Skateboarding

Welcome to my humble page dedicated to skateboarding. I started skateboarding some time in the mid to late 70's and I went on until the early 90's. Just recently I realized I really missed it, so I thought I pick it up again.

It didn't take me long to see that my board, that I dearly love, [This is the Gator in the picture below] doesn't look anything like they do today, but it's in great shape so I took it out for a spin and found that I have forgotten everything I ever knew about skateboarding - and I'll have to relearn from scratch. I liked it though but I realized that the Gator is a classic now and I will only skate it on 'special occasions'. So I got myself a couple of other boards:

Here are some pictures and info on each individual board:

Nice. The new Deathbox Brad Bowman. This is one of 100 that was printed with the new shape and the old graphics from the Deathbox 'snubnose' deck. This also means that the width and height printed on the board (9.25" x 32.5") is actually wrong, the actual shape is 10" x 32.5".
Brad Bowman was always one of my personal skater heroes - and his decks were always the coolest!!

I put on a set of Cortech Disc 56mm wheels and new Tracker SixTrack's.

Black Label [Red Cross] Duane Peters Full 10" x 32.875" with Tracker SixTracks and Ricta Core Brian Anderson 55mm wheels. This board is the shit! Wicked shape and sweet graphics! This Red Cross series was throws out of production because of a lawsuit from the Red Cross...

Deathbox Jay Adams Deck 9.5" x 33" with Independent 166 Stage 7 trucks and Coretech Core 56mm wheels.

Deathbox Mike Folmer 9" x 33" with Independent 156 Stage 7 and Ricta Core Geoff Rowley 54mm wheels. I love this setup! The Folmer with its 9" is a little on the narrow side for my taste, but somehow the shape and the concave just feels really good.

Powell Caballero (reissue) 9.5" x 32.75" with Independent 166 Stage 7 trucks and Spitfire Immortal 2's

Black Label [Red Cross] Steve Olson 11" x 34.25" with Independent 215 Stage 7 trucks and Ricta Core Campbell All Stars 53mm wheels. And yes that is correct - Ladies and gentlemen, 11" x 34.25"!! It's a monster. A real-life-true-bad-ass 'il monstro grande'. This board, the Duane Peters and the new Brad Bowman are the only boards that actually feels like 'old-school' boards to me - if it wasn't for the extended nose section they could have been taken straight from the 80's. I can't wait to go vert with this one.

And last, but not least the classic 'old school' board -
Vision Gator 'Mark Rogowski Pro Model' 10.25" x 30" with Independent 169 Stage 2 and Sims-Gyro Double-Conical wheels.

Hey, this grip pattern used to be really cool...

Here's a close-up of the Gyro's. These wheels look like they are 60mm, and they're pretty hard .. perhaps 91? They got the aluminum core, the cool double conical shape, and everything that made the Gyro's "The Shit" back in the days.

Hehe... The Cooper and the Lapper are both installed.

Here are the Indy's in all their glory.

Oh, and not to forget - I also got this cool helmet - It's matte black - looks like rubber, very cool! Light as air too - much lighter that the old Norcon or Fly-away's.

So that's all today - the question remains how I ended up here. Here's a brief history of as much as I can remember...

The board before the Vision Gator was a Sims Brad Bowman FE (Fiberglass Epoxy). This is the one that had bar code's and 80's style sci-fi font etc.

I recently started working on finding one of these - and it's going well!! see The Bowman Project for further info.

This picture is of the board I'm restoring at the moment. It's got Kryptonics 63.5 csi and Tracker SixTrack Ultralight's. On my original board I had Tracker SixTrack trucks (the original heavy ones) and a set of Green Kryptonics C-65 wheels (the ones with the white nylon core) on it. I made my own conicals on the C-65's thanks to mandatory metal-shop in school.

Before the Bowman I had a Hobie [Hobie Flex] 9.5"x30" or something like that. I think it was called "Starlight" or "Starbright" or something like that. The bottom was wood (no paint) with a set of wings that what I recall were looking like the classic Trans-Am bird. I wish I could remember more about this one. I'm sure (well, actually "I seem to remember") that the green kryptonics C-65 I had on the bowman, were actually bought for this board originally. Not a clue what trucks I had, but ACS-651 or Tracker fulltrack are strong candidates. At one point I'm pretty sure I had blue/orange Variflex conicals wheels on this board.

Ok, I just had to dig up a picture of this to settle it. Here I am in all my glory going vert with the Hobie. Hell knows when this is, but my guess would be around 1980. Here you can see the 'Trans-Am' style logo of this board. This picture would also seem to settle the truck issue - there's no way those are ACS's, so they must be Trackers. They would have to be FullTrack because I don't remember ever having ExTrack's... I did have the green Kryptonics on it though with the home-made conicals. Awww... I remember that t-shirt. That's a Dog Town Jim Muir shirt. I loved that shirt...

I also had a Quicksilver 76cm (?) metal slalom board with GullWing trucks and ... hell if I remember... could that have been red Kryptos? Yes maybe.... Definitely bright red wheels. RoadRider's..? Naah they were more dark translucent red.. these wheels were as red as the c-65 kryptonics...

Before all this my second board was a Val 2000 wooden board (I always referred to this as a Val 2000, but it is very possible that it was a Val Surf board and that I just thought it was called Val 2000 because it sounds cool), with (probably) proprietary trucks and Val 2000 wheels as well. I remember two things strongly from this board - each bearing in the wheels had "half a spacer" on the inside built-in, so you didn't need any spacers. My new Kryptonics 63.5 csi on the Bowman actually have something similar - they are called Biltin's - actually pretty nice. Also, the wheels on the Val were blue, but once they started get worn, they were white on the inside and the blue and white layers started to separate so the wheels literally fell apart. I also remember once using corn oil or something nasty from the kitchen to grease 'em up in a futile attempt to get these lame wheels faster - with disastrous results - the oil got 'sticky' and they never really rolled at all after that. Oh well.

My first board was a K-240. Plastic board with no base plates for the trucks - the hangers were screwed straight into the plastic board... I'm pretty sure this is the same as the 'Cal 240' that you can find some references to on the web.