Hammerheads, Santa Cruz Reissues, and Early 90's Shapes

Who doesn’t like a Hosoi Hammerhead? Well, maybe some folks out there, but ever since I was a kid in the 80’s, I always wanted to give one a try to see how the shape would influence one’s skating. I purchased the below deck at the local Vans and it must have been one of the early runs of that batch of reissues? Why you ask? Because I noticed that the deck was much thinner than the yellow, orange, and black colorways with the wheel wells. I even spied another white one later with wheel wells and a thicker deck.

Now, I’m not one to throw stones at the skate manufactures for this and board flex/torsion is generally not an issue for me, likely because I’m not all that heavy. Powell Peralta caught a truckload of crap for their first run of Bones Brigade issues, of which I bought a few. I have yet to ride one of those, but bending them in my hand and placing them on the floor and trying to get them to bend with my feet has caused them to flex very little, and I bought some of the very early runs to include the Lance Mountain Future Primitive, Guererro, and Hawk deck.

Back to the hammerhead . In comparison with the above mentioned Powell boards, this particular hammerhead was in a “flex” class all of its own and I mean it. In the six months I rode this deck , it felt like the proverbial wet noodle or accordion whenever I’d pump through the bowl. Even dropping in caused it to flex and creak and I always felt unsure when it would snap. Fakie disasters with this deck would put life and limb in jeopardy.

However, I set it up as best I could and even somewhat tried to replicate the “thrashed” Hammerhead reissue from a few years back, complete with sticker job and red rails. I paired it up with Thrasher 30^th Anniversary Indy 169s, Pink Hosoi Rockets, and of course, Bones Swiss Bearings. This was also my 3^rd attempt at a custom grip job and I wanted to use a pastel color. My wife is an artist and has always been my color coach. It’s a strength of hers and she taught me sometimes less is more since the board was already white, I thought it looked nice with pink and black grip.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this board, but unfortunately the flex overruled any enjoyment of the hammerhead shape. It also stress-cracked  around the mounting holes much faster than the Santa Cruz Roskopp.

I did manage to get my first frontside grind with this board and first little air off a hip, so she’s a wall hanger now.  She did get a farewell tour at Pier 62 in NYC before mothball J

Salba Tiger

Given that these were reissued a few years back, they fetch insane prices, not to mention a vintage Salba deck would cost you a mortgage payment. So, I compromised and found one of the “Ashes to Ashes” Salba tiger decks at a very reasonable price so I wouldn’t feel too guilty riding it and tearing it up. Given that the “Ashes to Ashes” series are all black and white, I chose to add color through the plastics, the wheels, and the grip job. Since it is the tiger graphic, I went with orange Vision rails, Orange 60mm Bullet 97a wheels, and orange and black risers. The tiger stripe grip job was my next attempt at custom grip tape. In my opinion, I still need to work on cutting pieces to size and planning out the patterns better. Also, small pieces of grip don’t cling as well as large pieces, but I found shoe goo on the bottom of the grip to be a great remedy for that. She sports Indy 169 trucks and Rockin’ Rons bearings and I’m still riding this one today. Hands down, this is my favorite board I’ve ridden so far. I love the concave, the shape, the nose, and even the cutaway tail. It has definitely added a huge dimension of confidence to my skating in the bowl and my airs over the hip are more consistent and have gotten a little bigger. A topic for a later entry, but I’ve found OJ wheels to be the most to my liking for the bowl with 95a-97a duro to be my sweet spot. I’m currently trying to learn frontside airs with this now. 

Park and Tranny Natas

As I mentioned in Part I, I started out riding street and tranny on a popsicle, but have found that my tastes have evolved there as well. I had actually bought the below Black Label Natas deck for my daughter, but she traded it to me for the Cab as she didn’t care much for it. I love it and dig these early 90’s style shapes. 

So yeah, it dawned on me later that this was a limited edition deck and probably should have been a wall-hanger, but I have had sooo much fun with this board. Plus, I don’t think the world will miss one more limited edition deck. I set it up with Polar Bear Trucks, Bones 52mm STFs, and of course, Bones Swiss Bearings. The dimensions on this one are 8.75 x 32 with a 14” wheelbase. The concave has a better feel than any of the popsicles I’ve ridden and gives me a better board feel and more control. I’ve managed to get my ollies to the point where I can make it on top of curbs and lower grind boxes. I also pulled off my first few frontside pop shuvits, learned frontside 180s, and started to learn backside 180s. Boardslides and noseslides have been coming along nicely as well. The wider deck makes it more comfortable for me to ollie at speed as well and on transition. This is one I’ll ride until it dies.

