Easy, Inexpensive, DIY Skateboard - Part 1: Making the Mold

[Music] hey it's Chris Boudreaux it's been it good to see you again we finally got access to the space that's going to be the semi permanent home for all of our tools and set shop work for the videos and the content without here good roads but for now there's no tools in it which is actually perfect because starting today I'm going to be putting out a series of videos on how you can make a skateboard with next to no tools and really inexpensive material costs so kick that off today we're going to be building a set of molds for a board they're a style of a mold called add impressed I didn't think this up you can find them online they've been used in the kind of amateur mid-level board building community for a very long time and they're made out of pine and insulation now add impressed has some upsides and some downsides but essentially what we have is a mold with a male and female half and we are going to be compressing them together with all of our sheets of wood in the middle when the glue in between those sheets occurs we take it out of the mold and all the curves will be locked into place so let me talk a little bit more about Tim presses sword in molds and the advantages and some of the drawbacks the drawbacks are that the foam is first of all a semi flexible material there's not a ton of CLECs to it but it's kind of a little bit of gift so these moments aren't going to give you super precise shapes you're not gonna be able to get like the exact curves that you want but you will be able to get a very very close approximation and the other drawback is that because of the tolerances and the mold like this at least the way that we're going to be making it there's very often a little bit of a gap between the male and female halves now what that means is that we have to use a slightly stiffer material so instead of you the Canadian maple rock mint implies what we're gonna be using is this this is Baltic birch plywood it also goes by Russian birch there aircraft-grade birch marine birch all different terms and names for a high quality birch plywood this is an a thin sheet it's got three veneers in it and what we're gonna be doing is cutting this into thirds we'll be doing three layers of plywood which equates to nine plus and we will actually the way the math works out that is that we will have six long-grain and 3 cross 3 so it should be nice and strong I want to speak a little bit to the style of the press or the style of the mould I love it the reason that I wanted to focus on this style of press for these videos is that they are so cheap so even for someone like me who makes a lot of boards they are just perfect for prototyping if there's a quick idea you want to get out there's a shape that you want to experiment with and try something out this is the one this is kind of standard skateboard wall I mean we can take a minute to look at that but you've got your kick tails and your concave but say you want to try a board that had some rocker in addition to the Cape doesn't contain you don't really know how it's gonna ride you don't know if you're gonna enjoy it for something like that that's just kind of an experimental that if you don't know going into it whether or not you're even gonna like it it doesn't make sense to build a really detailed labor-intensive mold set this you can do for cheap and you can do it quick and you can do it without any tools or with next to no tools and you can get them right back into pressing boards and prototype so even for someone who's making a lot of warren's who's done this before I still think Tim presses have a lot of value as a prototype but if you're just getting into it almost certainly the cheapest way to get started at least if you want to do complex geometry so anything beyond like a long board that's just got some concave maybe a little bit of camera if you want to get into kick tails you want to get into wedges you want to get into combinations of rock and camber you want to be able to experiment with different concave shapes cheaply and quickly dip press is the way to go so that's what we're gonna do today so I'm gonna show you how to be doing it's the first step in making a skateboard or cheap with next to no tools let's get started let's take a quick look at materials and tools the first thing you're gonna need is some wood to back the mold on the foam itself is not going to be rigid enough to take any kind of clamping force so we've got to make sure that there's something rigid on the back in order to distribute that force and push revenues into shape I find the most cost-effective way of doing that is just with some pine again it's super cheap from any home goods store you want to have a board for the male and female have some old so just make sure that you have enough length lights to do that 1/8 inch wide board will actually get you close to 7 and 3/4 and a 10 inch you know finger quotes 10 inch by the board will be closer to you I'm going with 775 today because it's the board that I have they'll give us a pretty cool little Street with I'm gonna be cutting it into about 30 inches because that's the size of my stock yeah and then to make the actual interior of the mold meet some rigid insulation foam you want to look for foam that has an r-value of 8 or 9 or higher the R value is how insulating the phone is and a higher number indicates that an answer so there are homes out there that you can get at the store that are probably going to be too soft for what we need them to do so make sure that's got a nice high r-value you only need a block of foam the size of the board that you're gonna make and that is as thick as the tallest featuring one so if you want one inch high kick tail the foam has to be at least one inch ah that's all I mean by that the next thing the last thing you're going to need materials wise is just some glue now literally any glue that sticks foam and wood will work today are everything be using a hot glue gun because it's fastest but you can use standard can be a load present you can use standard what glue or you can use some nicer wood glue and for what it's worth as we go through this project of making this board if you are trying to save some money use