportunity to design any graphic using infinite amounts of color.

Printing digitally is also a huge advantage when sampling production runs.  We can run single prints and put the board through the production process quickly without all the costly set up fees.

In the above image we are directly printing on Crown Plastics top sheet material.

Take your height in inches and convert it to centimeters, 1 inch = 2.54cm: so if you are 5 foot 9 it would be (69 * 2.54) = 175.26cm.  Then multiply that number by 88% or .88 (175.26*.88) = 154.23.  So you would want a 154 cm board or something close.  Now this is just our own theories, what are yours?