Meet the Long Beach woodworker giving skateboards a second life

Justin LaRose recycles skateboards into coffee tools, knives and more out of North Long Beach shop

On any given day, Justin LaRose can be found among the piles upon piles of old skateboards in his North Long Beach shop giving new life to the maple boards.

On the floor of his shop, a broken lime green Toy Machine deck lies on the floor waiting to be turned into a knife, a table, or perhaps a coffee tool.

Since he opened his shop approximately six years ago, patrons have requested to recycle their boards into wedding rings and even their car’s shift knob.

One of LaRose’s recent projects was a multi-colored shift knob made out of recycled skateboards in the interior of a Ford Mustang 5.0 GT.

“One of the biggest things I like to kind of mess around with is like ‘Hey, how many stairs has your knife kickflipped? How many miles has your knife skated?,’” LaRose said.

While LaRose strips the boards of their grip tape and preps them for new life, he often thinks of the memories made with the board.

He prides himself in using boards that are “skated so hard that they are broken,” LaRose noted. The energy stored in the boards from hours of riding fuels his creativity. 

“This was skated,” LaRose said, referring to the hundreds of boards in his shop. “Somebody landed their first kickflip on that and now it’s not just going in the trash.”

If LaRose carefully pores over the life of a skateboard, it’s because his journey started as a skater over 30 years ago in Massachusetts.

“I skated my whole life,” LaRose said. “And I just was like ‘Well, I know I want to skate.’ I just kept doing that and it kept just leading me places.”

One of the places it led him to was California, where while refurbishing a coffee machine at his job at a coffee roaster, LaRose realized he had the woodworking experience to make coffee handles.

The realization started a new chapter for LaRose who had found himself in a depression after the death of his mother.

“My wife reminded me, ‘Hey, you have a whole bunch of tools in the garage, why don’t you go play with that?’ I saw the stack of skateboards that I had accumulated and I’m like ‘Today is the day to jump into this and try,’” LaRose said.

His first try yielded a woodblock that he carried in his pocket for two weeks, calling it “his most prized” possession at the time. Eventually, it became a pendant for his wife.

“That’s when my doors were blown,” LaRose said “I really never had direction in my life until that moment right there.”

LaRose eventually came around to making the coffee handles and began posting his work on Instagram, kickstarting a wave of orders from places as far away as South Korea.

Thanks to the orders, LaRose began phasing out of his coffee shop job and began woodworking full-time.

Currently, LaRose’s projects are all commissions that have been lined up for the last six months.

His favorite project so far is an 11-foot conference table shaped like a surfboard made out of approximately 500 recycled skateboards. The signature multi-colored stripes adorn the body.

According to LaRose, the table weighs approximately 500 pounds. The final product sits in a high-end living facility in Costa Mesa.

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The boards used for this project and most others come from local skate shops in and around Long Beach like Long Beach Skate Co. and Legends in Downey.

The rainbow-colored stripes that adorn the projects come from the laminated wood that makes skateboards. Each skateboard has approximately seven layers of maple that manufacturers began adding color to in the 80s, LaRose noted.

In the transformation process, LaRose binds a number of boards together with glue and cuts them to shape, in the end leaving a multi-colored block to work from. 

As the decks wait their turn for transformation, they double as a throne for LaRose’s black cat, Grizzly, who has become the shop’s unofficial mascot.

The feline’s name came from LaRose’s sponsorship by the woodworking equipment company—Grizzly—who have provided him with his tools.

And it’s those tools that LaRose has used to fuse his love for woodworking and skating. For LaRose, all roads have led to skateboards.

“I would have never expected anything like that to happen,” LaRose said of his journey through coffee making, woodworking and skating. “I’m stoked to be able to show that love to this [maple] material with the work and effort that goes into it to see it on the other side as like a new shiny thing again.”

To follow Justin LaRose’s work, follow him on Instagram @epiclyajustin.