T H E   B O W M A N   P R O J E C T

Those of you who knows me well, probably knows that I spent the better part of my youth on a blue wooden thing known as the Bowman. This device was my preferred way of moving around for over a decade in the 80's.

The Bowman was really a Sims Brad Bowman Fiberglass/Epoxy skateboard, with Tracker Sixtrack trucks and green Kryptonics C-65 wheels.

In the 90's the Bowman was replaced by the Vision Gator, but there will always be a special place in my heart for the Bowman. Somewhere along the way, the Bowman was lost. I still don't know how it happened (since I never throw anything away) but the fact remains - the Bowman was lost in time, never to be found again.
Or so I thought.

Then, in September of 2003 I spot this thing on ebay: "Vintage Sims Bowman Pig Skateboard Deck".
Could it be...? No... could it .. really?

Indeed - it was. and I won the auction. The proud owner once again, of a Sims Brad Bowman- and it was even the FE model (most other people seemed to have bought the cheaper E model - pfft).

The board was fairly beaten up as you can see from the following pictures:

I seem to recall that my bowman was in better shape than this, so obviously I had to clean it up. I found this miracle thing called "Goo Gone" that helps removing stickers, griptape and all the sticky glue residues left. It worked like charm, and after a day of scrubbing We're in a little better shape:

No bad eh?
Much thought energy has been spent thinking about how I can possible go further to restore this beauty to its original good looks. The paint is not in that good shape, and is literally falling off the board in certain places where the sun has done its thing. With help from my artistically talented buddy Michael (the wide one) I got an Illustrator file that is a pretty darn exact replica of the graphics. I also made some high resolution scans of the graphics.

The primary idea was to sand down the board completely, put on a layer of the original blue color, and then (somehow) get the graphics back on the board - probably through some transfer-printing process or whatever.

With that being an option, I thought that then it wouldn't hurt if I could try manually restoring the board by hand - I mean if I screwed up I'd sand it down anyway.

While I'm far from done, I'm actually quite pleased with the progress. I have applied the primary blue background color to most of the board, and I will soon go over to the silver and pink text.

As you can see, I got hold of a nice set of white sixtracks hangers that I mounted on a set of never before used tracker-light base plates. I also got a pair of never before used blue tracker copers, and to top it off - a set of never before used Kryptonics 63.5 csi - I always wanted those wheels - inspired by the BMW 635 csi they were, as they say, "The Shit" back in the days.

It's starting to come along - and I'll post more as the project is progressing.