Ben Shanks Kindlon 2016-10-20 04:56:00
FOUR DECADES OF BOARD BUILDING WITH ERNIE DELOST
It’s a bleak, chilly day in the spring of ’83. Sleet is falling from the sky, and Ernie DeLost is standing in his underwear next to a burning dumpster as a cloud of toxic waste billows up from its metal walls. Ernie had accidentally let two metal drums, one containing a wood-laminating resin and the other a hardening compound, overflow within the confines of his rented workspace at the Fedder Industrial Park in downtown Rochester, NY. In a frantic attempt to prevent the compounds from mixing and save the entire building from burning to the ground, Ernie covered the chemicals with heaps of cat litter before shoveling it through a small window onto a sleet-slickened metal ledge, then into the now-smoking dumpster just outside the factory. He’d also managed to cover himself in the mess, searing his skin when he slipped and plunged into the dumpster.
Just as Ernie stripped off his jeans and T-shirt, he looked up to see the building’s superintendent, a grumpy fella with wiry whiskers, pull into the complex. The mustached man already had qualms about renting space to a group of what he saw as noisy, rambunctious board builders, and this incident certainly didn’t help their case. “He just lost his mind,” Ernie says. “We had to move soon after that.”
This wasn’t the first time Ernie had made a hazardous mistake within a workshop, and it surely wouldn’t be the last. Now 52 years old, he says the majority of his most dangerous moments have come from constructing boards, not riding them. But making mistakes is crucial to the overall design process.
“It’s like when you hear about somebody in a lab breaking some beakers and creating a new material,” Ernie says. “A lot of times, the things that work best come from mistakes that occurred during construction.”
And Ernie’s been making functional mistakes for more than 40 years. From crafting some of the world’s earliest fiberglass snowboards to creating some of snowboarding’s first freestyle-oriented models, Ernie has done more than just shape boards—through four decades of design, he has humbly helped shape snowboarding as we know it today.
KICKTAILS AND A CHICKEN COOP
Born in Pennsylvania, Ernie grew up in Rochester, NY with two older siblings: his sister, Karen, and brother, Fredd. His mother, Sarah, still lives there, but his father, Fred, passed away when Ernie was 17. His dad had been an Army man and was a skilled athlete partial to baseball. He was on active duty during the Korean War but was never called into action, and spent his time on the diamond while stationed in Japan. Upon his return to America, Fred obtained a degree in business administration and settled down at a nine-to-five helping manage various local companies, although Ernie wasn’t convinced his father was ever totally satisfied with his work.
“He was a real brilliant guy and I know he wished he had his own business,” Ernie says. “He told us, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do—if you want to dig a ditch, go for it, but strive to be the best damn ditchdigger around. You’re going to spend a large majority of your life working, so it better be doing something you really love.’”
When Ernie was 10 years old, his dad bought him a clay-wheeled skateboard with a flat deck. It consumed him, and he had a knack for it. About the same time, Doug Baxendell was opening the area’s first skateboard store, Off The Wall Skates, in the neighboring town of Brockport, NY. Doug recruited Ernie for the shop’s team and the two got to work building a modular halfpipe for shop demos. This was the first of many times Ernie worked with fiberglass and it served as the initial spark for applying his engineering ingenuity to standing sideways.
In the winter of 1974, the skate shop received a couple of Bob Weber’s Skiboard, also known as the “Yellow Banana.” Although Rochester is mostly flat, lake effect graces the area with plenty of snow. Ernie, Doug and the other skaters rode those Skiboards incessantly, their biggest problem being there weren’t enough to go around. “So,” Ernie says, “Doug and I were like, ‘Hell, why don’t we just make some of our own?’”
Doug and Ernie dry-walled the old, unused chicken coop in Doug’s parents backyard, converting it into one of the first DIY snowboard factories in the United States. The coop was about 10x12 feet with a six-foot-tall ceiling, and lacked the ventilation needed to deem the chemical-filled confine a safe work environment. But a mini-ramp was stationed in the barn next door, so it was ideal.
“Back then, when ads said, ‘garage manufactured,’ it was true,” Ernie says. “We didn’t have the Internet, so we learned on our own. And as kids, we weren’t thinking much about our health and definitely breathed in a lot of bad shit.”
Maybe that’s where some of Ernie’s creativity comes from.
In 1977, the two formed Snowtech, and by ’81 they went to market. Snowtech’s early models were constructed of fiberglass and had rubber straps, oversized staples and golf spikes in place of bindings, which were very much in their rudimentary stages. With roots in skateboarding and a strong desire to ride fakie, Ernie and Doug built the first kicktail ever seen on a snowboard, premiering the feature on their Omega model. One night they received a call from some board builders out west heckling them about the new design. “We ran some ads in an early Thrasher magazine touting the kicktail on our snowboards,” Ernie recalls. “We got a call from these guys saying, ‘What are you going to do, ride it backward?’ We were like, ‘Yeah, that’s the whole point!’”
