Indoor skate park opens this week

The interior of Skate Hard Idaho in Idaho Falls

For years Mike DeFord and Travis Thomas have shared a passion for skateboarding. There’s one problem in Idaho, however. Several months of the year the ground is covered with snow and ice, or it’s simply too cold.

The two shared a dream of an indoor skate park, and two years ago they finally got started on making it a reality. On Saturday, Skate Hard Idaho, 1550 Jones Street, Unit H, will have its grand opening.

The business includes a skateboard shop dedicated to products and brands skaters find preferable to the mass-produced corporate products found elsewhere. “These are brands that are owned, managed and run by skaters,” said DeFord, the owner. Among others, they include Dogtown, Street Plant, Alva, Real, Toy Machine and Bones.

Alongside the shop there will be the indoor skate park, which will be open year round. The park is designed to provide skaters a diverse landscape, with ramps, rails, boxes, hips and other urban/street style objects. The park will also have “vert,” large vertical walls connected to ramps.

In addition to the park, Skate Hard Idaho is working with local youth and skateboarders to manufacture its own line of skateboards. “This has been a long time coming” DeFord said. “Skating for over 30 years, you see a lot of trends come and go but what has never gone away is the passion that skaters have. We love and live to skate. Skaters have always wanted their own place, 

while the public skate parks are great they are limiting, they are often crowded and they are what they are.”

The Feb. 20 grand opening, from noon to 8 p.m., will offer free skating, with plenty of special activities. 

The park is open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 8 p.m. Late night sessions will take place on occasion.

There are two sessions per day, noon until 4 p.m. and 4 p.m. until close. The cost to skate is $3 per session or $5 all day

For more information visit www.skatehardidaho.com

Longtime Valley Glass employees become co-owners

Four longtime Valley Glass employees have joined Marc Naylor as the owner of Valley Glass in Idaho Falls and Boise. Although this brought an end to 60 years of family ownership, the movie is anticipated to bring experience, commitment and service that will ensure the company's continued success.

The new owners are Bryon Moore, manager of the Idaho Falls Valley Glass, Paul Robinson, Jared Ellis and Dave Pearl.

Moore and Robinson, both Idaho Falls natives, joined the company more than 30 years ago as home and commercial installers. They worked together as the outside installer crew and in the shop. Moore became manager in 2014.

Ellis, of Rigby, joined the company about 20 years ago, starting as an installer, but graduating into the company’s head sales position.

Pearl has more than 25 years of management experience in the greater Boise area. Like his new partners, Pearl started working for Valley Glass out of high school and worked his way up to manager. He will continue to manage the Boise operation.

Naylor, who lives in Ogden, Utah, is the grandson of company founder William Naylor, who started Valley Glass in 1956. He laid out three basic principles — superior service, customer loyalty and quality products — which the new owners said they are committed to honoring.

NanoSteel recognized for innovation, gets attention in automotive press

NanoSteel, a company with roots in the Idaho National Laboratory, has been on a roll lately. It has been named to the Cleantech Group’s Top 100 list for the third consecutive year. The list recognizes the top 100 private companies in clean technology and is collated by combining proprietary Cleantech Group research data with over 11,000 nominations and specific input from an expert panel. And in the past week, its Advanced High-Strength Steel has been written up in auto industry publications.

The company, which dates back to 2002, was started by Dan Branagan, who led the INL team that developed Super Hard Steel. Now NanoSteel’s chief technical officer, Branagan took processes and patents he developed at the INL and spun them out for licensing to industry. He was recognized the 2002 Forbes Special Anniversary Big Ideas Issue as “one of the important innovators of our time, one of 15 people who will reinvent the future,” and was selected by Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the top 100 “brilliant young innovators” in the world whose work will have “a deep impact on how we live, work, and think in the century to come”.

NanoSteel’s corporate headquarters are in Providence, R.I., but its research and development and applications engineering take place in Idaho Falls. Its products are used in the auto industry, oil and gas, mining, power generation and cement and concrete.

In 2012, BizMojo Idaho reported the company had developed three classes of advanced high-strength steel that they hoped would will give automakers new ways to safely stretch steel in the design of lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Nearly four years later, the progress has been remarkable, said Craig Parsons, who heads the company’s automotive division.

“The AHSS steels we’re developing are cost-efficient to manufacture with unique combinations of high strength and formability not normally associated with steel,” he said, in a Feb. 2 article posted on TodaysMotorVehicles.com (Steelmakers are rising to challenges from other automotive materials). “(Our) steels are designed to be manufactured into parts on existing stamping and assembly lines," he said. "Automakers can keep using their current production infrastructure and employees won’t need retraining.”

The company also got a writeup this week in Automotive World, The Shape of Steel to Come: Why Ductility Matters.

Obama mentions INL battery research in weekly address

Idaho National Laboratory battery researchers got a shoutout from President Obama during his weekly address last Saturday. It happens at 2:07. Check it out.

Chesbro Music ups emphasis on homegrown guitar brand

Ben Parker of Chesbro Music

Chesbro Music, one of Idaho Falls’ most enduring businesses, is about to begin the second phase of remodeling its store on Broadway.

While the first phase, completed last fall, dealt with the west side of building’s main floor, this new phase will bring a look to the guitar sales floor. The company is working with Idaho Falls Power and Home Lighting Center to install digital LED lighting. This ought to not only offer better product display but save the company money eventually by significantly reducing their electrical consumption.

While this will shed new light on the Fender, Gretsch, Guild and Taylor guitars in the store, a whole new emphasis will be brought to the store’s own brand, Teton Guitars.

When Chesbro Music says it is the “Home of Teton Guitars” it is the literal truth. Teton Guitars are made in China for Chesbro’s, which sells them not only in its store but in stores across the nation.
The project has proven to be a great success, said Ben Parker, Chesbro Music’s marketing and project manager. It dates back to the 2010 NAMM show in Anaheim, Calif., a huge annual trade show for everybody in the music business.

At the time, Chesbro’s was looking for a company to make inexpensive nylon-string classical guitars for them. At NAMM, they met representatives from a Chinese manufacturer that did nothing but classical guitars, so a tentative deal was made.

“We wanted to see what their mass production and quality would be,” Parker said. When the first 10 guitars came in that November — just in time for Christmas — the results were outstanding.
In addition to a big order, Chesbro’s asked the manufacturer if it would consider expanding into steel-string guitars. “They made a fantastic guitar,” Parker said. This was the cedar-top STS105NT, an dreadnought with a $399 list price.

By the end of 2011, the line had expanded to four classical models and three steel-strings. “We wanted to make something that working musicians could afford that would play well,” Parker said. The most expensive Teton is the newly minted STA150CENT-AR, an electric cutaway that retails for $799.
Chesbro Music has been doing business in the Far East since the early ‘70s, when Joan Chesbro, the president of the company, forged a close relationship with Hoshino, maker of Ibanez guitars and Tama drums. The company was Hoshino’s U.S. wholesaler for decades, and its connections proved valuable when it came time to market Teton Guitars.

Parker said they have Tetons in 200 to 250 stores, including the six new accounts they added at the 2016 NAMM show last month.

One new dealer, Guitar Villa in Bethlehem, Pa., reported that people from the nearby C.F. Martin and Co. factory in Nazareth have come in to buy Tetons. “It makes me feel good to hear a story like that,” Parker said.

The guitars are not intended to compete with premium brands, but a lot of professional players are leaving their Martins and Taylors home and using Tetons onstage. Overall, since 2010 Chesbro’s has sold more than 15,000 Teton Guitars, about a third of them in 2015.

“We’re looking to sell 50 to 60 percent more this year,” Parker said.