I’ve been watching these guys for a couple years. They have a segment called ‘You make it- We skate it’. Someone sent them this.
I guess this is the year of the laser.
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whoa. I can’t believe that thing put up with that abuse, pretty nice!
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considering how many real plywood skateboards I have seen snap in half at skateparks, I’m actually really impressed that it survived as long as it did.
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As long as they stayed over the trucks, no problem. Ish.
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Nice to see another fully exposed laser 
Looks like his is also Lasersaur derived, at least in part.
The sense of humor these guys have with the twitter bit makes me think it could be fun to hang out for a while. Though I doubt we would find much to do past being silly.
The grinding that locks in between the cross braces could actually be an advantage, if you plan the design for it and put a low friction bar between the right braces. But it looks like having the board go completely perpendicular is bad form.
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He never used wood glue. If he had, that sucker would never come apart, well if I had done it. - Rich
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The video showed him gluing it together and bracing with clamps.
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He either did not use the right glue or was not very good at doing it. When I glue wood together, the wood will break before my glue joint. That’s the way it is supposed to work. The way the thing came a part, it looked as if it really didn’t have much glue. But as always, I could be completely wrong. - Rich
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The video only clearly shows glue being applied to the curved pieces on the ends. It is possible that the long braces were all snap fit only.
And it wasn’t clear that he applied glue and then also pressure. It seems to me that loose joints where you just put a huge blob of glue and let it sit free to dry do not hold up well.
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It still kind of bothers me to see the time and skill put into that only to see it trashed…
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it’s what they do and what I think the makers, at least partially expect. I’ve followed a few makers who made skateboards for them and they say things like “I wonder how long this will last” or “I doubt this will last more than 3 or 4 runs”. Seems to me like they know what they are getting into when they send the boards.
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Ah, but you have to think in terms of lasers! Now that it has been done once, he just has to lay down some board to make another just like it. The hand assembly did not seem too time intensive.
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We need to get this William Osman on the Glowforge love train.
And then there is the whole skateboard community to evangelize.
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@marmak3261 thanks for the screen shot. Looks like the right glue and clamping (sort of). So maybe loose slots and tabs? A little charring or debris to weaken gluing? It just came apart a little to cleanly, as far as I could tell from the video. Any wood worker that has done some glue ups can tell you that something was odd there. - Rich
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Shouldn’t have been the charring. At 5:00 he mentions a belief that the char may interfere with the glue, so says he will clean the edges. I do agree that it was odd that it broke so cleanly, and was able to be pushed back into place. Is it possible that temperature changes and vibrations during shipping could have destroyed the glue? Seems a bit of a stretch… But whatever happened was something pretty odd.
He points out at 7:28 that those particular pieces are held on by glue alone. So every time the kickplate flexes, it would apply all pressure to the glue and absolutely nothing else. My idea of temperature and vibration weakening the glue is shot, since those pieces broke at the glue in his initial trials (8:30)
A few more ribs and braces, foam the whole inside and a skin of fiberglass would strengthen it, but then make it too rigid.
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That’s not nearly enough clamping according to the nuts I read. You want somewhere north of a few hundred psi. If it’s urethane glue he basically made an enhanced friction fit. (And yeah, the impact loads on that…)
If you skinned that board as is, it would probably be too stiff, but if you made it out of 1/4" and skinned with superthin ply it would be about perfect.
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Considering that every joint was cross-grained and small, the weakest possible scenario for traditional wood glue, it was only surprising that it lasted as long as it did. It appeared that most of the internal joints were not only not clamped, but unable to be clamped due to the nature of the design, and also on what looked like lauan plywood which tends to be a bit flaky on the exposed edges, again impressive that it took that much abuse! 
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Good analysis. I see something fail and the engineer in me wants to fix it, redesign it, do better. It is a personality flaw many engineers have. 
- Rich
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I’m WAY too old for skateboards but this will be great for RC and drones. You can get a lot of strength out of very little material with geodesic design.