your techmount tape on three is the glue that we're going to use to bond the layers of the board together so if you want to be really efficient with your money and you can only buy one blue tape on three but you don't have to do it that way and today I'm going to be using hot glue now let's talk tools you need something to cut the fun ones and again in the interest of saving money the most efficient kind of tool you can get is this is actually a used sawzall blade which will work great wow that things be up okay but if you're buying your tools new you're going through Home Depot there's a song called a whole song which is metaphor punching through your drywall cutting out spots for sockets and things like that it's about this long it's about this shape and it costs about six bucks that you can use to cut your phone you can use it to cut down your backing boards for the molds and you can use it to do the rough cutting when you get around to actually shave it in your blank so again for cost efficiency go for a whole song now that is not the most effective tool for any of those jobs so if you have them or if you have the money to get a couple more tools a good handsaw way easier to be cutting the backing boards and then shaping your board with and a utility knife that can have a long blade is gonna get you nicer cuts on shaping your phone making the actual curves and everything in the phone is actually a very good shape the reason why is unlike something like this which is a pulsar which is very flexible the whole saw or isazo blade is actually pretty rigid it doesn't have a whole lot of spring to it and it's narrow which means if you need to cut curves you've got kind of the room with the housing the sublet is to navigate those curves whereas a broader saw like this you would never be able to do like the transition from the edge of some concave back down into the gate tail so a blade like this for agility blade like this for cutting wood and I believe like this for clean lines on your phone is the most big as far as cutting tools go but you can get away with justice next and I suppose last we need a straight edge some kind and something to mark our minds with and again if you're trying to save money you can eyeball it but it's way better to use a straight edge I grab some tape too I'm not gonna need this today for my bill because the hot glue sets very quickly but if you're using one of these other glues especially one of the PVA base glues the foam kind of doesn't let any air through because it's an insulator and it takes a long time for the glue to dry so it can be very helpful to use some tape to just tack your parts in place as the glue dries if you're waiting something to keep in mind if you're using one of these longer setting foods okay so that is our tool set and our materials so let's get started first thing we're gonna do is cut our backer boards so I'll talk more about Baltic birch when we get into the video about actually pressing the board and I'll talk about some other material options you have and ways to source it because you can't sometimes be a little bit hard to get a hold up but for the boards I'm gonna be making today this is the sheet that I have and I don't need the mold to be any longer than stock so I'm just gonna use my sheet of wood to mark out my lengths back boards use a tape measurer and a square too but this just saves you a little bit were cool let me take a saw and cut boards a little tip just a little sawyers tip if you grab your saw like a pistol grip and put your finger along the edge of the blade and I hope you keep that cut nice and straight [Music] [Music] great so we have our backing boards for our male and female sides of the mold the next thing that we need to do is cut block of foam shape so again instead of using a ruler just because it's one extra tool to have to deal with we can do it just using the vacuum and I think looking at this particular jungle foam I'm actually gonna cut all four sides because the ones that came off the machine are really not flat there's dips and curves everything else in it you can use that it's not gonna hurt your mold too much but it makes layout of all of your board shapes easier if you have nice straight sides so that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna be using sea air utility blade but for both cutting out the back and boards and the phone if all you want to do is spring through that six dollar hole saw it'll do the job and it's gonna be a little bit more rough and it's gonna fire a little bit more elbow grease but it will work there we go now I've got a nice smooth edge to work with when I go to mark my lines for cutting my board geometry later I'm just going to do that on all four of their sides we've got a piece of foam that will live between our two backing boards then we will cut power or geometry out of and using that we'll be able to make both the male and female sides in the mold so the next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna take a shape that we plan for our board and all the geometry we're gonna lay it out on the block of foam so that we know where to cut I'm thinking because of the size of this board and kind of for my favored wheel base range that I'm going to actually make a single kick tail mini Cruiser type board I like to have a slightly wider wheel base you could probably make on the small side street deck using the dimensions that we have here but I want that building so but I think I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get nice no kick in the back I'm gonna have probably a kind of shallow concave and just a little tick how do you even really kick tail just a little hook on the front so then you have something to lock your minutes so let me take the back of boards out of the way and then we can start laying upper deck something that I like to do I find super useful whenever I'm making any deck is to start with a centerline and then in general you want to maintain the idea of where that center line is as you go all the way through making your deck and the idea there is a center line is the line that you want your bolt holes aligned with so you want to establish your center line in the mold so that you know that you've got the same amount