Longboard Build

andywolo Nov 08, 2017

I decided to make my brother an extremely early Christmas gift. Since we live in Canada, in igloos for most of the year I had to make and give it to him this summer. Christmas day I'll bring a picture to remind him not to whine when there isn't a present for him to open. I wanted to build him a cruiser longboard to rip around the streets of Edmonton. He lives right off a popular street with bars and shops and likes to go up and down during the summer months. The project took me a few weeks from start to finish and the end product was a beautiful cruiser made of walnut, maple, and padauk.

I found these templates on a longboard site just through a google search. At my dad's work he has a massive plotter style printer (I don't know what that is, but it prints big things). He printed out a couple templates for me to trace onto MDF.

I cut two different templates out of the MDF and then used them with my flush trim router bit to get the final shape for the boards. I cut the board out using a jigsaw to give it close to final dimensions so I didn't burn out the router.

This is the board after initial glue up.

MDF cut out and the board. I took pictures of the wrong boards halfway through but the process is still the same. I kept one and gave one to my Bro.

After using the flush trim router I had my final shape.

The next step was to use a 1/4" roundover bit to give the board nice curved edges.

after applying the first coat of poly.

installing the trucks was actually quite a painful process since I don't have a drill press. It was tough to get them aligned perfectly and after doing this I realized that where the holes are drilled is not ideal so hopefully he doesn't go down any major hills and have the joints come apart on him.