Ever wanted to shred down the mountain atop a sheet of super smooth glass? The folks at Network_A and Signal Snowboards teamed up to make a real glass snowboard and see how it rides. This video is fun to watch — you get to see the entire build process and the exhilarating field testing afterwards. It looks like they had a blast.
Signal owner Dave Lee traveled to Brescia, Italy to have it made out of quality Italian glass. Watch as they cut the two pieces of glass, bake (melt) the tip and tail curves into them, give them a tempering salt bath, join together the two halves, vaccuum seal it, and finally bake it in a gigantic autoclave.
Once it’s finished, Signal Italian team rider Giorgio “Iannino” Morell takes it through its paces in on a Tuscany mountain. As soon as he gets his boot strapped in, Dave asks, “How does it feel?” Iannino replies, “Fast, man. So fast!”
The actual performance of the board appears to have been unpredictable. At a certain point, the board just stops out of the blue. But other times, like “when Iannino would get the board on a steep section of this hill, then it would break loose, and all of a sudden it would be the fastest board you’ve ever seen.”
After the first run, the glass had cracked, but since it’s tempered, the board was still intact, and he continued to ride. They got a couple hours of riding in, but then on the last run, everyone heard a loud crack, and it broke for real.
[via @vice]
I like Dave’s words at the end of the video: “Our day is done. And we’re not sad about it, because that’s what Every Third Thursday‘s all about. You give things a try, and sometimes they work out, and sometimes it’s back to the drawing board.”
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