Everyone claims their board is “hand made in XXXX”. You even see “hand crafted in China” on some! Truth is, no snowboard is built by fully automated processes from start to finish. Elan has come awfully close. If you can find Elan production videos on youtube, they’re very impressive. So if you think about it, EVERY snowboard is “hand made”!!
It’s a statement that has been taken way out of context. Blak Sheep Snowboards are HAND MADE as much as possible, with the help of some machines, like a nice pneumatic press, a couple Grindrite machines, a couple routers and saws and drills and other hand tools. Our shapes for our bases and cores are cut using templates that were built from CNC routers. Either myself or Dave builds your board from start to finish, most of the time we are both working on the same board at the same time. If you go any more “hand made” than our processes, you will start to lose repeatability, and end up with lumpy wavy snowboards that eventually fall apart, unless you’re lucky and got the one good one.
It’s a painstaking process, but we started with nothing, so the process has been very rewarding. We will be hand building snowboards long into the future, and we will strive to keep that personal aspect a part of Blak Sheep.