If you skateboard and destroy your deck, think about donating it to the Rotterdam-based design company Focused Skateboard Woodworks. They take the brightly splintered pieces and turn them into rainbow-hued wooden tabletops made of stacks upon stacks of discarded skateboards.Founder Danilo Nedic started his business less than a year ago, but his skate tables can already be found as farway as in New York City office buildings to a Rotterdam chocolate shop. "Designers and architects are fans of our work," says Nedic by email. He got the idea for the skate tables after seeing the skateboard sculptures of the Japanese artist Haroshi. "What appealed to me as a skater in his work is that he used old decks gage them new life. I devised a design for a tabletop where the colored layers are drawn from he length of the blade of the board."
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Image courtesy Focused
Nedic took his design to Jeroen Dekker, an industrial designer and owner of Hectik Skate Ramps, who took over the production of the table himself. The skateboards from local skate shops in the Netherlands consist of seven layers of maple wood. Often, two or more of those layers are colored.“We cut the old decks into strips and put them in sequence with the color upwards. That way you get one continuous line. For a complete table, there are normally thirty decks needed,” Nedic says. "It really is drudgery: blood, sweat, and tears, but the result is beautiful and each sheet is unique.”“For the chocolate shop we even took a couple of old skateboards from owner. Thus, every table has a story. And that it is sustainable, is a welcome bonus," Nedic says.
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