Knuckleduster's Skateboard Emporium - Pressed wood, cast aluminum, and chewy urethane welcome!

[knuckledust3r]

So, back on SCTMMC V2, which was a Wordpress property, my login/screenname was actually Shopmonkey.

Why?

Well, dear reader, among the many jobs in my diverse work background was a 2 year stint I did as shopkeeper at a local skate counter. Because time is a flat circle, this skate counter was inside the local guitar store - the very same guitar store where I got my first electric guitar (a green Strat-type) as well as my namesake Knuckleduster bass. I started keeping a blog to tell tales of weird or interesting customers: Shopmonkey.wordpress.com. So, when V2 was launched, Wordpress got confused and merged my SCTMMC account with my blog account.

I always loved the idea of skateboarding. From the time I ever played the first PS1 demo disc of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, I knew there was something special there. Watching the seemingly impossible maneuvers on The X Games filled me with awe. Fast forward to 2006. As a freshman in college, stuck at home on Christmas break, I caught Lords Of Dogtown on some cable TV channel. I was enthralled by this - the surf style skating, tastefully represented in the movie by some of the OG Z-Boys, was soulful and simple, yet still looked rad as hell. I dove nosefirst into researching board types and trying to find something I could ride, all the while being sucked into an information vortex of skateboard forums. By Easter, I'd purchased my first longboard. By the end of the school year, I'd purchased my second. By the time I went back in the fall, I had 4...each for a different purpose.

I can't tell you how many boards I've owned, and either sold or traded off throughout the years. Between my wife and I, I think we're at somewhere around 18 boards in the house currently (not counting a street luge that isn't set up at all). While I'm not super active in the scene (my goal was to get on a board once a month this year, which hasn't actually happened), I've been at least somewhat present in Instagram circles and what few skate forums remain.

 

[Andyman]

I had a few boards in my early to mid teens. I had a flex board with real ball bearings in the wheels, and later, a wood board with the closed bearings. Mostly transportaion, since I was too clumsy to do any kind of tricks. Early 80's or so.

 

[ponchonlefty]

i too played the tony hawk demo. i wore it out. i think the song was superman. correct?

 

[bonin in the boneyard]

I got a skateboard for my 9th birthday. It was gun-metal gray and said "Metal Leopard" with a cool graphic on it. I remember it vividly because of a kid who asked me what type of board I had because he knew all of them. "What the hell is a metal leopard??" But it was just a $20 piece of painted plywood from K-Mart. At my birthday party we took turns riding down the slope in my driveway to the back yard.

I rode that fucker until the rails were bent down (the opposite of concave) and the grip tape was so smooth you could slide your knuckles down it without scraping them. So for my 10th birthday I asked everyone for cash so I could get a real board. I got about $115 and went off to Sartorius Sports (who also outfitted me for snowboarding a few years later). The Metal Leopard eventually got sawed in half and turned into a dolly for dragging my tenor saxophone to school.

I thought Rodney Mullen was the shit, so I asked the kid at the shop to set me up with a board for doing "street." (Rodney Mullen's autobiography is one of my all-time favorites, btw). But the kid at the shop must have had no idea who or what I was talking about because he sent me home with a bright pink and blue Powel Peralta pool deck, but I didn't give a shit because it was fast. On the other hand, I never did learn to ollie on the thing, or any other. I still have that board somewhere.

The next year, Gleaming the Cube came out, and Mike McGill became my hero. I still have his trading card. I only learned last week that Christian Slater paid Tommy Guerrero $500/day to teach him to skate. I didn't know who Tommy was at the time, but fast forward to the 2020's and I have a few of his records.

I eventually switched to mountain biking, roller blading, and snowboarding, and skating fell by the wayside.

At some point in law school I got sick of the 1.75 miles each way to the train station. Bikes weren't safe locked up and weren't permitted on the train, so I got an Arbor skateboard (since my snowboard was an Arbor and it was amazing). I only fell a couple of times before I found my legs again. I started going an extra two stops on the train so I could link up a couple long gradual downhills back to my apt.

After school I didn't ride much. I was self conscious about walking into a Boston law firm and trying to make a professional impression while dragging a skateboard. But a few weeks ago I was on my buddy's boat and he convinced me to try wake surfing. I got up on the third try and on my second run was able to carve turns up and down the side of the wake until my legs burned. That gave me confidence and left me wanting more. My son just got the training wheels off his bike, so all he wants to do is go up and down the street. I took out a board just to keep him company and felt pretty comfortable on it. So I bought a new backpack with skateboard straps and have skated to work every day since last week. And today was the first day on my new carver.

Goals:

1. Learn to pump
2. Learn to slide
3. Learn to ollie
4. Don't break anything

 

[bonin in the boneyard]

Good news, my buddy still has the Supercharger! I'm going to make my wife a pole so she can use it as a dry land paddle board.

 

[bonin in the boneyard]

I've never played Tony Hawk

 

[knuckledust3r]

I had a few boards in my early to mid teens. I had a flex board with real ball bearings in the wheels, and later, a wood board with the closed bearings. Mostly transportaion, since I was too clumsy to do any kind of tricks. Early 80's or so.

At one point or another, I owned a fiberglass board with loose ball bearings...sold that to a collector a few years back.

 

[knuckledust3r]

1. Learn to pump
2. Learn to slide
3. Learn to ollie
4. Don't break anything

Pumping is weird and kinda unintuitive until it just clicks and you're doing it. The weighting and unweighting of it all does lend itself to some horrendous crashes. When I broke my wrist, the surgeon completely guessed that I was skateboarding when it happened, and began describing these gloves that motorcyclists use: He was basically describing a slide glove. Wearing slide pucks on your palms, coupled with elbow pads, can allow you to divert your downward wipeout motion forward, allowing your entire upper body to absorb the shock (instead of just your wrists).

