Chico SK8 Co.

I am currently a new student at OSF this semester and I can tell you this is one of the sweetest hookups I’ve come by so far. Regular public high school was just straight up not my thing, all these rules and regulations and suspensions for skateboarding down the street from my school, ridiculous! Allthough I had full capability to be an academic student I could never apply myself to stay interested, because I never wanted to pursue a career in math, or geo, or history, and especially not computer tech jobs sitting at a desk all day. No. I need some flavor in my life; I have to be more involved with the world. So my first board is pretty much the birth of my company/brand, so it’s name is the “C.B” (Chico Board). Being a teenager/ adolescent and part Mexican, I thought Chico (which means kid/ boy) would be appropriate to represent my ethnicity and background. I incorporated the Mexican flag to represent my background.

The process of making a board is always dope. First you have to start off with the individual veneers which are individual plys of maple wood. I layered the veneers on top of each other in this order: 2 long grain plies, one cross, another long, one more cross, and 2 more longs. We do this order to give it strength and durability. Directly after that you have to put it in the vacuum sealed bag and pump out all the air using a wine pump; the Roarockit bag applies around 3000 pounds of pressure per square inch! I had to leave the board in the bag for 24 hours to let the glue dry. Once the glue dries and the press was complete, I scraped down the edges to make the board even and get rid of glue. After the scraping comes sanding, with an 80 grit, the roughest of the batch, to take off all the missed edges and bumps. I then moved on to a sanding belt to round the edges and then to 100 grit sandpaper and so on to 220. Once that is complete you have yourself a nice smooth wood finish. After this process I then designed a template and painted my board completely white. I then finished the flag colors and went on to the graphic for the center of the flag. I then drew up a design, put it straight on the board, covered it with frisket (which is a type of transparent sticker paper) and then cut out the design with a knife. After the board was finished and painted I had one last step of putting a thick layer of clear coat on it to give it a nice shine finish.

I am pretty psyched with the way my board turned out. Being my first board, I knew I could have had a lot more mistakes but I kept them down to a minimum. I really liked working with the frisket because it gives you can see through it to what you’re cutting out. I showed my design to my buddies and they all said it was sick and wanted to buy it!