Freebord was originally conceived and prototyped as Steen Strand’s master's thesis while he was at Stanford
University. The prototyping process was long and frustrating, but he finally got to a working prototype that
ultimately led to launching Freebord. Here are some of the attempts along the way:
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| “This prototype mimicked t“This prototype mimicked the sidecut of a snowboard. It kind of worked but it was very inefficient (lots of drag moving from wheel to wheel, and hard to mimic the sliding aspect of snowboarding with this design).”he sidecut of a snowboard. It kind of worked but it was very inefficient (lots of drag moving from wheel to wheel, and hard to mimic the sliding aspect of snowboarding with this design).” |
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| “This prototype is an early version of the eventual final product. The center wheels worked great for allowing sliding but they needed a directional bias for stability (here provided by the surgical tubing). This photo also shows the extra wide trucks, a critical component of the eventual design.” |
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“After one of our riders drifted into fakie and caught a fat edge, I began designing a center wheel that could rotate 360 degrees. This is the test set up.” |
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| “Once the test set up worked, I built two cam center wheels and mounted them on a test deck that I had already used for numerous earlier prototypes (it probably has 100 holes drilled in it from trying different things).” |
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| “A more refined and compact version of the cam-bias center wheel.” |
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| “I tried many different deck shapes and sizes. This one’s on an old Powell deck, which taught me that width, stiffness and concavity improved the ride.” |
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| “I was pretty sure center wheel height needed to be finely adjusted. These are prototypes of the different ideas. Much later I learned that center wheel height was more forgiving.” |
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“This is an early prototype truck with super wide trucks.” |
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“This is the FB-112, our first full production model.” |
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| “This prototype tested the idea that you can get away with smaller trucks if you lower the deck closer to the ground.” |
