NICK: I've seen guys come over here with, like, 30 to 50 boards.
It's like, "This is all mine, my whole life,"
and you kind of think, like, that's really cool.
I'm about to make a guitar out all the time you spent skating these things.
My name is Nick Pourfard.
I own Prisma Guitars and build guitars out of skateboards.
NICK: Skating really gets you some street smarts.
The first time I ever set foot on a skateboard, I rode down a hill outside of my house
in San Diego and I fell on my chin.
My teeth, like, all shattered and chipped and stuff.
I couldn't eat for, like, two weeks.
I'd never touched a board. That was the first time.
Then I started skating. [LAUGHS]
QUESTION: That didn't dissuade you?
I'm kind of like nervous about bombing hills and stuff, but now I live in San Francisco.
[LAUGHS].
I've been skating and playing guitar
since I was 12 or 13.
When I thought of making guitars out of skateboards, I wanted to make something I couldn't buy,
something that was sentimental.
I wanted to see if I could do it, see if it was possible, see if it would sound good.
A luthier is someone who builds or repairs lutes and a guitar is a fretted lute.
I worked for this man, Gary Brawer, and one day Nick walked into Gary Brawer's with a
partially built, fully skate-wood guitar and he needed someone to set it up or whatever.
People were interested in it, but I think a lot of people were worried that it was just
some guy in his garage gluing skateboards together, thinking he could make a guitar or whatever.
No one was going to help him out with it.
I thought it was really well done, especially for, like, the first instrument he'd ever really attempted.
This is, like, our tightest work that we've done, you know?
I think that's true. [LAUGHS]
Yeah.
NICK: Skateboards are made of hard rock maple.
Guitars have been made with this since the beginning.
This guitar has 14 boards in it.
I've used, like, as few as four boards, as many as 40 or 50.
In the beginning, I was taking six months to make a guitar and now I can do it in a day.
It starts with people bringing skateboards
to me, skaters, skate shops, distributions, other people that recycle boards.
We sit all day, we pull grip-tape off the boards until our fingers basically start bleeding
and then glue them up, start working the material until we start seeing colors and things like that.
From there we're just doing traditional guitar things,
like we cut the body, route the body, drill holes, whatever we got to do...
...sand, fit the neck, make sure everything is setup right, spray the nitro,
wet-sand, buff, ship it out, do it again [LAUGHS].
I take some of these boards out sometimes
if there's blood on them or if there's, like, a huge chip in it because they were mad or
something and they were just hitting the ground with their board.
Visually you can see the pressure cracks where someone broke it or bolt holes or whatever,
but when you touch it, it's not there.
So that way, you get the story.
It's like people watching, but just with skateboards.
JUSTIN: I think in the beginning, one thing that me and Nick ran into was the slight skepticism
that we were just building guitars, you know, that had these cool looks, but, you know,
maybe they didn't play well.
[BASS GUITAR RIFF]
BOBBY: Everybody has their own way of getting a sound.
Nick's guitars have a unique sound to them because of the decks.
I've played with a lot of people.
Sly Stone, Billy Preston, Santana, Jefferson Starship, Etta James.
Your grandmother will know who these people are.
That's how far back it goes.
You can feel it when an instrument speaks to you, somebody's vision, somebody's heart,
somebody's soul and the energy into an instrument.
He's going to be a part of that new generation of the new builders.
Can you even imagine what he's going to do in 10 years, in 15 years,
where his talents are going to be?
NICK: I'm getting, like, one of those ones that just, like, rip every time.
Skateboarding in a lot of ways is kind of an illegal activity and just inherently,
you're figuring out how to do something you're not supposed to do.
And you're definitely not supposed to be taking skateboards and making them into guitars.
So, yeah, I would say that skateboarding definitely has an influence in that.
Having your own business straight out of college in your garage and not relying on anyone else
and kind of doing it in the way that Nick's done it is pretty rebellious.
NICK: When you make something, like, on your own, with your hands and it actually
looks the way you visioned, it works the way you visioned, that is, like,
the best feeling ever.