Sliding took me a couple weeks of skating every day after work to get down. It freaks my wife out to get down low enough to touch the ground with her slide gloves. For me, it was hard to prop myself up correctly in order to deweight the board and initiate the slide.

Ollieing is one thing I haven't actually mastered...go figure, eh?

 

[bonin in the boneyard]

Yeah, gloves are my primary safety gear (they're not proper slide gloves, though). I'll wear a helmet if I'm going faster than I can run.

 

[Jim C]

I've fallen many times at speed during the 70's on old clay wheel Super Surfer wood boards.
That was back when boys were men unlike you sissy boys with your fancy trucks and urethane wheels.

But let me ask you; you all put motors on them things yet?

 

[ponchonlefty]

I've fallen many times at speed during the 70's on old clay wheel Super Surfer wood boards.
That was back when boys were men unlike you sissy boys with your fancy trucks and urethane wheels.

But let me ask you; you all put motors on them things yet?

i like where this is going. what ya think maybe a leaf blower, large drone to make it hover.

 

[Jim C]

A kid in the neighborhood was flying on some sort of board that had a big battery underneath

 

[armyadarkness]

I've fallen many times at speed during the 70's on old clay wheel Super Surfer wood boards.
That was back when boys were men unlike you sissy boys with your fancy trucks and urethane wheels.

But let me ask you; you all put motors on them things yet?

 

[armyadarkness]

Might put this on my board

 

[armyadarkness]

I'm picking this up next week. I plan on using it to join the Black Widows

 

[armyadarkness]

Okay... So, my actual skate experience is a lot like my music experience... which is to say I'm the Leo Fender of it... better at design and repair, than actually using the stuff.

I lived next to a famous skate shop that my buddies dad owned, as a kid, and many of my friends went pro with either skating, surfing, or BMX. I surfed and rode BMX, but I sucked at skating. However, that didnt prevent me from building and collecting many EPIC boards, during the mid to late 80's, which was an awesome time for skateboarding! I got free boards from Alva, Caballero, Peralta, Mountain, Blender, and then built them up and kept or sold them.

Now, the Koffin Kats and God Damn Gallows make boards and sell them at their merch tables, so I enjoy collecting again

 

[ponchonlefty]

I'm picking this up next week. I plan on using it to join the Black Widows
View attachment 8012

right turn clyde.

 

[knuckledust3r]

My earliest memories of watching longboarders harkens back to the Gravity Games on NBC: Sort of an answer to ESPN's X Games, but sort of centered around downhill skateboarding and street luge...Biker Sherlock was the founder and president, the event coordinator, and one of the competitors.

Going back to around 2010, I made a mission to build period-correct (between 1999 and 2002) setups to pay homage to the boards that were ridden a decade prior. The first board I found was the TVS Lady Cruiser; the red board. I set it up on Randal 150s and some old-stock Kryptonics. Shortly after that, I found a Dregs Race on Randal Downhill trucks and some Dregs Labeda wheels...since the Labedas were sorta kinda shaped like the old Exkate Cherry Bombs, and that's what Gary Hardwick rode on his TVS board, those wheels got put onto the TVS board. Coincidentally, Team Dregs used Kryptonics wheels, so that was a very simple wheel swap. At some point in there, the TVS was on some 81a Abec11 Flashbacks. It's currently sitting (as pictured) on some Hesher Snowballs, which are Kryptonics clones.

In 2012, Dregs Skateboards went bankrupt and put a bunch of their assets up for auction. I bought the Dregs Race in the picture - using the alignment of the stickers under the griptape, it was actually confirmed that this was the actual board owned by Biker Sherlock and ridden to the Gold Medal in the 2003 Gravity Games by Dane Van Bommel. It came to me on some super soft 72a Abec11 Flashbacks, and currently sits on some 81a amber 'thane Flashbacks.

The Sector9 Race on the far right is one that I assembled using setup instructions from one of the later competitors in the Gravity Games: Andrew Mercado wrote a setup manual for using Indies for downhill - got some Sector9 Bombhills wheels on there, and Seismic Tekton bearings.

The newest one is the Mark Golter, second from the left. The board arrived yesterday, and I had to buy the (awesome) tiger-striped griptape at the shop today. It's on some first-gen Bear Grizzlies with 10mm axles and Venom Magnum wheels. While it's not strictly period correct for the turn of the millennium, the board itself would've shipped sometime around 2012 to 2014 from Madrid with similar Venom wheels (we carried a few boards from the same series at the skateshop when I worked there).

 

[Jim C]

I'm going to a party tomorrow where my friend and his step dad built a legit full scale half pipe in the backyard.
It's freaking huge. I'll post a couple pics tomorrow.

 

[knuckledust3r]

Let's see if I can pull these out of my ass here - first place is Rick Kludy on either a Dregs Race or Sector9 Race with what look like Kryptos; second place is Gary Hardwick on presumably a TVS dropthru and Abec11 Flashback wheels; Third is one of the Rogers brothers (probably Dave, as I'm pretty sure John was mostly luge) on some board with Flashbacks; and Fourth may be Alex Wenk though I don't know for sure.




Far left is George Orton in the shark helmet, second from the left might be Golter but I don't know, third is Lee Dansie, fourth might be Dane Van Bommell but I don't know for sure, fifth is Gary Hardwick, and furthest right is Biker Sherlock.



This is one of my favorite pictures of myself that's ever been taken.