Fingerboarding has always been a hobby of mine since Junior High. A guilty pleasure I guess you could call it. Man I am getting old, that was about 10 years ago since I started. Anyway, I recently discovered the world of wooden fingerboards. Up until this point I have only used Tech Deck fingerboards which are made of plastic. But there is a whole world of homemade wooden fingerboards. Berlinwood based out of Germany I have found to be the best. They are handcrafted perfectly and work really well. Only bad part is that they cost about $30-$35 to get them shipped from Germany.
This is a Berlinwood Wide- Deep Concave. This deck is great, but I thought I could probably make my own That would work just the same. So I gave it a try. These first couple of decks I made out of plies of birch veneer. I call the company Ampersand.
This was my first one. I made the kicks pretty high, a little too high. I also chose not to have very much concave at all. I just never got into that whole thing. I like fingerboarding with an almost flat deck. Maybe with just the slightest bit of concave. I made it wide, about 29mm. That is great because I have large fingers and it's easier to control the board when it is wider. I was pleased with how it turned out. Although it is definetly too steep to easily perform tricks.
So I gave it another shot. This time even wider (31mm-32mm) with lower kicks, and a better shape. I also played around with some graphics on the bottom before lacquering it.
Once it was done and I drilled the holes and everything, I slapped on some FBS Extra Smooth pre-cut griptape and I was ready to go. This is probably the best deck I have ever fingerboarded with. It reassured me that I will probably never need to buy a deck again. The extra wide cut is perfect for my fingers and the shape just feels right. This is still only a prototype. The next step is too find some more exotic wood veneers. I may also experiment with screenprinting, dying, or carving on some of the plies of wood.
Maybe when I have fine tuned the decks and have a mold made, I can pop some of them up on ebay and see how they sell.
I have been slowly working on a little fingerboarding video. I hope to finish editing it soon. I will probably put it up on here once it is done.
2 comments:
hello.i`m from ROMANIA.i want a wooden deck from berlinwood but from Germany to Romania the transport is to expensive.and i can`t live what i dream:((
Nice craftsmanship!
How long time do you roughly use on making one of those? Regarding the graphics, do you just freehand those? When it is so small it might work to do the graphics in Illustrator or photoshop and print them on ricepaper and glass them in with a thin layer of polyester/epoxy - surfboard style. Cool stuff!
-TJ-
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