Crafting New Industries - Skateboard designs

thingiverse

My Crafting New Industries project was inspired by my passion for skateboards, despite being a bit of a klutz when it comes to riding them, having started on different types since I was about 7 years old. After reading the prompt for this assignment, I began thinking about the wide variety of skateboard, longboard, and cruiser decks and how cool it would be to fully customize a board. Currently, there are ways to customize boards that range from semi-to highly customizable, such as visiting stores like Zumiez or using websites like penny skateboards.com that have built-in 3D customizers. With these tools, customers can pick a starting deck, then choose the trucks and wheels, select designs or colors for the board, griptape, and panel underneath, and even decide on truck and wheel colors. With 3D printing, this kind of customization can be taken further by allowing customers to choose from hundreds of different types and shapes of boards as well as engravings etched into the desks themselves before painting. Boards could be made out of plastic or a mix of sawdust and plastic or even just wood in the future. In this context, a customer would start by picking a material for their deck, then choose from a few starting types and styles of boards before contacting the business about customizing the shape or size of the deck. They could choose colors like on the pennyboards site but also select different trucks to be printed on the spot out of metal. I'm not sure what kind of plastic standard wheels are made of, but future versions will allow for printing in-house and quickly producing different sizes and riding styles of wheels. Designs could be printed onto the bottom of decks with machines similar to the hamburger print demonstration. With all this customization, customers can get really creative with designs and styles, ending up with exactly what they want. Here are a few prototypes based on choosing your style of board before delving into different designs and even more specific alterations that would require contacting the creator. I focused mainly on sizes and styles of riding and then cut out designs for tails of boards because it's super interesting. These are just rough ideas as to what could be created with this type of 3D printing business or industry in the (hopefully) near future, part of my ART 297 - Project 10: "Crafting New Industries".