Which Fingerboard Mold Should You Buy? Concave, Kick and Piece Count Compared

A mold sets the curve across the width of the deck, and that curve is permanent once the glue cures. You can re-grip a deck, swap its trucks, sand its edges and reshape its outline. You cannot make a shallow deck deeper. So concave is the decision to get right, and every other spec is negotiable afterwards.

Shallow concave gives a flatter platform. Your fingers sit on top of the board rather than inside it, which makes pushing and cruising comfortable and makes the board forgiving when your placement is imprecise. It is the honest recommendation for a first press, because a shallow deck that you pressed slightly wrong is still rideable.

Medium concave is where most riders end up, and it is what we would tell you to buy if you are only buying one mold. There is enough curve to locate your fingers by feel without looking, but not so much that a small placement error kills the trick. If you are undecided after reading this whole guide, buy medium.

Deep concave is a specialist choice. The curve grips your fingertips and makes flip tricks noticeably easier to catch, which is why technical riders prefer it. The trade-off is real: deep concave is less comfortable for long cruising sessions, and it exposes technique problems rather than hiding them. It also asks more of your pressing — deep curves put more stress on the outer plies and are the most likely to spring back or delaminate on a first attempt.

Kick is the upward bend at the nose and tail. Higher kicks give you more leverage for popping the board off the surface, so ollies and anything that starts with a pop come more easily. Lower kicks keep the board closer to flat, which makes manuals and grinds more stable and makes the deck feel longer underfoot.

The thing nobody mentions: high kicks are harder to press cleanly. The tighter the bend, the more the outer plies want to lift away from the stack while the glue is curing, and the kick is where almost every delamination starts. If this is your first press, a lower kick is a genuinely easier build.

Kick and concave are independent, which is why our range carries combinations of both — shallow concave with a high kick, deep concave with a high kick, and so on. Decide concave first, then pick your kick within that group.

A two-piece mold is a matched positive and negative that closes on the veneer stack in one action. It is the simplest thing to use and the hardest to get wrong, because there is only one way for the two halves to meet.

A three-piece set separates the kick forming from the concave forming, so the plies are bent in stages rather than all at once. That reduces the stress on the outer plies at the kicks, which is exactly where first-time presses fail. Several of ours ship with a scribe, which is the marking jig for cutting a consistent outline afterwards.

A four-piece set gives you the most control — separate blocks let you form kicks and concave independently and adjust how much of each you apply. It is the right tool if you intend to press a run of decks to a repeatable spec. It is the wrong tool for your first attempt, because more parts means more ways for the stack to shift while you are clamping.

Honest summary: buy two- or three-piece for your first mold. Buy four-piece when you already know what you are correcting for.

Wood and resin molds are cheaper, entirely capable of producing good decks, and what most home builders use. Their limitation is wear — wood compresses slightly every time you clamp it, so a mold that has pressed many decks will not hold quite the same shape it did when new. For occasional building, that drift will not bother you.

Metal molds hold their tolerance effectively indefinitely, transfer clamping pressure more evenly, and are the right choice if you are pressing decks in quantity or selling what you press. They cost several times more, and the honest reason to buy one is repeatability, not deck quality — a well-used wood mold and a metal mold in the same shape will both produce a good single deck.

If you are choosing between a metal mold and a wood mold plus a stack of veneer, buy the wood mold and the veneer. Presses fail from lack of practice far more often than from mold material.

Alignment pins are steel dowels that register the halves of the mold to each other so they can only close in one position. Molds without pins rely on you holding the halves in place while you apply pressure.

This matters more than it sounds. If the halves shift sideways during clamping, the deck cures with a twist along its length — one truck sits at a slightly different angle to the other. A twisted deck does not roll straight, and unlike a rough edge or a thin patch of glue, you cannot fix it afterwards. The shape is set. You press it again from new veneer or you ride something that pulls to one side.

If you are choosing between two otherwise similar molds, take the one with pins.

A mold on its own presses nothing. A complete first setup is the mold, maple veneer or pre-cut blanks, wood glue, and a way to apply steady pressure — clamps are fine and most builders start there.

Pre-cut blanks are worth the small premium on a first build. They come sized for deck production, so you skip the cutting step and the outline comes out consistent, which removes one of the several things that can go wrong on a first attempt.

A scribe or marking jig is optional but makes a visible difference to the finished outline, because it lets you mark the same shape every time rather than eyeballing it. Some of our mold sets include one; there is also a standalone scribe if your mold does not.

Budget for spoiling the first two or three decks. Everyone does, the veneer is the cheapest part of the setup, and the failures are how you learn what your clamping pressure actually does.

Springback — the deck relaxes after you take it out and the concave is shallower than the mold. Usually the glue had not fully cured before you released the pressure. Leave it clamped longer; the cure time on the glue bottle is a minimum, not a target.

Delamination at the kicks — an outer ply lifts away at the nose or tail. The bend was too tight for the ply to follow, or there was not enough glue where it mattered most. A staged three-piece press or a lower kick both reduce this.

Twist along the length — the deck is not flat between the trucks. The mold halves moved during clamping. This is the alignment-pin failure above, and it is the one you cannot recover.

Glue starvation — dry patches between plies, often visible as a pale line at the edge. Too little glue, or clamping pressure so high that it squeezed the glue out of the joint. More pressure is not better; even pressure is better.