The Silverglider

Concorde was built almost entirely from aluminium. At twice the speed of sound, high over the Atlantic, the air rushing past heated the metal so much that the whole plane stretched by a few inches, opening a gap beside the flight engineer’s panel. On the final flights some engineers slid their uniform caps into that gap at Mach 2. By the time the plane landed, the aluminium had cooled and shrunk back, clamping the caps in place for good. At least one is still stuck there today, inside a Concorde at a museum in Seattle.

Silver had looked like the future long before Concorde. In 1964 Andy Warhol had his friend Billy Name wrap the inside of his New York studio in tinfoil and silver paint. Warhol’s explanation was short: “Silver was the future, it was spacy.” People came to the Factory to be photographed, to be bored, to be famous for an afternoon, while the walls threw it all back at them.

By the time Concorde started carrying passengers in 1976, silver had gone on the road. Airstreams drifted down the Pacific Coast Highway with surfboards strapped to the roof, roadies pushed amplifiers through stage doors in metal flight cases, while in the drained swimming pools of Santa Monica kids were grinding the coping on skateboard trucks, which happen to be cast from aluminium too.

We have been hanging around those pools in our heads since we started Floyd. Our cases roll on skateboard wheels, their shells have always been polycarbonate, but aluminium was there from the beginning, in the handles, in the frames, under every board we ever rode. It was only a question of time before we built a whole case out of it.

The Silverglider’s two shells are each pressed from a single sheet of aluminium, so there isn’t a seam or a fold anywhere on the outside, just plain silver. The top and side handles are natural leather, which is a lot nicer to grab on a winter morning than bare metal. Inside it’s Floyd orange, underneath are the same skateboard wheels as on every other Floyd.

Over the years the aluminium takes on a patina of its own, the way an old Airstream softens in the desert sun or a pair of jeans fades into the shape of whoever wears them. Every trip leaves a little something on the shell, so in time the case starts to look like the places it has been.

The Concorde is in a museum and the Factory is long gone, but silver still looks like the future to us.