The Vintage Snowboard Plate 4×4 Binding Adapter
The Vintage Snowboard Plate or V-plate, was a concept that came about trying to figure out what board to ride at Retro Fools Day. Retro Fools Day is an end of the season event at Stevens Pass where skier and snowboarders compete to see is the most rad. Part of being rad is riding old gear. With having so many rad old vintage boards to ride it’s hard to decide which one to pick. You want to ride the old Santa Cruz Tau but the bindings have a broken strap. Maybe the Barfoot Freakstyle but those binding are so old and the highback is snapped. How about the Mystery Air? You have tons of Burton 5-hole binders but you will have to piece one good pair together and your currently snowboard boots do not fit in the heelcup. All these rad boards that you need 5 different bindings for that are all old and could explode upon first run. There has to be a better option if someone just made something like that.
So there I was an old industry guy with 70 vintage snowboards, 4 bins of old broken crappy bindings, a buddy that was a binding engineer and a dream. Bob and I would have lunch together and talk about product ideas. I kept throwing out the V-plate idea and we finally said lets just make a prototype. We have the connections to make prototypes cause Bob owns a product design company and I have all the boards to use as templates for the different hole patterns lets try and make something work.
It took a while to make templates for all the old boards. There was no technical way to do it. We just traced the hole patterns manually and then scanned them into the computer software and tested out the holes on printed paper to see if they lined up. Bob made the CAD model and we shipped it off for a prototype. It’s just a piece of plastic with a bunch of holes in it and some stainless steel inserts. But its made out of expensive high grade Delrin and is machine milled, which is time consuming with all the holes. We knew we were not going to make a million of these and it was more of a cool idea we wanted to bring to life. We figured there would good number of collectors that might want a set so we got some pricing made them available to the vintage collector community.
We just placed our order for our 3rd production run to be delivered for Christmas 2015. The V-plate is not a million dollar idea. The market for old snowboarders that not only collect vintage boards but also want to ride them is pretty small but its great to see the old boards getting back on the hill. Sure it makes the board a bit heavier. And maybe it doesn’t fit every single vintage board out there but it’s more about that one run you can do on your old Noah Skate or that Sims Terry Kidwell that brings you back to the days of yesteryear that makes it all worth it.
The V-plates are only made one or twice a year depending on demand. We build them to order. So if you are interested in getting a pair well you need to get on the list for the next run. How do you get on that list? You need to visit http://facebook.com/vplate and send a message via there to get ordering details. The price is $150 USD.