What I'm Riding Around Now (and Have Ridden..) Part 1

Like other skaters, I've developed preferences for what I like to ride and much of this comes from trial and error coupled with an evolving discovery of my own skating style.

I'm won't drill down too far down into the technical details of specifications as there are many other blogs that do this exceedingly well. Plus, I'm more of an artsy, right-brained person and tend to go by the feel of things more than letting my brain drown in a soup of numbers and stats.

First off, I see a ton of posts from skaters that are 6'5" with size 15 shoes who are in a quandary about the right size board for them. I really can't speak much to that as I'm on the smaller side at 5'7" with size 9.5 shoes, weighing 155 lbs soaking wet. Longboarder Ben could speak more for the tall guys (hint, hint Ben.) Does that mean that smaller skaters are less baffled with the amount of products available out there? Likely not and this took me a couple of years to begin to figure out what my preferences are.

Ok, time for some stats, but not a shovelful as promised.

I like boards that are between 14.5"-15" wheelbase, generally between 8.5"-9.5" in width. I've experimented with both shorter wheelbase and longer wheelbase boards. When I came back to skating, I started out with the Caballero Dragon and Bats Reissue (the mini size) as that was the board my mouth watered the most over when I flipped through the ads in Thrasher as a kid. Still one of my favorite graphics today:

Skate One has the dimensions listed with a wheelbase of 15.1, however the length of the deck is at 29.75. Not a big deal however, there is very little space between the front bolts and the nose. Which brings me to discovery #2, I like boards with a nose and by feel, I like around the width of my foot, plus a half more between the front bolts and the tip of the nose. 

The Cab Dragon and Bats was nice enough, but I felt it to be a little too squirrley and responsive, plus I like to widen out my stance when I ride with my foot covering the front bolts. This meant my front foot would often slide off, leading to small annoyance and banged up shins. 

I eventually gave the Cab Dragon and Bats to my daughter since she expressed that she liked it and enjoys riding it and bought another for a wall hanger ;)

Of Popsicles and Santa Cruz...

I then went to two setups. Since I took "Skateboard Classes" at Wakefield Park a couple of years back, I felt the pressure of conformity and went and bought a "popsicle." All Hail Cardiel!

I ran this board for about 6 months with Theeve Trucks and Bones 54mm STFs. With this board, I learned how to pump, ride transition, get my kickturns back, learned backside shuvits, and learned the basics of how to ollie. The concave and board feel of this 8.12 Antihero deck was o.k., but I absolutely hated those Theeve Trucks. To me, they did not turn well at all, and definitely not as well as Indys (and I rode Trackers from the 80's back in the day, which is a pretty damning indictment.) Not only that, but the noise they made, oh the noise when rolling down the street was akin to fingernails on a chalkboard. Never mind that even Bones Swiss bearings did not roll as quickly when mounted on them, likely due to clearance issues (metal screeching on metal, but I'll leave that one to the engineers.) They were soon replaced with Indy 139 lows, which I found to be much more to my tastes.

My only gripe here was as a beginner, I tightened those Indy lows down almost as far as the kingpin nut would allow and blew out the stock bushings in no time. I replaced them with a series of bushings and yes, I tried the Bones medium bushings and blew those out quickly as well (tightened the crap out them.) I eventually replaced them with the Khiro Low purple bushings which lasted in the trucks until I handed them over to LB Ben last month.

Since that time, I've experimented with a number of the smaller popsicle decks, ranging in size from 7.75 to 8.25. Of these, I've sampled Santa Cruz, Hook-Ups, Santa Monica Airlines, and Toy Machine. I may write more on my experiences with individual decks later, but my big takeaway was that the smaller popsicles are fun, but for me, they are best reserved for flipping around in the driveway and out in the street while working on ollies or flip tricks. 

That said, I have always enjoyed riding "old school" setups from the 80's. They are part of me from when I started riding as a kid, but not only that, they are just soo damned fun to ride. I always try to have one or two setups lying around.

Out of a bit of nostalgia, I put together the Roskopp reissue below, complete with Indy 169s, reissue yellow churchglass 60mm 95a Bullet Wheels, and Swiss Bearings. Soo fun to ride. Little did I know that I would absolutely fall in love with the functionality of these Santa Cruz Reissues as they blend old school shapes and graphics with a more modern concave and design cues. The wheels were a bit hard for the blacktop and chewed up sidewalks around here in Northern Virginia, but they would turn out to be awesome in the concrete park! 

