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Cool Materials/Production Method Video: Can a Glass Snowboard be Done?

By Rain Noe - February 25, 2013

in Materials

I had one particularly severe design professor who hated materials swapping for the sake of materials swapping. For example if you brought in a design for something ordinarily made of leather but spec'd it for steel, and you couldn't back up your reason for the materials choice, he would excoriate you. "That's not profound, that's not clever," he would rant. "The materials are supposed to serve the design, not whimsy."

Still, sometimes it's fun (particularly when there's no danger of an "F" looming over your head) to see videos like this one, where materials experimentation is done just for the hell of it. To create a piece of "ride-able art," the guys at California-based Signal Snowboards visited some of Italy's master glass manufacturers to see if a glass snowboard was do-able.

The first stop was the Vetrerira Aurora glass factory in Brescia, where the board is first cut and formed. (Who knew you could hot-bend and laminate multiple layers of glass together, like a skate deck?) Stop two was glass magicians Viraver Technologies, where the glass was tempered, bonded and cooked. Then came the biq questions: How would it perform on ice, hard pack, powder? Check it out, and dig the crazy amount of machinery required to crank one of these out:

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bob

11 years ago

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wow really cool- a glass snowboard would be awesome- it would look like I am flying through the air-

gorilla glass it please
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nym

11 years ago

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Love it!

I agree that material-swapping just for the sake of having something with an "alternative" appearance is most of the time highly questionable.
Let's say you cover a given smartphone with diamonds or cover it with gold/platinum etc. and it doesn't serve any really function than raising the price for a handful of buyers that have no other use for their money.

But it's great to see people thinking out of their normal boundaries of manufacturing and by that material choice.
Even though if it might seem ridiculous at first, it will teach them a lot about what actually is to appreciate about the existing ones.

Like the friction behaviour (slip-stick phenomenon, Stribeck-Curve etc.) of glass compared to traditional extruded or sintered tread surface materials.

Or just to see how we net flexibility of the boards when buttering on the slopes.

I doubt that we will ever see a pure glas snowboard in the commercial world. But still it was fun to watch and I guess the guys at signal learned a lot :)

Love the series!
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