of concave on one side of the board is the you want to transfer that centerline to the blank when you make it so that you know where the center of the blank is eventually you use that center line to make sure that your bolt holes are aligned so first things first let's get ourselves sirenoid to mark my lines I'm using a sharpie big shows up on the screen pretty well it's easy to see but you can use anything you can use a pencil or a pen or a nail and just scratch the lines into the foam this isn't super precise work so I find the big fat dark line of a sharpie to be helpful so that you can see your lines later when you're cutting like I said I want to have a kick tail figure out I have a rough idea of where I want my wheelbase to be for doing a mini Cruiser oh whoa whoa we think of like a five inch kick tail that's kind of short six inch yeah let's do a six inch kick tail [Music] six inches here six inches here you could do this with a square if you have one and I do but I do want to show you guys that you can do this with like a pretty minimal set of tools so this line here is gonna be where our kick tail starts and we're going to cut our kick tail out of the side of the board I want to have a lethal tiny nose school thing we'll do two inches for that it's gonna be so subtle in the final product but a little luck you'll be able to feel it and it will it's good and I like a pretty u-shaped concave as opposed to a tub one where you've got a bit of a flat bottom or a W concave you can do all of those things and foam but I am basically just gonna kind of eyeball doing this in thirds which should give me a nice you concave I know the quarters about there we'll measure that and we'll make sure that we have the same measurement out from the center by measuring it out from the center you know that it's symmetrical even if you have a little bit of extra material on your foam on either side you really want to be relying on that center line because you can always cut material off the sides of the boards but you can't cut it out of the middle all right I'm gonna draw the lines now for our concave the next thing that we need to allow for is wood can really only bend in one direction at a time so we need to make space for a transition from the concave which is going to be here to kick tail which is gonna be here so this needs to go to flat the easiest way that I've found to do that is to kind of just make a little chamfer you might want to give yourself a little bit of room and tuck this palate a little bit so that there actually is a little bit of flat before the kick Tilson but in this case I'm gonna rely on the slight flexibility of the foam to kind of just make up for any imperfections and that's one of the nice things about doing these dim presses is as long as you have a rigid enough material feel bit close enough so let's just draw our connecting lines back here [Music] to kind of just go straight this is gonna be our kick and the shape is gonna alternate to kick tail these are gonna be our concave on this side and this side this is gonna be our nose up here and now I did not want to write concave up side up so the next thing that we have to do is lay out what the side profile of these shapes are going to be so that we know where to cut on the sides something to keep in mind as you're doing this is that your kick tail can only be as long on the diagonal as your saw blade because you have to cut all the way through the poolman wants but we'll get to that into it a little bit so just as a quick check as you're laying it out take your saw blade and make sure that it is longer than the longest cut you have to make on your kick tail so what we're gonna do now is take this two-dimensional shape that we laid out on the top of our mold blank and transfer it to the sides so that we can have those shapes in three dimensions the kick tail I'm gonna make the full height of my block of foam so I'm going to find the edge of my kick tail as I've marked it out on the top and I am just going to draw a line from that to the corner of the block do the same thing for the nose but the nose I am NOT gonna make as high as a kick tail so let's mark out let's do a half inch and mark our triangle there I want to make a correction real quick this diagonal line that I drew here for the concave is going the wrong way it needs to go like this this edge is gonna be thin and it's gonna flare up and draw the side of our concave which means it needs to be doing the opposite going this way so I'm gonna correct this really quick so let's take a look here we've got our line coming in from the kick tail here which ends here and I'm gonna line that's gonna start our concave here but we want this curve or this shape to be a gradual transition so what we're gonna do is establish the basic height of our concave as it goes along the edge of the board we'll do a half inch again I'm just going to mark a couple lines from the bottom of our mold along the edge and then connect them and then we're gonna draw this transition here from the bottom of the kick tail to the beginning of the concave it doesn't need to be perfect the foam itself will kind of make up for any mistakes but it's nice to have that be a good gradual curve that way the wood has room to bend so now you can start to see some of the 3-dimensional shapes we're going to be making our concave is going to go from here to here and then down along this edge and down along this line here our kick tail is gonna go down through this line here and then across our mold here so it's got a nice square transition I'm gonna go through and just mark the side components of the nose and then flip it over and do the other side so again we've got our little nose it's gonna go like that and we've got our concave which we're gonna cut out and the shapes gonna go like that the last piece of marketing that we need to do is to just mark the last line to outline the nose and tail on the front and back the mold I'm just gonna take the marks that we made initially from the side extend them onto the front back of the mold like that I'm connecting with a line great I guess we don't need to do that for the tale because the line for the tale is just the edge of the mold so that's perfect up next we're