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A couple of winters ago, when some friends and I were slogging up the roughly 2,000 vertical feet of Waterhouse Peak in the South Lake Tahoe area, snowshoes on our feet and snowboards strapped to our packs, we were repeatedly passed up by smiling telemark skiers, smoothly gliding uphill with skins on their skis. The snowboarding answer to this ease and simplicity is known as a splitboard, a snowboard that comes apart into two planks, which you cover with skins for the uphill, and then put back together into snowboard mode for the downhill. The hitch is that I've been drooling over ready-made splitboards for a few years now, but they regularly cost between $600-$1200 for the deck alone. Now, Voilé is offering a kit to split an existing board yourself; the Split Decision kit runs around $160. And in MAKE Volume 20, Damien Scogin gives us a detailed step by step for making your own splitboard. The sketchiest part of the build has got to be taking a saw to your snowboard. It's like DIY surgery on one of my most beloved toys, but Damien shows how to use a table saw and build a quick and dirty jig to keep the cut straight. Is it a coincidence that a friend of mine just gave me a board that would be perfect for this? Nope, I think it's a calling.
If you're a MAKE subscriber, your issue should be arriving any minute now in the mail. If not, look for it on newsstands on November 17th or order yours from the Maker Shed. The issue is dedicated to "Kids of All Ages" and it's jam-packed with nothing but fun.