The Roskopp was 9.5" by 31" with a 15.3 wheelbase. It had a more modern concave with the size of nose I prefer. I discovered bowl skating with this board and not only was it the board I first learned to drop in on, it was also the one that got me my first backside grind :)

Overall, this setup lasted for around a year and a half. I retired it last December when I broke my front teeth out in the flatbottom. I carved up to the vert section of the roundwall at Lake Fairfax with not enough speed and angle to carry me through. I tried to kneeslide it out, went a little way on my knees then face first. Thankfully, my helmet absorbed most of the impact (always wear your helmet kids!) It could have been much, much worse. No time like catastrophic injury to replace a setup, plus, I had some stress crackage around the bolts which made the trucks feel a little unstable. So for the holidays, I bought myself a Hosoi Hammerhead!

Continued in Part II

Injury Recovery Doesn't Have to Be Nonproductive

For the past couple of weeks, I've (rather grudgingly) been nursing a few injuries I've accumulated over time and have given the park a break to heal up a bit and recharge. The adage that dudes like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen have put out there is true, to think, that the end of our skating will come in a glorious, catastrophic injury, leaving us hopelessly crippled with a helluva story to tell the grand kids as we putter around in the wheelchair is for the most part, the exception. The real truth is, as our bodies age, sometimes the injuries accumulate, don't heal all the way, and you can feel yourself starting to grind to a halt.

Granted, two busted shoulders (one separated and one jacked rotator cuff,) a tweaked up elbow, a heelbruise, and having half of your bottom and front teeth consist of repair fillings ranks comparatively minor to broken bones, hips, skulls, but this stuff can add up, make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, and limp to work like you just got worked over by every mugger in the D.C. area. Pain hurts, and while it takes older skaters a little longer to heal, this stuff doesn't discriminate. Young and old, the injuries can pile up and from what I've been told by skaters who are way better than me, taking a break here and there can actually improve your overall skating by leaps and bounds.

I really think it's all in how you use that break though. I still get out every day and ride around, get the blood pumping, ollie up some curbs, etc. I even set aside time in the driveway to do flip tricks in the driveway afterward. I cherish that time when I can zone out the world and focus on things like foot placement, timing, and try things repetitively without having to wait my turn.

I had that experience today and broke through that wall to that "Zen" like state of tranquility where things just seem to click and landed my first FS Pop Shuv and BS 180 in the driveway today, all during my "recovery" time. Kickflips and heelflips are still eluding me 2 years back into skating, but I feel them getting close, real close, with heelflips being the closest. Just got to get that flick down and catch with both feet.

For all else, ice, aspirin, yoga, and physical therapy is somewhat of a lifestyle, but the price I pay for being active and having fun while doing so. Same as any "sport" or fitness lifestyle, doesn't matter whether it's weightlifting, golf, tennis, wing walking, or competitive flagpole sitting. If you're active doing something you love, you learn to mitigate injury as best you can, but also to deal with them in their aftermath when they do happen. If I've progressed in anything in the past two years skateboarding, my kneeslides out of bails are tops! I also visualize Ray Barbee and the "ragdoll" when I skate. I think it helps me overall, plus it makes for some pretty funny bails as I flop all over the place and leave a trail sweat smears. Staying nice and loose helps you dodge the injury bullet as well for the most part.

Anyway, I'm much more healed, still some pain though, but I can't not skate the bowl for too long. This weekend I'm back at it. Good concrete demands to be shredded!

Tim

My Manifesto (Of Sorts)

The Summer of 1987 (though I don't remember the day, sadly enough :( . I had a friend down the street, a few years older than me who had got a Thrasher skate mag from a friend of his. As he flipped through it, he explained how rad skating was. Me, being young and impressionable at the tender age of 8, agreed, because this dude was older and I wanted to be "cool" in his eyes. Back then, the older boys on the block used to dare me to do things they were too chicken to do themselves or use me to practice all the latest WWF wrestling moves, including the sleeper, the figure four leglock, being body slammed, and yes, pile drived (driven?) with a motorcycle helmet on.

Anyway, young, impressionable, and eager to please, right? So, as we leafed through Thrasher, we played skateshop fantasy, picking out the boards that we would like. My friend drooled over the Tony Hawk chicken skull and I was torn between the Caballero dragon and the Hosoi Hammerhead, not having any idea who these guys were. I "settled" on the Caballero dragon and from that day, Steve Caballero became my favorite skater, cuz I liked his graphic, not ever seeing the man skate of course and having no idea what he even looked like. My friend was quick to warn me though, that Vision was for poseurs, and to stay the hell away from Vision skateboards and street wear. Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz were the way to go. This, of course is hilarious in retrospect as neither one of us at that point even owned a skateboard, let alone ever stepped foot on one. 