gonna start cutting our phone so grab your saw again it's gonna be advantageous to have a long stiff narrow saw and I recommend starting with a kick tail instead of the concave because the concave has got a slightly more complex cut to it you want to get a feel for how the saw cuts through the phone but what we're gonna do is we're gonna start on the line that we drew on the side and cut down through the block while trying to keep the backside of the blade in line with the line on the front of the mold and the front side of the blade in line with the line here that will cut a nice wedge out of our foam which we'll be able to use both sides of so let me get through the cut and then I'll describe a little bit how this is gonna work but again just keep a firm grip if you're worried about the saw wandering just go slow you can always tilt and twist your hands it's one of the advantages of having a narrow size that you can steer a little better and then just take your time and be careful and you should have no problems so as I'm cutting I'm watching where the saw blade cuts along this line and I'm watching where it cuts along this line kind of moving my eye back and forth to make sure that it stays in line if it wanders out of the way a little bit I can either twist this way or twist this way to get the saw back in line if you go slow you should be able to keep it in control and make sure those lines are straight if there's little variations it's not gonna matter because the foam that sticks up or that is press down a little bit we'll just get compressed when we actually press the born in it so there's a little room to make mistakes here you don't have to be perfect cool so this block that we cut the piece away from this is gonna be our male side of the mold and you want to hang on to the pieces that you're gonna cut off because we're gonna piece those together and those are gonna be the negative the female side of the mold that we're gonna use to push the layers between so as best as possible try to make sure that the pieces that you cut off come off in a single piece because we're gonna be using them next let's do the kick tail it's the same cut it's just a little bit bigger so it helps give you a little bit more patient mmm just take your time since this is a long flat cut I'm gonna switch over to using this wood saw and I'm hoping that I'll still be able to keep it in line even though it's a broad blade I won't have to steer it too much and it should make faster work of this cut because this was slow going on this could only really move the blade back and forth about an inch you get there eventually but I'm thinking this might be faster so I'm gonna give this a try there we go I'm glad I made that choice it did make faster work of it you'll see that my kick tail line got a little bit twisted there but all I'm gonna do to help with that is I'm just gonna shave some off up on this end to even it out a little bit I'll probably do the same here grab my knife real quick and just even out that line I'll do the same this just smooth out that transition a little bit and there we go we've got the male half of our kick tail and the female half and they'll go together like that the last side cuts that we have to make are the ones for the concave and they're the most complicated ones or we're gonna have to do is start on this corner here keep the edges of our blade along this line and then steer it so that it intersects these two lines and then this is just a long cut similar to the way our kick tails went but this this curve up front here that's the reason why there's an advantage to having a narrow blade because it makes it much easier to steer through then cut but just like everything else if you go slow and take your time watch your edges watch your cut you should be able to steer your blade through that if you make any mistakes the foam can kind of account for it you can always add you can glue more foam in place if something goes wrong but you can do it in one shot and that's the best way to do it so that's what I'm going to try to do now we're gonna start at this corner cut in and then turn and go down the line so we made it to our transition now we're gonna turn which I'm doing by just twisting my hand and forcing the blade to cut a curve great we made it through the transition now I'm just gonna cut along these two lines the same way we did for the kick tails all the way down to the other end where I'm going to transition back out and then we'll do the other side there we go now the other side something that's good to do just a quick note is mark your cut offs from the sides with the side that they correspond with so we're going to call this one a this is the nose and that'll just make sure that the parts that you cut out are still matched up with the places that you cut them from [Music] there we go cool let me do that thing where I mark just clear this is my B side and this is B no so cool so what's left are five pieces of foam this block is gonna be the middle side of our mold and you can see skateboards would kind of be oriented that way we got kicked out you've been a little up for the nose we've got our concave and then the beam outside is just going to be the parts that we cut off opposite of that we're gonna glue those in place and when you put material between the two and clamp them together it'll press all of the firewood into the shake of the board that we're looking to have so the next step is to take our pieces of styrofoam that we just cut and attach them to our backing boards just as a quick note you can go in at this point and clean up your mold pieces if you want send them out smooth them out so that they're not so rough but you don't have to because we're using a stiffer material we're using that Baltic birch and because the foam has a little bit of give to it even though the surface is rough there'll be enough surface area in the right places so that when we squeeze it down the pressure will get applied where it needs to go so you can go in and clean it up it'll make it look nice it's always good to kind of practice your fit and finish it but you don't have to this is going to be good enough so I'm just going to go with this is waiting for that movie uh Nikita and then we're