During our recent excursion to Santa Cruz we got an inside look at the NHS Research & Development Lab led by none other than head skate scientist Tim Piumarta. If you haven’t seen or read Part 1 of this article, be sure to go back and check that out! The R&D Department is responsible for the engineering side of NHS Hardgoods, namely wheels, decks, trucks, accessories and griptape for all of the NHS family. This includes Santa Cruz, Flip, Creature, Ricta, Independent, MOB Grip, Krux, OJ and others. Every single piece of hard skate gear that leaves their facility has been designed, engineered, manufactured, measured and thoroughly tested in the lab before being given to pro riders for the final street tests. It’s no wonder that NHS has been the number one skate distributor for over 40 years. These guys are pros, check it out.
NHS Research & Development Lab – Part 2
The Wheel Abrasion Machine
This machine will test the abrasion on a wheel. The wheel is on a 30° angle so it’s like being in a [power]slide for ¾ of a mile. Again, a lot of these machines… it’s kind of real world testing but we want to be able to test them so rigorously that no wheel passes. We’ll destroy everything in here. It’s just who survives it the best.
And again [for] all of these machines we use we test ours to see how we’re doing against our own standard but the other cool thing is we’ll call up Skate Warehouse and go, “I need Brand X, Y and Z in bearings or wheels or decks.” I always call you guys. You’ve got the best delivery, best service, best customer service and we get it so quickly. Whenever I talk to somebody on the phone I say, “NHS is buying something for the lab,” and everyone gets all excited. “What are you gonna break today?!”
We’ll buy competitors products and test them to see how we compare to them. It tells us… are we any good? Are we number one? Are we number two? Or are we number ten? It tells us how much work we have to do. It’s always good to know your competition and this lab allows us to know our competition really well.
We’ll weigh the wheel before it goes in, in grams (tenths of grams), before it goes into the machine and then weigh it after. The delta between the two weights will give us a mass loss percentage and that’s what we used in some of those videos to show who had the best abrasion.
Durometer Testing
This [device] is an A scale, Shore A Durometer. A scale, B scale, C scale, D scales are all differentiated by the type of point that’s at the end and the strength of the spring. So, I’m going to do this once and then I’ll have you do it. Ok? Here, we’ll take a Formula Four 101A. Ok, all you do is take it in this hand like this and just roll it. There’s a different apparatus for this but for the sake of just doing this by hand, I’ll teach you this way. Roll it across. Now, what’d we get?
Dylan: I’d say… about a 97.
Ok, I’m going to have you do it now. That’s a $500 piece of equipment so don’t drop it. Slowly, slowly. There you go. What did you get?
Dylan: Yeah, 97.
Ok, now take this Ricta Park Crusher. Yeah, we’re going to reset. Ok, now do it again. What did you get? Let’s try that again. About a 97. Ok, so you’ve got this [Formula Four] wheel at 97A and you’ve got that [Ricta Park Crusher] wheel at 97A. Let’s go over to the B scale.
A lot of people have said, “God, why are you guys using the B scale? It’s confusing.” A lot of retailers say the same thing. The B scale is made for urethane this hard. A scale was made for urethane like cruiser wheels. Real soft stuff, 70-80A, it’s accurate. The A scale starts being inaccurate from about 98A to 100A. It can’t go past 100A. Not possible. So, the B scale. This [Formula Four] 101A is 80B. I’m going to have you do it. See if you can get 80B. Do it again. Did you get 80B? Push a little harder. Closer? 80B, ok, there you go.
So remember with the A scale they were both pretty much identical. [Testing Ricta Park Crusher on B durometer] …84-85! Ok, so, how could that be? This [Park Crusher] is actually rated 83/84B and this [Formula Four] is 101A—this should be harder than this and it’s actually softer than it!
Remember, when you see the number written don’t believe it. Go buy the product and go ride it and judge how you feel about that hardness. Don’t just automatically assume that the number that’s on here is accurate. Unless of course it comes from NHS! Then trust it [laughs] because I think we’re the only guys with durometers! So that’s how we measure.
We also keep these things in a climate controlled room so whenever we’re testing it’s always the same because temperature can effect the spring rate on the durometer.
The Griptape Friction Tester
Here’s the Griptape Friction Tester. What’s it do? It measures friction. How do we do it? Well, first we’re going to demonstrate. We’re going to drag a shoe sole on a… I believe it is a 6 kilogram weight and we’re going to drag it across MOB Grip.
There’s a 25 pound load cell, which is going to measure the voltage of the tug and then paint a picture of it in a graph to show us, quite accurately, how much energy it takes to drag this weight with that shoe sole across the griptape. It kind of measures two things. One, the initial stickiness of the tape. Then also, as your shoe is bouncing along, the continuous dynamic friction of the tape. So, fire it up. There you go! Picture of the friction of a tape.
We’re able to compare us against all the other tapes out there. It allowed us to get MOB standard, where it is as far as the grippiest and then we were able to tune it down for MOB M-80 to get a little bit more motion, a little bit more flexibility on the tape.
The Deck Shape Digitizer
If a pro comes in and says, “I’ve got this shape I really like and it doesn’t fit inside any of one of your available shapes,” we’re able to digitize this with this magical 1981 digitizer [laughs] that we modified just to do shape copying.
With the help of this wand we can actually draw a picture of the board all the way around. We’ll transfer this line into our CAD programs and then we can measure, modify, change and then use that line in our CNC programming to cut a very accurate shape.
Let’s say a rider brings in a shape but he’d like to take a 16th of an inch off each side and smooth the nose. We’ll take the board he’s got then do the work in the computer, then go and cut it on our CNC machine in our prototype shop and turn it around.
Aaron, you and Galen have turned around boards in less than 24 hours and handed off ready-to-approve changes. We can do it time and time again. It’s no big deal. Really, having a machine like this digitizer allows us to get exactly what the rider wants.
And there you have it guys. The NHS Laboratory. Happy to have you here!
We’ve only covered some of the many machines in the NHS Research & Development Lab. There’s still plenty more to learn that we didn’t have to time film, including the Deck Edge Impact Delaminator, the CNC Mold Deck-Cutting Machine, the Wheel Urethane Flat-Spot Machine, the Automated Wheel Concentricity Tester and others. If you want more information, be sure to check out the Strange Notes YouTube Channel and subscribe to the Skate Warehouse Blog for interesting interviews like this one, fun road trips, industry news and everything else that we do here at Skate Warehouse. Enough reading, go skate!
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