DIY longboard skateboard

My teenage son is pretty hard to shop for, so this year for his birthday I decided to make him something.  For the past year or two, he has been increasingly getting into riding skateboards.   He's got a couple of different boards, but didn't have a long board and I've been curious about those for a long time, so after watching a lot of of YouTube videos, I worked up the courage and started ordering parts.



The biggest source of inspiration and probably the simplest and most straightforward process explanation came from  The Absolute Easiest Way to Build a Longboard video from Good Roads.  I ended up borrowing a few different ideas from other tutorials, but doing it using 2 sheets of 3-ply Baltic Birch seemed like one of the easiest ways to get started. (My press ended up taking a lot of cues from Cash's How To Make a Longboard / Skateboard Press | CashedOutBoards video.)

I started by making the press.   Since I didn't have a table I could clamp it to as in the video (and I wanted the process to be repeatable since I got the stuff to make myself one next ;-)), I picked up a 2x10" a the big box store (making sure to get the flattest one I could find) to use as the base of the press and cut it down to 40" with my radial saw.  To make the parts of the form that would shape the wood when pressed against, I uses some 1x2"s I had laying around and I rounded off the inside corners with a sander.  I screwed them on with counter-sunk 2" screws so that the screw heads wouldn't bite into the deck and I could easily unscrew them to move the forms around in the future. I wanted a teeny bit of kick-up, so I added them to the ends of the press as well as the sides.  I then measured carefully and drew center lines in both directions on the press with a marker so help with alignment purposes later.

For the clamping part of the press, I used a 2x4" to make the center press section and made 2 horizontal clamps out of 12" 2x4 pieces and some 3/8" threaded rod with nuts and washers.  Make them long enough that you account for the thickness of your base, press pieces and material before it gets squished together!   I also marked center lines on these parts.

Now it was time to make the deck.  I started by cutting the Baltic Birch sheets I got by following the links in the Good Roads video into two 40" x 10" pieces.     I covered the lower section of my press with cling wrap so that if any glue dripped, the deck wouldn't achieve oneness with the press.   I found the two sides of the plywood that were the prettiest and labeled them to be sure they were facing out and lightly drew the centerlines on the top piece with a pencil. (The prettiest piece should go on the bottom, since the top will probably be at least partially covered with grip tape.)  I laid the bottom piece on the press. Moving quickly, I covered the side facing up with a very liberal coat of Titebond III glue, dumping a ton on and spreading it out with a plastic spatula.  Once completely covered, I grabbed the top sheet (making sure to have the pretty side up) and carefully aligned it and set it on top of the glue.  Once on, I placed my top press piece on the deck, aligning the center-lines in both directons, placed on the clamp tops, washers and nuts and quickly, moving around the board, tightening each one a little at a time, tightened the clamps until I achieved the desired concavity in the deck I was looking for.   To make sure it's even,  I used a level to check for front-to-back and side-to-side level of the clamp cross-bars, and I used a caliper to measure the distance between the top and bottom cross-bars on the clamps.    Once the main clamps were on, I applied additional cross-bars and clamps closer to the ends of the board.   Use as many as you have!

I waited two days to remove the deck from the press.    I've heard 24 hours is ok, but I wanted to be sure it was dry as it was pretty humid out.    When I was trying to decide what type of deck I wanted to build, I stumbled across some old PDF templates that had been circulating.  They were great, because I could print them out at actual size and then tape them to the board and trace them out.   Having tons of hills around and wanting something really stable, so I chose a drop through truck design with cutouts for wheel clearance and a super low center of gravity.  I printed out the template (8 pages), aligned them, taped them together and then cut out the shape of the board.     Again, having center lines traced out helped a ton here.  

(it looks like it's separated here, but it's not, it's where the boards moved North/South in comparison to one another as they were being pressed) 

I clamped the deck to my work bench and very carefully cut out the shape with a jig saw with a fine jigsaw blade to minimize tear-out. For the straight parts, I cut pretty much on the line, but for the curves, I cut about 1/16th outside the line and then shaped it down to the line on the bench sander.

Lol, fuzzy, but you get the point

I found some drop-through truck hole templates online and marked those out on the board and used  1-1/8th" and 7/8th " Forstner bits on my drill press to make a series of holes and then connected them with a jig saw. I've seen folks use router templates for this, but this seemed to work very well.  Use what you have!   I used the drill press also to drill the 3/16" truck bolt holes.   I counter sunk mine just a touch to prevent cracking.  (for drop through, the screw head is against the trucks, not the deck, so you don't need to counter sink it as far as you would if you were trying to counter sink screw heads.)

Now that it's all cut out, next came the sanding.    I've seen folks use a router to round-over the edges, but I was a bit hesitant to do that for fear of gouging it with the hand router I have or something, so I put about a 1/4" bevel all the way around the top and bottom edges of the board with the sander, and then used the process outlined in this video The Complete Guide to Perfectly Rounded Longboard Edges to round over the edges. Once it was all shaped, I sanded the whole thing smooth with various grits, working my way up to 220.

Here you can see the concave on the board when cut to size.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about how I finished and painted the board since it fought with me quite a bit and I'm not sure why, so I don't want to give bad advice. I will pay a lot closer attention to the doing it for the next board and see if I can get it nailed down. At a high level, I used a multi-layer candy blue paint job. I ended up getting a weird chemical reaction and some unwanted crackling on the final coat of clear on the stripes, which I though was odd, since all of the materials were from the same kit.

I gave it to him in "kit" form, so he got to put it together himself. 

Overall, It turned out great. I'm happy with it and he was incredibly surprised and really loves it, so that's all that counts!

I absolutely love how this board rides! I've never been on a longboard and we took it out for its maiden voyage yesterday and it was so much fun. So smooth and stable! I had lots of fun building it, it's a blast to ride, go try it!

Things I'd do differently:   On the press, I'd probably make it a bit longer if I were to do it again in case I wanted to make a longer board in the future.  The truck holes were a bit tight, so I ended up needing to "wallow" them out slightly with the 3/16" bit in a hand drill to ease assembly.  The board has lots of flex with just the two 1/4" plys.   Not knowing much about longboards, it seems like that's "normal", but in the future I might look at additional layers, especially since I weigh about 50 % more than my son :D