Josh Rolf, the S9 Mad Scientist in his lab

One of the good things about being part of a skate team means being able to have input in the design of boards, or even cut different shapes of existing boards to suit your needs. Since riding for Sector 9 I've always been a fan of taking their already sick shapes and just making small tweaks and adjustments to suit my style. As time passed and I tried all the different shapes and sizes available I started to get the feel for what works and what doesnt, and it was time start getting tech with re-shaping some boards to suit my personal needs.

A stack of Roxannes in many different styles of concave

Josh Rolf (Munkae Trucks) has been the local mad scientist here at Sector, he has had plenty of time and lots of free range to test shapes moulds and materials in order to create the best products for the team and customers, he always asked for input for board designs so I had a good sit down with him one arvo and talked about shapes and how we can take what's there and make it better. Recently Josh had given me a thicker Roxanne with extra fiberglass for full rigidity, I then later cut out the waist and re-shaped the tail and re-aligned the wheelbase further up the nose and created a slightly different ride. I was pretty stoked on this shape so I took it to Munkae and we traced it out to cut it on some other concave types.

Tracing the custom shape onto the pressed blank 'taco cave'

Josh had already pressed up and cut a bunch of Roxannes in different styles of concave, some with w-cave some with deep tub some with crazy taco concave, you name it was all there. We spent some time inspecting all the different styles and put in some notes to how we wanna make the next concave to suit this shape. For now I just chose a couple different styles to cut out so I could test and get the feel for.  

Its not always just fun and games making skateboards, factory machinery are dangerous things!

The first board was cut on the 'taco' concave with kind of pinches in towards the nose and tail for cutting out pintail shaped boards, but instead of cutting the shape from the middle of the pressed blank we loaded it further towards the front to give it more of a bowl up on the nose with still some good concave at the rear. The second board was a similar shaped concave but with a slight w that ran from full nose to tail and had an extra layer of fiberglass underneath to keep it super rigid. We did two slightly different cuts for each board just to give it a little bit of variation so we can find that nice middle ground.

Custom Roxy with w-cave, slightly narrower profile

Custom Roxy 9-ply, fatter nose taco-cave

Over the next few days will be perfect for testing out the boards, going to sneak in a session with the Muir skate crew at one of the local runs (I was there helping shoot a video last time I was here, that hill is sick!) and then heading up to Santa Barbra to shoot some footage with Louis, Ross and Braden Tibbles.