gonna do the male side first because it's easier it's just a single block and all we have to do is make sure it's lined up with the edges that'll do things all I'm gonna do spread a bunch of blue on the wood and then put the foam on top of it now this is a high temperature glue gun so if I put it directly on the phone then it's gonna melt it which is why I prefer to do it on a wood first a lower temperature glue then isn't so bad about that but you have a little bit less time to work if you're using a high temperature we've done especially when you get to the thinner areas just be careful because it might melt through the foam and get on your hands minutes or huh and that does not feel very good experience like I said I'm outside this is much easier is all yet is tack it down we don't need a ton of surface area with the glue all we're doing is making sure it stays attached to our backing board they have a little mistake glue in there pulled it up broken a piece of foam this is one of the reasons I love impressive so much because they are so forgiving he's the broke off back in place and it will still work these things on top of being cheap and easy to make there is a ton of room for error it's really they're just really really easy all right so we've got a mail pack and I like to use the mail half as a reference for the female half just to make sure everything's lined up I marked the sides of my concave a and B when we cut them earlier and I marked which then was the nose so when I grab my concave pieces this one says B this is the B side and I've got my marking for the nose so I can just line those up we're gonna do the same thing for the a side Hey take two no now there's a couple ways you could do this one that I think works pretty well is you put the backing board down you put your glue down you flip your pieces over and this is especially important for the concave because they have to go to the opposite side because it has to flip back over for the mold so work together you tack them down that way you can also put glue on this and put the board on top of it it helps if you're gonna do it that way to have something between the two layers like saran wrap or something that helps you get your parts of the lined a little bit better the concave for example hasn't like shifted side to side but for today for demonstration purposes I am going to do it the first way that I describe by flipping the pieces over I can see just because these two parts are next to each other about the size of where the block of foam for the kick tail needs to go so I'm going to draw slightly within that shape with my glue lining up edges yeah that worked great do the same thing where they quickly put the nose all right that's funny and again just like with the cutting the concave is the hard part because we do want to make sure this is getting lined up here because we have that little bit of gap on both sides and we want to make sure that when we put the molds together that's it so I am going to draw a bead down the edge and try as best as possible using the male side of the visual reference to get the female side line go I'm just gonna flip this over and you'll see that looks pretty close make sure the edge is lined up watch my fingers because that glue is hot and this is a thin piece of foam it'll come straight through it and then we're just gonna flip the b-side and do the scene Yeah right edges are correct push it down a little bit this would be the part if you're using like a white glue or a wood glue take a little tape and use the tape to tack down your parts and all that does is hold it in place so they don't shift around glue is dry now ah glue gun it's already good to go so you don't have to be good but it doesn't make it a little bit easier if you go with a slower setting glue and that's it that's our mold done we've got the male side and the female side to do a quick check flip the halves over make sure they fit together make sure that there's not too much of a gap anywhere let's look here yeah that gap looks okay that's actually I think that's one of the better ones I've done that's cool so our two mold halves fit together well we've got one last thing that can be helpful to do which is you grab our sharpie again and we mark that center line in the beginning in the process we want to make sure that we can see it from the outside of the mold so just continue that on across and down your size on the tail you could also do it you know the phone pieces before you incorporate them into the mold that works just fine the reason I'm doing this Matt Oh is because it's much easier to transfer the centerline from the mold to the blank when it's still in the mold instead of sitting there and having to try to calculate the centerline on top of the blank so we're gonna have our pieces of wood in here they might overlap they might shift around a little bit while we're pressing but if we have our center line on the mold when it's done curing all we have to do is mark it there mark it there I'm gonna draw a center line right down or excellent so that is how you make a really cheap easy set of skateboards so this is probably the most important part of making a skateboard the next most important thing is we need something is them together there's a lot of ways of doing that expensively too and in the next video I'm going to be showing you to it the absolute cheapest way to do it is just a pile heavy stuff on top so we're gonna be pressing board that way and we're also going to make some clamps that are really easy to turn into a kind of static manual skateboard press so that's gonna be the next video coming out shortly I hope you liked it I hope you find this useful I hope that when the series is out that you will go make skateboards because I think it's so much fun it's so much fun to ride the gear that you have made yourself it's so enjoyable and being able to do it this quickly and cheaply you can try out a bunch a different shapes you can ride kinds of boards if you wouldn't otherwise be able to because the cost is so low I love it I want to share it with you guys I hope this inspires you stick around for the next set of videos I'll show you the rest of the process and until then I'll see you soon to the table

