Our boards are uniquely engineered, designed, and fabricated. While most swimmers are used to kickboards that are either soft or rigid foam, our approach is slightly different. In terms of construction and materials involved, you should think about our kickboards like ‘mini-surfboards’. We engineer the board structures utilizing advanced materials.
We use a rigid foam core (similar to current kickboards and surfboards), to which we add graphics and finally mold a layer of resin over the entire structure (including some fiberglass reinforcement) to encapsulate the core. This gives our board a very unique look! Stunning graphics can be displayed, and structural rigidity is increased. Also, our boards are quite smooth compared to ones swimmers are used to kicking with. These properties allow us to design for specific applications (more to come soon)!
Geometry
We are starting off our product geometry philosophy with ‘if the wheel works don’t fix it’! Meaning, we are keeping with traditional geometries for boards and paddles. For now 😉 The traditional long, rectangular, round headed board with flat, parallel surfaces and edges. Though rounded corner edges. 
It’s all very ‘traditional’ and maybe even ‘boring’, but we want you to enjoy the graphics and highlight our unique graphic elements to contrast the mundane geometry. Currently, our boards are fabricated in two sizes; Regular and Medium.
Some swimmers prefer shorter boards, we listen and we are constantly developing geometries!
We started with the traditional large surface area since it can be advantageous for better customizations. Larger areas can be designed for specific buoyancy, to resist flow or alter flow or enhance flow much better than small areas. Larger boards can also be better customized in weight. We can add or subtract weight easier for future designs. Not to mention how much more stunning the graphics area is on a larger geometry!? Look for geometric variance in future board lines.
Board sizing is very important! Check out our Sizing Page.
Materials
We require our foam cores to conform to certain physical properties. Also…visual properties… so, we color our foams to conform to the base color. We have engineered our own foam formulations to suit the purposes of our boards. Namely, the density and rigidity kickboards require.
But our engineering doesn’t stop at foam strength and weight! When we design light weight (or future super ‘spaceflight’) boards, we do it with ingenuity! Light yet incredibly strong composite materials are utilized in the fabrication of our lighter board lines (coming soon). But for now, we ensure the structure is rigid and strong by utilizing some fiberglass resin composite layer on top of the foam substructure. This ensures that structural stiffness does not suffer due to low foam density structural weakness.
Though adding the outer sheath composite layer adds some weight which is evident in our boards relative to other current simple foam boards. But don’t worry, you won’t sink during those brutal kick sets!
The future looks bright for more advanced material incorporations into boards and other products.
Graphics
You may notice that all our current board designs are done on a solid black background. This is our current signature board design. But you can expect background color changes in future expansions…
All our boards come with the upper surface displaying one of any number of variations of our Radioactive Kickboards logos with enough background space to add stickers or custom display graphics or teammates signatures with permanent markers. Our signature black background contrasts stickers well. For this background white ink markers work best for custom markings.
Graphics are designed by our pro graphics team (one guy at a computer… with occasional outside influence and alterations). Graphics are always printed on professional printers to ensure the highest quality, but clarity is meant to be viewed from distance. Resin and top coats ensure abrasion and UV resistance. We select our mediums and coloring based on best quality at best prices!
Check out info about our Board Lines Here.
IMAGE NOTES;
Product images on this website are merely representations, and as accurate as we can show the images representing the products. The actual printed graphics of boards may be slightly darker in tint since you are viewing glowing pixels on the screen (website viewing), while ink printed material is usually a darker hue. The image on your board is an exact ink replication of the photos viewed on the website (of course in much larger format). The boards show remarkable visual graphics despite this slight visual difference.
To access our boards page go to boards.
