 I've seen guys come over here with like 30 to 50 boards and it's like this is all mine my whole life and you kind of think like that's really cool I'm about to make a guitar out of all the time you just spent skating these things. My name is Nick Porfard. I own Prisma guitars and build guitars out of skateboards. Skating really gets you some street smarts and the first time I ever stepped foot on a skateboard I rode down a hill outside of my house in San Diego and I fell on my chin. My teeth like all shattered and chipped and stuff. I couldn't eat for like two weeks. I never touched a board that was the first time and then I started skating. I didn't dissuade you. I'm kind of like nervous about bombing hills and stuff but now I live in San Francisco. I've been skating and playing guitar since I was 12 or 13. When I thought of making guitars out of skateboards I wanted to make something that I couldn't buy, something that was sentimental. I wanted to see if I could do it, see if it was possible, see if it sounded good. Luthier is someone who builds or repairs lutes and a guitar is a fretted lute. I worked for this man Gary Brower and one day Nick walked into Gary Brower's with a partially built fully skatewood guitar and he needed someone to set it up or whatever and people were interested in it but I think a lot of people were worried that it was just some guy in his garage gluing skateboards together thinking he could make a guitar or whatever. No one was gonna help him out with it. I thought it was really well done especially for like the first instrument he'd ever really attempted. This is like our tightest work that we've done you know. I think that's true. Yeah. Skateboards are made of hard rock maple. Guitars have been made with this since the beginning. This guitar has 14 boards in it. I've used like as few as four boards as many as 40 or 50. In the beginning it was taking six months to make a guitar and now I can do it in a day. It starts with people bringing skateboards to me, skaters, skate shops, distributions. There's other people that recycle boards and we sit all day. We pull grip tape off the boards until our fingers basically start bleeding and then glue them up, start working the material until we start seeing colors and things like that. From there we're just doing traditional guitar things like we cut the body, we're out the body, drill holes, whatever we got to do, sand, fit the neck, make sure everything's set up right, spray the nitro, wet sand, buff, chip it out, do it again. I take some of these boards out sometimes. There's blood on them. There's like a huge chip in it because they were mad or something and they were just hitting the ground with their board. Visually you can see the pressure cracks or where someone broke it or the bolt holes or whatever but when you touch it it's not there. So that way you get the story. It's like people watching but just with skateboard. I think in the beginning one thing that me and Nick ran into was the slight skepticism that we were just building guitars you know that had these cool looks but you know maybe they didn't play well. Everybody has their own way of getting a sound. Nick's guitars have a unique sound to them because of the the decks. I've played with a lot of people. Sly Stone, Billy Preston, Santana, Jefferson Starship, Etta James. Your grandmother will know these people. That's how far back it goes. You can feel it when an instrument speaks to you. Somebody's vision, somebody's heart, somebody's soul and and the energy into an instrument. He's going to be part of that new generation of the new builders. Can you even imagine what's going to do in 10 years and 15 years where his talents are going to be? Getting like one of those ones that just like rip every time. Skateboarding in a lot of ways is kind of an illegal activity and just inherently you're figuring out how to do something that you're not supposed to do and you're definitely not supposed to be taking skateboards and making them into guitars so yeah I would say that skateboarding definitely has an influence in that. Having your own business straight out of college in your garage and not relying on anyone else and kind of doing it in the way that Nick's done it is pretty rebellious. When you make something like on your own with your hands and it actually looks the way you visioned it works the way you vision that is like the best feeling ever.