Small Scale Manufacruting
About Sims Longboards
As a High School project I was very interested in making longboards because of the high cost for a longboard and because of their poor quality. I started building longboards with the intention of making and selling high quality longboards of my own design. Through trial and error I realised that to sell at any scale I needed to set up a way to manufacture longboards in higher quantities with fewer mistakes. To do this I orignially tried a cement form gravity press that used two custom made cement moulds to press the curve into a blank, this did not work because it did not reach the required pressures to keep the plywood from delaminating. to get around this I instead used a vacum bag where I could make 2 boards at a time and ensure that they were fully laminated. After this I used a template and table router to cut out the shape and edge profile. Once this was completed the boards were coated with polyeurethane and either given away, stored or sold. This process used a series of templates and jigs to drill holes, cut blanks to size, and make curved boards. This decreased the ammount of time I spent making each longboard to about 2 hours a piece and ultimately lowerd the cost of material for each longboard to about 35 dollars.