RIDING HIS WAY OUT

While some are out celebrating, and drinking apple cider the night before New Years Eve, Sophomore Jack Bauman took the gloomy weather as inspiration to make skateboards.
“We sat up all night in my garage cutting out boards and making design ideas and everything and we stayed up all night long and made our first skateboard. Since then we started to make even more and both of us got pretty good at it, and even to this day we make skateboards,” Bauman said.
After that night, Bauman continued to pursue his newfound hobby. Currently, he makes longboard designs since he has since shied away from trick skating, or boards that are lighter than skateboards that are made to do tricks on.
“Me and my friend started out free forming it, and eventually developed our own style. Most of the time its completely from scratch. We’ll buy our supplies and our wood and we’ll draw our own outlines and make our own dimensions and go from there.”
According to Bauman, making skateboards are not as intimidating as it might seem. He approximated around fifty dollars are spent to buy parts from the skate shop to the wood at the hardware shop.
“A lot of time I’ll make a longboard design, cause I don’t really do too much trick skating anymore. I’ve given some away and sold some in the past,” Bauman said.
Bauman usually spends a day to make a board, like he did on that rainy New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, the story does not end there. In his case, first time is not always a charm when it came to making his first board.
“The first skateboard we made was good, except the first time I used it, it snapped in half and scraped up all my arms and all my legs, so we had to go back to my garage to fix the board,” Bauman said.
He looks back at his mistakes as means of improvement. The demands of his classes and other extracurriculars hinders him from making boards as frequently as he used to.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever start a business building skateboards, but it’s definitely will be something that I’ll keep doing, especially because it costs a lot less to make your own instead of buying a $400 board from the shop.”