Words: Ben Shanks Kindlon and Johnny Lupo 2021-01-25 18:29:31
The 165 cm Gordon & Smith Halfpipe in all its neon, overly P-Texed, 10-plus-pound glory. Photos: Ben Shanks Kindlon When you pick up a 165cm Gordon & Smith Halfpipe snowboard, it’s hard to imagine anyone airing out of of anything on such a tank. The 1988 sled, weighing in at 10 pounds and 13 ounces with six visible plys of wood sealed together using a much-vaunted horizontal lamination process, it’s essentially an oversized skateboard deck with P-Tex on the bottom—and the top. Unlike any snowboard to come after it, the G&S Halfpipe uses the same material for its base and top sheet. The idea was that the P-Tex would make snow shear off the top sheet, but it mostly just made the boards heavier, thus defeating its underlying purpose altogether. Chalk it up as just another of snowboard development’s countless experiments gone awry, but at least give it credit for being one of the funniest in hindsight. Gordon & Smith started in 1959 as a San Diego surf company. Its founders, Larry Gordon and Floyd Smith, are revered for their innovations in the surf industry, most notably for being the first to use polyurethane foam in their surfboards and becoming the world’s largest surfboard manufacturer during the 1970s. They grew to have a presence in the skateboard world as well, sponsoring a few of the Z-Boy legends and producing thousands of skateboards annually, including a Stacy Peralta pro model called the G&S Warptail. As they observed snowboarding’s growing popularity in the late 1980s, G&S decided to drop in on the mountains too. Along with Sims, the brand would become coveted for bringing surf and skate style to snowboarding’s southern West Coast scene, but only after a failed experiment off the lift. The Halfpipe was released during the winter of 1988-89, the first year G&S tried their hand at building snowboards. Pioneered by Henry Hester, the company’s sole snowboard builder at the time, the Halfpipe was available in two sizes: 155 cm and 165 cm. The top and bottom of the boards were built with a sublimated base material sheet, with the graphic printed on the inside of the sheet before being laid down on the board. The boards’ binding patterns only allowed for a few positions—either roughly 45 or zero degrees—which led most who used it to ride with a double-positive angled stance. The Halfpipes were hand-built, there were a lot of inconsistencies between boards, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many still intact 30 years later. Despite its weight and wonkiness, G&S team riders such as Steve Graham made the Halfpipe work, placing well in early US Opens on the 165cm model. The Halfpipe brought attention to G&S, which helped them attract and later contract a young Mike Ranquet, who designed his own pro model with the company the following season. At 160 cm, Mike’s 1990 G&S pro model weighed six pounds and 12 ounces—nearly half the weight of its predecessors. It featured sandwich construction with sidewalls and vertical lamination, meaning the snowboard had a core like those we ride today. Though comical these days, the Halfpipe’s base material top sheet was a bold experiment. Although G&S didn’t last long in the snowboard industry, 30 years later we can see some value in the Halfpipe’s overweight deck. As it did then, does now and will forever more, snowboarding needs bold experiments. Innovation does not happen without these shots in the dark. Yet that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh about the failed experiments later. Who knows, maybe 30 years from now, our successors will laugh at current snowboard design. But at least ours won’t have so much neon.
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