Traditionally speaking, the public has only ever gotten the finalized, perfect copies of production model boards. And some may say that this is incredibly positive- the fact that customers are always 100% ensured and confident that they’ll be receiving a production-quality board means that a company’s image goes up, and customers stick around, having experienced the quality of a company’s service.

Prototypes and leftover B-grades are usually left to the team riders or close friends of companies. For that reason, prototypes are sometimes sought after in the public scene as some prototypes have different shapes or concave features that certain people enjoy. Some like to collect them and appreciate having a one-off, one-of-a-kind board in their arsenal. I turn out to be one of those people.

So I was incredibly delighted when I learned about Sanctum’s 24K project, where they fully open their prototyping process to the public in the form of limited production runs of sub-models in the process of creating a finalized, production-grade board. For example, when prototyping Tanner Morelock’s Choomah, Sanctum released the current model as a 24K board last weekend. The Choomah will continue to evolve in its shape and concave, but the limited release represents the Choomah at that point in its development.

The current 24K Choomah is a 35 inch long, 9.75 inch wide cutout topmount monster with a 27 inch wheelbase that grows to 28 inches per the rider’s request. It features some awesome curves, such as an artificial microdrop in the front in the form of wheel flares, a fat W with ridges in the back, and an edged flare that spreads to the back corners.

The construction is completely logical to the shape of the board. Keeping the presence of the wheel wells in mind, the engineers at Sanctum created the board in 2 sub-plies. The top sub-ply is the one with the top of the board, and the bottom is cut out before being pressed with the top to create flawless wheel well. There’s a layer of carbon fibre in between the sub-plies, creating a lightweight but stiff construction. Then there are plies of gold-dyed aluminum to sandwich the board, creating the namesake 24K construction.

All 25 are sold out already (they sold out in the first 4 hours), but keep your eyes out for the next 24K release for more dank protohype action from the Sanctum Collective.