Happy Monkey Snowboards, Inc.

I am now offering a very affordable CNC template service for snowboard or ski templates. The goal is to provide the small snowboard and ski building community with cheap templates for simple designs developed in snoCAD-X. All of the details are here: Template Service.

I’ve added information about how I trim flash, cleanup sidewalls, base grind, and cleanup inserts here: Trimming, sidewall cleanup, base grinding, and inserts. I’ve also reorganized the site a little bit per the note below… hopefully there aren’t too many broken external links!

For the past 7 years, Happy Monkey Snowboards, Inc. has offered completely custom handcrafted snowboards for sale to the public. It has been a wonderful experience building custom snowboards for new and experienced riders alike. We’ve improved our techniques and capabilities significantly over that time, and today I can honestly say that we have built some of the best snowboards in the world.

Since its inception, Happy Monkey has been a part time venture for all involved — really more a labor of love. I’ve done the vast majority of the work personally, with a lot of help from my lovely wife Helen, and input from a few good friends who’ve helped with everything from shape design, to product testing, to equipment construction, to helping me work out kinks in this or that part of the process. I’ve purposely kept the production volume low year-to-year to ensure that I can build the best quality boards while still meeting other obligations in my life.

However, I have reached the point where it is no longer reasonable for me to put in the time and effort needed to continue to produce boards for the public. Therefore, as of today we will no longer offer snowboards for sale to the public.

I will be changing this site into an educational resource for others who would like to get into building snowboards and skis, or for others who are already building and may be able to use detailed information about how we built to improve their processes. I have already started providing this information in the Snowboard Construction section. That will continue to grow and become oriented specifically towards other builders. My motivation for doing this is twofold: first, I have always enjoyed teaching others what I know. Second, and most importantly, I’ve had a long-standing dream that one day most of the snowboards and skis you see in a lift line will be made by small, local manufactures. While custom snowboards produced by Happy Monkey will no longer be part of that dream, I hope that our experience and knowledge gained over the past 7 years will enable others to be part of it.

To that end, I will be starting a small service for other builders: custom snowboard and ski base, core, and mold templates for little more than the cost of materials and shipping.

Happy Monkey Snowboards, Inc. will, of course, remain for the next two years to faithfully honor the two year warranty outstanding on all boards that we have shipped this season.

This has been a hard decision, but it is the right one. I want to personally thank everyone who has supported us throughout the years.

Sincerely,

More updates to Making a Monkey: Fibers, Epoxy, the final steps to prepare for lamination, added a new sub-section called “Builders Corner” with information on routers, bits, trimming sidewalls, press heat control, and thermocouples.

Builders Corner also includes something that I hope many others will find valuable: the construction checklist, which is a spreadsheet that we print out for each build to track our progress from beginning to end, and to make sure we don’t forget anything along the way.

New sections on bases, edges, and nose/tail spacers, and on finishing wood veneer top sheets have been added to Making a Monkey today.

We’ve finally started adding material to the Making a Monkey section of this site. We will add more over the next few days, and post another blog update at that time as well. If you have any questions about any of this material please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll add more detail.

This will take some time… we took about 370 pictures over the course of the last custom build, and that doesn’t even cover the entire build, but it will all get there eventually.

As we updated our site for the 09/10 season, we realized something. You see, Happy Monkey has always made long boards, but it turns out we haven’t been advertising it very well. So we’ve made that a bit more obvious throughout the site, and made the pricing clear. 

The max length is 200cm, and decks over 180cm start at $725.

As an example, last season we made an absolutely beautiful 200cm board for a local guy. He wanted a long board, but not necessarily a super-wide board, which are two attributes that tend to go hand-in-hand at other companies. So we designed a 200cm deck with just a 25cm waist, and a long sidecut so the nose and tail weren’t uber wide either. The result was a deck that we almost didn’t want to give up! We’re actually gonna make a prototype of something based on this shape and test it out this season for ourselves. If we like it, we’ll consider making it a stock model next season.

We’ve finally updated our site for 2009/2010. We continue our fine tradition of full custom work again this season and look forward to working with you to design and build your dream board.

New for this season we’re offering two stock models: the Gelada 168 and the Papio 166. Each model has been in development for the past three seasons, and we feel it’s finally time to unleash them. The Gelada is a fantastic freeride board, and the Papio is our killer pow stick.

Full custom starts at $625 up to 180cm, and $725 up to 210cm.

The Gelada starts at $525, and the Papio at $500.