Ernie had always been intrigued by how things work and thought he’d pursue a college degree in engineering. A class field trip to the Kodak headquarters during Ernie’s senior year of high school altered that desire abruptly. Upon conversing with an engineer there, Ernie discovered that for the two years’ prior, the man had spent all of his time working on just one small piece of the company’s newest commercial camera. Ernie wanted to be involved in the entirety of the design process, from start to finish. In 1982, he graduated high school and instead of buying textbooks, he used his entire student loan to purchase P-Tex for Snowtech boards. He also failed to attend a single lecture that semester. “I think I finished that year of college with a 0.0 GPA,” the self-taught engineer says.
During Snowtech’s first several years, Ernie and his friends were limited to riding hills around town, mostly building banks, berms and impromptu quarterpipes on golf courses. In the spring of 1982, he headed south of Rochester to Swain Ski Area to try his luck on the lifts. A skeptical employee denied Ernie a lift ticket and sent him to see the mountain’s owner, Robin Smith. Smith looked at Ernie, then at the fiberglass board he was holding, then at Ernie, and then the board again. “Well,” Smith said with a smirk, “if you’ve got the balls to do it, buy a lift ticket and go try it.”
With a three-dimensional contoured base and no metal edges, Ernie spent most of the day spinning out of control on chewed-up, slushy chunder. This led to building a more traditional model with flatter bottoms rigid enough to hold an edge. “That’s when we started fooling around with a type of design that was more similar to the planks you see now,” Ernie says.
By 1985 Snowtech was producing 1,500 boards annually, their numbers only topped by the likes of Burton in Vermont. Snowboarding’s growing popularity caught the attention of George Powell, who convinced Ernie to move west and spearhead a snow program at Powell Peralta, one of the world’s largest skateboard manufacturers at the time. Although the snowboard side of things never took off at Powell Peralta, Ernie’s move to Santa Barbara, CA led him to meet a guy he still calls his best friend: Chuck Barfoot.
CLOSING THE MOLD
Ernie and Chuck started building Barfoot Snoboards together in 1985 at the “Ice House,” a rented workspace in a building originally purposed for ice manufacturing.
“I always refer to Ernie and myself as ‘yin and yang’ because of how well we work together,” Chuck says. “It can be difficult to find people that you function well with, with whom things just seem to flow. We think similarly and when we work together it’s always a neat blend. We’re workaholics who love what we do—we make work fun. It’s like having a marriage—you can either have a hard time or a good time. I would rather have a good time.”
They did their own thing at the Ice House until 1988, when Dorsey Truitt contracted them, offering to pay for their materials as long as his company, Atlantic Skates, could serve as Barfoot Snoboards’ sole distributor. Ernie and Chuck set up shop in Carpinteria, CA, constructing fiveply snowboards with P-Tex bottoms. There they would build the boards’ original molds before sending them south to San Diego where a large skateboard-manufacturing company, Taylor Dykema, would press the blanks. The blanks would be sent back to Ernie and Chuck, who would drill holes for binding inserts and route slots before pounding and gluing in the boards’ metal edges. Their workspace in Carpinteria was shared with a local surf company, which led them to finishing their boards in a similar fashion to their beach-based contemporaries. The early Barfoot Snoboards were sprayed, hot-coated, glass-layered and polished.
The boards were created using an “open-molding” process—pressing multi-ply blanks, cutting them to shape and adding the remaining components, such as the metal edges, retroactively. There was room for improvement with regard to both the efficiency of construction and overall quality of the boards. Before Ernie left Snowtech, he and Doug had been experimenting with “closed-molded” construction—a process in which all the boards’ parts are precut and fit into respective cassettes before being pressed, leaving only the bottom and sides to be finished on the grinder—but this practice had been placed on the builders’ back burner.
By the mid-80s, Burton was working wonders when it came to helping snowboarders obtain access to various ski resorts, and similar to Ernie’s experience at Swain in ’82, more and more riders were discovering that contoured bases didn’t fare as well on hard-packed groomers as they did in backyard powder. In ’87, Ernie saw his old partner from Snowtech, Doug, who had improved upon their first closed-mold construction attempts with the help of a builder named Shaw Kaake. Chuck and Ernie were blown away by the construction, and they decided to combine their efforts under the Snowtech roof in Rochester. “We started drawing from skiing and seeing their best models came from closed-mold constructions too,” Ernie says. “Close-molded construction and vertical laminated wood cores—it was clearly the future of board design.”
