Portacope makes everything grindable

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

By Sam Petri

Late one night in the summer of 2002, after a day spent skateboarding spots throughout the city, Casey Cimbura, 25, now of Jackson, Wyo., was headed home on his skateboard through downtown Portland, Ore.

“I saw a ledge off in the distance and I was like, ‘Oh my god, look at that ledge,’ and I started hauling ass at that ledge,” said Cimbura, “And when I got up to it, it was skate-stopped. I was like, ‘I’m going to overcome that.’”

Skate stops are metal fittings that businesses and cities fasten to curbs, handrails and benches every few feet, rendering them ungrindable. They prevent skateboarders, BMX riders and in-line skaters from damaging property and ensure no one gets injured on the property. The advent of skate stops has ruined many classic skate spots throughout the county, frustrating the skateboarding community, including Casey Cimbura.

Two days after Cimbura’s run-in with the skate-stopped ledge, he was at his job, working as a mechanic at a golf club. Searching through the trash for extra parts, he stumbled across a piece of angle iron.

“It just clicked,” said Cimbura, who then began taking 90-degree sections of angle iron to places that were skate-stopped, allowing him to grind. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect. “It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t portable. I wanted it portable,” he said. “So I was thinking and thinking.”

Now Cimbura has a product – Portacope – a portable coping system designed to make unskateable terrain, like a skate-stopped ledge or an uneven stonewall, rideable. It also protects delicate yet ideal places to skate, like marble ledges, from damage. The Portacope system is made from five two-foot sections of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene that connect together using locking cams, forming a rigid 10-foot-long piece of 90° coping.

It sticks to curbs using a powerful adhesive called Ultra Tape that leaves no residue behind and is reusable. All of the parts set up and break down within one minute and pack away easily into a provided bag. Cimbura sells the systems for around 120 bucks a pop. 

“This is street skateboarding tactics right here,” he said. “It’s not a portable rail, it’s a portable grinding surface that allows you to overcome obstacles like skate stops and different surfaces that are unskateable.”

Although he’s sold less than 100, Cimbura counts legendary pro-skaters Jeremy Wray and John Reeves among his customers. And after meeting and skating with hip hop artist BukueOne a few years ago (he just played at The Log Cabin on Friday), the Bay Area rapper provided Cimbura with the music for his promotional video.

View it on YouTube.com by searching for “Portacope” or at myspace.com/portacope. Jackson Hole’s recently closed Colosseum Skate Park also had a Portacoped ledge.  
Every Portacope system out there has been handmade by Cimbura himself, thus the relatively high cost of $120, sometimes greater. Cimbura realizes this.

“Skateboarders don’t have much money – a lot of them don’t,” he said. “They don’t want to drop $150 on something they don’t know much about. If I could put them on the market for 50 to 75 bucks, they’d be pumping out a lot quicker.”

Right now, when an order is placed, Cimbura has to gather and pay for all of the materials. He then has to take the time to manufacture it himself in his garage, basement or wherever he can find the space. The materials alone run him over $70, which in turn creates a price of $120-$150 for the buyer.

It’s a very small, very grassroots business, but Cimbura has big ideas. Openly seeking investors, Cimbura would like to lower the price by manufacturing them on a larger scale and then use a distributing company to ship the product.

“I could travel around and do what I love, set up demo’s and skate,” he said, giving voice to his dream. “Skateboarding, snowboarding, this is my life.”

Portacope’s lack of funds caused Cimbura to miss an annual website domain-name payment. When a domain-name buy-up company saw how many hits it had gotten, it bought the website name out from under him. This may cause Cimbura to change his company name to Revolutionary Skate in the future.  But for now, Cimbura has a proven product that let’s you grind any surface. He also sells jib-ledges for snowboarding.

To place an order or find out more about Portacope, give him a call at 413-9231 or visit www.myspace.com/portacope.

Photo by Andrew Wyatt
Casey Cimbura grinds the base of an elk antler arch using his product Portacope.

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Portacope makes everything grindable | Planet JH News Article: Sports & Recreation

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