Channel: Good Roads

Views: 41,656

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: skateboard, skate board, longboard, long board, diy, do it yourself, home made, homemade, cheap, easy, easiest, molds, mold, dimm, dimm press

Id: R6Pui0ULDlY

Length: 37min 18sec (2238 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CHAINMAILLEKID]

Dimm's vimeo video link has been down for a long time, but its still in the side bar...

Anyway, IMO the dimm press is basically nearly the best way to start building molds. It really makes board building feel a lot more approachable.

And so I wanted to highlight this video to help get the dimm press out there again.

[u/SpaceTurtle917]

I've never heard of this, I've always used a screw press. Pretty cool

[u/5Dollar]

Yes I agree the SilverfishLongboarding forum was a great resource for board builders. Too bad it is not easily accessible on the wayback machine.

Silverfish along with http://www.ncdsa.com which also had a board building area (it’s still active but not much is posted there on board building) was my go to for posting work that I had done and for helping people who asked questions about our Roarockit kits when we were first starting out.

There was lots of great info there for sure. It however had its ups and downs. Mostly ups I am glad to say. Trying to decide who had the correct information was always a challenge. Everyone there seemed to be the expert so it was easy to get conflicting and misinformation. It was also trolled by individuals who were at times pretty nasty to some builders. I guess you take the good with the bad. I certainly felt the brunt of this but in the end I enjoyed my daily fix of the place.

Silverfishlongboarding does have a Facebook presence if anyone is interested. Erik and Maliki Kingston were the two that ran the forum. In the end I think it got too large for them to handle. They both helped Roarockit tons by letting me be part of the forum while still being someone who sold a product. I was respectful of this privilege and tried to only post helpful information when asked. Yes I agree Reddit does not cut it like a forum although the search component I find pretty useful. There is Diy Skateboard Builders on Facebook which I host at arms length if anyone is interested. It has a large following of builders. People do help one another there and post pictures of their work. It’s not Silverfishlongboarding but it is a useful area.

Dimm I knew well. He used our kits for a long time. He went on to do bigger things with his life and because of this disassociated himself with the process. Respectfully he wishes to remain this way. Back then there really was an explosion of technique. All the alternative methods of building boards that are use today in part were helped by the Fish. Not much has changed technique wise since then. Sites like http://diyskate.com, Roarockit tutorials, the above posted YouTube area and your tutorials chainmaillekid do a great job at taking a ton of information and condensing it all down to something that really helps builders.

I can link the above tutorial to the dimm link when I have time.

Ted

[u/chrisFromGoodRoads]

Oh hey, that's me! I also miss the 'fish. I learned most of what I know about board building on there and the board build-offs were fun.