In ’87, Barfoot pro team rider Ken Achenbach partnered with fellow Canadian Neil Daffern and designed the original Barfoot Twin- Tip, further opening the doors of an already progressing freestyle scene. About that time, Snowtech disbanded, allowing Chuck and Ernie to focus solely on producing close-molded Barfoot Snoboards. By the late ’80s they were making 6,000 boards per year. Their boards were improving and the sport was growing in popularity, both at exponential rates.
Thanks to these early innovations, Chuck sees Ernie as a bona fide forefather of modern-day board construction. “We were building prototypes because no one had really ever built boards for snow before,” Chuck says. “We were innovating and experimenting, and our original creations helped set the tone for how we see snowboards being built today.”
By the dawn of the ’90s, Ernie was ready to get back to the west coast. He returned to California in ’91, this time to San Diego to work with Taylor Dykema. Coincidentally, the move came at the same time another board manufacturer, Vision/Sims, was shutting down. Taylor Dykema purchased their assets and set up a super-shop with 20 double-bay presses. “In the heyday, we were making 70,000-80,000 boards a year for Lamar,” Ernie says. “The Ranquet pro model pool table graphic, the [Don] Szabo models, the Jimi Scott and Kevin Jones models, and more.”
Along with Lamar Snowboards, Taylor Dykema was handling the original equipment manufacturing for Arbor, H Street, World Industries, Joyride and others, making them the largest snowboard manufacturers in the United States at the time.
CAPITAL L
It’s a bright, sunny day in the spring of 2016. A cool breeze dances through the open doors at the Capital L Manufacturing headquarters in San Diego, and Ernie is walking with a smile, his employees returning it with grins of their own. “I’d always have to spell that part of my last name out to people,” Ernie says with a laugh. “That’s why I decided to name my company ‘Capital L.’”
Ernie founded his own manufacturing company in 2003 with his wife, Connie, who he met in ’92 and married in ’99. Connie handles Capital L’s bookkeeping, accounting and the like, freeing up Ernie to focus on designing and constructing boards, which he still spends more than 60 hours per week doing. When their 13-year-old daughter, Corinna, isn’t playing soccer, she occasionally comes to the factory and works on various projects with her dad. Ernie says she’s the “spitting image of her mother,” and a very bright student who particularly excels in math and science. “She has a real aptitude for how things work,” Ernie says. No surprise there.
Capital L’s first clients were kite and wakeboard companies, Slingshot and Liquid Force, and, in 2006, Ernie was approached by Loaded Boards and asked to build the skate company’s longboards. “Once you know how to build a snowboard really well, it opens the doors up to building everything else, because nothing is as difficult to build as a good snowboard,” Ernie says. But apparently no other board is as satisfying to build as one destined for snow either.
Ernie had stayed in contact with Barfoot, who was “still grinding away up in Santa Barbara making these real nice-looking, surf-shapeinspired longboards,” Ernie says. “But we were still always saying, ‘We should build snowboards.’”
In 2010, Ernie, Matt Nipper of Aggression Snowboards and the Loaded crew, Don Tashman and Danny Carper, started building prototypes of a Loaded-branded snowboard. They launched in 2014 with a high-end model utilizing cork and bamboo as building materials, and this fall Ernie and Chuck will be relaunching Barfoot. Chuck says he’s ecstatic to be working on boards with Ernie again, expressing that Ernie brings out the best in him both in-shop and on-hill. During last year’s SIA, the two took to Copper Mountain, CO, following a storm that had graced the slopes with nearly two feet of fresh. “I hadn’t ridden in over a year but we were laying out some turns like I couldn’t believe,” Chuck says. “Halfway through our first run Ernie and I were screaming our heads off in excitement over the perfect conditions and the new all-mountain design we were testing.” Chuck describes it as an all-inclusive lifestyle for him and Ernie: designing, constructing and riding. So while the technology these vanguards work with may be ever-evolving, it’s clear the bond they share hasn’t much changed in their 30-plus years of friendship.
Ernie says he’s also considering creating a few models under the Snowtech name that will speak to the company’s original designs, but incorporate contemporary construction techniques and materials. Past creating a self-sustaining company, he says he doesn’t have any monumental marketing aspirations for either brand; he just wants to make good, reliable snowboards.
“It’s fun—I’ve essentially spent my whole life figuring out how to build toys,” Ernie says. “I run with blinders on. I know what’s going on around the industry, but try not to be too influenced by any of it. If you know what you’re working on is a good idea, you should run with it. It’s never been about the fame on my end; I just like building stuff that I like to use. And I’ll keep doing it for as long as I can.”
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