A FACTORY TOUR -- How Snowboards Are Made

Author:  Sarah Hathaway, Burton Snowboards.

GENERAL NOTES

There are no "snowboarding machinery" manufacturing companies like there are for bikes, skis or appliances, so we have to invent our own machines. We make some of our machines "from scratch" and in other cases, we transform ski machinery into snowboard-specific machinery.


Parts preparation (this process vanes with different boards)

•    The steel edges are cut and bent to fit specific boards.

•    P-Tex and top sheet plastic are cut.

•    Silk screening of the P-Tex.

•    Toe and tip protectors are cut.

Core
    -various pieces of vertically laminated hard and soft woods form the core.

Milling
    -We run stacks of assembled ores through the mill machine to trim the sidecut out of the original wood

Planing
    -Each board is fed into a planing machine where the core is profiled. This means making the tip and the tail of the board thinner than the middle.
    -All steps are cone to specific measurements depending on the model,

Layup
    -Layup is where all the components of a snowboard are assembled
    -The following components are layered during this process

        Bottom metal mold       Completely shaped P-Tex
        Steel edges                   Wood core
        More fiberglass              Top plastic sheet
        Top mold

    -The mold is then raped shut.

Presses
    -The board is put into a press for approximately ten minutes.

Shaping
    -The board is, cut out of the metal mold
    -The P-Tex is already shaped but the top plastic is still rectangular
    -The excess plastic and fiberglass are cut off with a band saw,
    -At this point t beg- in look like a snowboard.

Silk-screening
    -The board goes into the silk-screening room to screen the top graphics

Grinding
   -Theboard goes through a series of wet and cry grinds

QUALITY CONTROL
    EVERY board goes through Quality Control Checkpoints before it leaves the Factory At these checkpoints Quality Control employees check and recheck EVERYTHING about the board including insert patterns smoothness dimensions, graphics and colors. This is just a sampling of what they examine. At the last checkpoint, everything is inspected one more time before the board is numbered, stickered and bagged for shipping.