When Billy Landenberger was growing up in Attleboro, Massachusetts, there “wasn’t really a longboard scene.” But when it comes to chasing adrenaline, it doesn’t take much to get a teenager’s gears turning. A few of his friends built a half-pipe, and that was it. After school, he’d skate over on his longboard to practice. He doesn’t remember what kind of board it was, but it was cheap and old-school. “What I remember most vividly,” he says, “is the hill. There was this huge hill, and I remember flying down it, completely out of control. I fell in love with that—going real fast, having this individual sport.”

As a kid, Landenberger had been pushed to play team sports, and while soccer and baseball have their upsides, they weren’t his passion. It’s not that he wanted to be left alone; he was thrilled to discover there was a big wide world of skaters out there. Yet he didn’t embrace the sport with his whole heart until much later, when he started Sad Lumberjack. Building longboards changed his relationship to skating, to making, and to being outdoors.

It all started when he moved to Maine and found himself with a little free time on his hands. Landenberger usually spent his summers fixing up his home, but in 2014 he found himself finally living in a place that didn’t need much work. He needed a small project, and he remembered that hill, the feeling of flight. What if, he thought, he used his carpentry skills to make a longboard? “I started with pallets, old shipping pallets,” he remembers. “I’d pull apart anything I could get my hands on. There was an old cedar fence on the property, and I took that apart, milled it, and made a board.” His customers arrived by word of mouth at first, then later they found him online. Not everyone understands the name right away, but Landenberger is willing to explain: “The lumberjack’s sad because he doesn’t have any work,” he says with a laugh. No trees are cut down to make Landenberger’s boards.

He uses all hardwood, all of it secondhand. Sometimes he gets scrap lumber from his own projects, but more often than not, it comes to him from a local furniture maker. He takes scrap wood and “stuff that otherwise would burn” and mills it, planes it, glues it, clamps it, and lets it dry. “I use a planer that runs the whole board through so it’s nice and flat,” he says. “Then I shape it, however the customer asks. A pintail or kicktail. Then there’s the messy part of making sure the edges are smooth.” His process involves “a ton of clamps,” a jigsaw (“a bandsaw would be better, but I don’t have that,” he says), and several kinds of sanders. He does it all from his home studio, located adjacent to his stylish, energy-efficient Arundel home. He’s been so successful that he recently had to make a decision: go full-time, or scale back.