The first longboard ended up being a little too long for my daughter, so we we worked together on a shorter one.
Yes....This is one piece of wood.
We wanted to put some holes through the board, but I was concerned about weakening the board too much. Smaller holes would keep the board stronger, but would not look as good. I then had the idea of only cutting the holes half way through and staggering them on the back side. This creates an awesome look and each hole is sort of cross braced.
When fabricating with a router you are always working with "negative" space. You create by taking away. The problem with a router is the tool diameter forces you to round all the inside corners. These intersecting pockets sneak past this limitation by forming the illusion of sharp corners many places in the design.
Each side was routed about 0.40" deep (more than half way). I did this to create a little extra open area in thee voids.
It ends up looking super complex, but in reality, it was completely cut with a 5/8" router bit in about 7 minutes per side, with one toolpath per side.
The board is plenty strong for a ride up to about 175 lbs.