Brian Chuk
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any physical side project; the last time I made anything was around four weeks ago (the camera balloon). Although I no longer have a fancy woodshop to sneak into in Stuyvesant or an even fancier professional makerspace like Kite and Rocket, it’s nice to just use my own two hands, a saw, a hammer, a drill, and a file.
I found a street sign that was just lying there on a platform in the Little Neck Long Island Railroad station. Days past, May showers came and left, and yet it stayed. On one lucky day, I saw the metal board get relocated to the inside of a trashcan—a clear indication that the board was of no use anymore. So I grabbed it (albeit clumsily because the board is almost 7 feet long), and hid it in a nearby bush since I was on my commute to high school. When I was on my way home, I picked up the board from the bush and left it in my backyard. Now, it’s about time to bring it to life.
Let’s build a longboard.
Closeup
On closer look, it’s a fairly new white board with a couple holes in it for screws to hold the board up. The corners are a little bashed up, but that’s fine. The board is a sandwich of two sheet metal buns with a thin sheet of corrugated plastic in between (think plastic in the form of thick cardboard boards).
Before I decided to use the board, I had to test to see if it was a viable material for a longboard first. I wanted to test how easy it was to cut into a shape I wanted, so I used a hacksaw to test how it held against it (hacksaws are meant to cut metal, but you can use them for pretty much anything). After a moderate amount of effort, the hacksaw left a clean straight line on the board, as you can see on the lower left corner of the board in the photo above. Then, I did stress testing to see if the board was strong enough in the first place to hold my weight. I placed the board on two bricks, with the two bricks exactly under each end of the board. Bad idea haha. The board bent instantly under my weight and thus that’s why we have a crook in the board in the photo above. I moved the bricks a lot closer together—about 30 inches apart, the length of a Penny Nickel board—and the board held firmly even despite my jumping.
Of course, I had to straighten the board back, so I bruteforced it into shape with a hammer.
See? All fixed!
After all that, I brought it with me into my dorm room. It’s just leaning on the wall in the corner of my room now. I also found a makerspace with some decent tools called Hack Manhattan, and although they have a $50 membership, they have a open house every single Tuesday where you can just walk in and use their workshop. It won’t be convenient lugging that 7 foot board into the 2 or 3 train, but it’s the only option I have. That’s all for now, I have Hack the North in Toronto this weekend and Cornell’s Big Red Hacks the following weekend as well as NY Comic Con, HackNY, and YHack the following month so I might have to wait until November to finish this project.
Until next time,
~ Brian Chuk