Aggression Snowboards

In 1992, at 22 years old I moved from my hometown in Virginia to chase a snowboarding dream in Colorado. I saved money for four months, resigned from my shop foreman job, packed everything I needed in my Toyota pickup and hit the road west in early October. It was a solo mission because all my friends seemed to lack the desire or the balls to go. (My truck blew up in the middle of nowhere Kansas an hour before dusk and I had to ride a rollback for the remaining 400 miles into CO. but that's another story). Upon arrival in Boulder, I was looking at a Snowboarding magazine and saw an Aggression Snowboards ad. I quickly noticed the address was off Arapahoe Rd in Boulder, CO. and I believe a phone number was listed. I got in touch with Tom Fritschen, the facility manager and ask if they were hiring or needed any help. After our first conversation I got myself an interview. Five days after arriving in Colorado I had a job manufacturing snowboards.

We made two primary models that year, the Tarquin Robbins freeride models and the Assault backcountry models. There were also GS racing and custom boards as well.

As production continued we ran into an edge delam problem at the tip and tail of the boards. The edges were popping away from the core of the board on the tip and tail curve.  This was a serious product defect and Matt Nipper, the company founder wasn't happy about it, neither were we. Matt was rushing to design a new machine that would hopefully fix the problem. I came up with a simple manufacturing technique that I believed would solve it. I went into Matt's office and presented it to him. He didn't think it would help the situation and felt we needed to build a new and better machine (which we probably did also). Matt told me to go ahead and try it on two boards. That day I made two boards with my new process/technique and sent them on through the rest of manufacturing production line. That evening the finish board inspector called Matt over and they stress tested the two boards. Both my boards held up, the edges did not pull away where others did. The team gathered in the testing room and everyone was stoked the boards were no longer failing. This problem would now be gone forever. Tony King, chief fabricator who ran board layup and press room said "give that guy a free board!" Matt smiled and agreed, at the end of the week he let me pick a model, took it out of the final production stack and gave it to me. I was stoked, it was my first real snowboard.

Left photo below: Marcello finishing a TR60 on the wet sander. Right photo: Me at the base station putting base assemblies through my slip roll technique. To solve the delamination problem I didn't rely on the huge force of the press and the epoxy resin to keep the metal edges curved up into the tip and tail. The problem was the edges wanted to straighten back out after board flexing and the very ends lost some curve and popped out away from the core, taking the p-tex base with it. What I did was pre tension the base assembly edges by slip rolling them to a much tighter radius than the final board curve would have. I made the curve get progressively tighter towards the edge ends. This gave the edges a tendency to want to curl tighter rather than straighten back out. During pressing they would be relaxed into the board curve shape and their tension pushed into the boards core, where they had no chance of flattening and popping out.

The P-Tex routing area and two of the original presses.

Left: Clinton Augustene going mad in the base room. Center: Board finish and right: "board layup".

Working here was awesome. I was on the often cold snowy roads at 6:00am riding an old Peugeot 10 speed to work. We worked four ten hour days, 6:30 to 5:00 and usually went snowboarding together on Fridays. My first ride with the team was at Copper Mountain in two feet of epic Colorado powder. I couldn't yet turn well but first thing off the lift I B-lined to a kicker (a snow launch ramp), did a big japan air to crash land downhill tumble roll right through a rope fence. About 12 of my team stood there watching, laughing and clapping. Tony or Mike instantly nicknamed me "Cannonball Chris". Heh, whatever, I was one happy newb and picked up snowboarding pretty quickly.