Photos: Scott DW Smith / The Imagesmith
What exactly do we mean when we say that all Venture snowboards are made from scratch in America? This isn't just empty marketing copy. Let's take a peek into the inner workings of snowboard manufacturing at Venture, delving into the core production process and what it means to be proudly made in the USA and best of all, made in the Colorado mountains!
As the name implies, the core is the central and most important component of a snowboard. The core profile is largely responsible for how a board rides and gives a snowboard its unique personality and riding characteristics.
Does the tail have lots of pop? How does the nose of a board butter? How stable is it at speed? Does the splitboard version ride like its solid counterpart? The core plays a major role in all of these factors and more.
Given how much the core influences the way a board rides, it should come as no surprise that building cores is one of the most time consuming parts of the production process.
At Venture we do all our own woodworking, and build our full length wood cores from scratch. They literally start as a pile of raw lumber in the parking lot.
From day one we've used only sustainably grown and harvested wood for our cores. Our Colorado Core is a blend of poplar, aspen and ash. Poplar and aspen provide lightweight strength, while ash - the wood used for baseball bats and hammer handles - is incorporated for its impact resistance and durability. Our aspen wood is harvested locally in Colorado, less than a hundred miles from our factory.
Venture's P-tex sidewalls are integral - meaning they are milled together with the rest of the core, rather than added during layup. This gives them superior impact resistance and contributes to the legendary durability we are known for.
Because our production crew is made up of die hard snowboarders like you, they sweat the small stuff and pay meticulous attention to detail.
Taking the cores from start to finish requires lots of wood glue, cutting, and planing, and creates lots of dust. But it's all worth it when the end result is a fine tuned, precision crafted, award winning snowboard or splitboard - something we take pride in building and you can take pride in riding.