A few days later, my friend's dad took him to the local K-Mart and bought him a Valterra Skateboard. This particular Valterra model had green wheels and had some kind of a green demon as the graphic, with green rails and tailguard to compliment. The bearings on this board weren't horrible if I recall and much better than the awful Nash board I would come to posses. So one night, under the glow of the yard lamps, with the boom box playing music from hair bands such as Poison, AD/DC, and the late night Dr. Demento show, I learned to ride a skateboard.

To this day, I am not sure where my friend learned how to ride, but I remember him teaching me proper foot placement (I pushed mongo at first), how to push, and how to turn by carving.  The best part though was later that night, we bombed the hill that was our dead-end, subdivision road, and a couple of the neighbors' really steep, and therefore really fun driveways. One of the neighbors yelled at us for trespassing and at the tender age of eight, experienced my first instance of skate harassment in my rural Southern Ohio subdivision. My friend would also later slam into the side of a moving car coming out of this same driveway.

The next morning, I begged my dad for a skateboard, and having borrowed my friend's Thrasher, I tried to convince my Dad to buy me a "real" skateboard. This was the plan of my friend you see, I pointed eagerly at the Skates on Haight and tried to convince my Dad how much I wanted, no...needed that Caballero skateboard. I had to have it or I risked being a poseur for the rest of my life, and you don't want to risk your son being  a poseur, do you?  My Dad instantly deflated me with a "no son, that's too much money for a toy when I can pick you up one from K-Mart for much less. My fate was sealed and I was doomed. My Dad showed up with a banana shaped Nash skateboard a few days later, the one that had the sawblades on the grip tape. I Fn' hated that board and a year later I would break it in a ploy to get a new one. It didn't quite work out for me as I wound up with an even more horrid generic board from a Myrtle Beach street vendor. It was pink, with a bear/moon graphic, and bearings that were way more horrible than the Nash, if you want to call them bearings that is.

Upon seeing my Nash skateboard, my friend helpfully chimed in with "Timmy is a poseur" over and over again, in a singsong voice. I pushed around his driveway on it a few times and down the road, huffing  and puffing to keep up as my Nash bearings screamed to keep up with the better riding Valterra (Yeah, comparing Nash to Valterra.) My friend tired of me trailing so far behind and soon, I threw the Nash aside and the Valterra became our skateboard for the next few years. Sessions around his house usually involved trying to miserably ollie, kickturn, and in the summer of 1988, with the Bullet Boys playing from the boombox, we put together a “ramp” consisting of a piece of plywood and a cinderblock in my friend’s driveway. It didn’t work out too well.

 My friend moved away in the summer of 1989 and with the death of vert, skating became suddenly uncool and I ended up riding BMX on my Huffy Sigma, bunny hopping, jumping dirt mounds, breaking teeth, and generally scarring myself up.

Then in the summer of 1992, I managed to get a hold of a used McGill Snakeskin setup, with Tracker Trucks, and Santa Cruz Bullet Wheels. Skating was making a comeback, and all the other skaters at school had the new style boards. Needless to say, there was no association between they and I, and even trying to mimic the flip tricks they did in secret with a vert board was damned hard to say the least. I threw the BMX aside in favor of the McGill. I never sessioned with anyone, but continued to  make sad attempts at ollies, bombing hills, and getting thrown out of various neighbors’ properties for bombing their driveways.  I kept at it until the summer of 93’ when on one of these attempts, spiral fractured my leg in two places in a freak accident where I was thrown from the board, hitting just the right place on my leg while bombing a driveway. I went away in the ambulance that evening, ending skating for me 20 years ago on Memorial Day. As my dad forcibly retired from his job at the steel mill, we lost health insurance and he faced me with a difficult choice. I could continue to skateboard or, save up for a few years, buy a car, and learn how to drive. He simply couldn't afford both and insurance for a teenager. I chose to buy a car and learn how to drive...

I often thought about skating. Especially walking down a lonely part of street to college,  work, or elsewhere, my mind would wander and I found myself mentally skateboarding, but willed it away.  College came, girls came, then career, marriage, kids and fast forward 18 years later to the spring of 2011, almost 2 1/2 years ago. Out of the blue, I decided to start skating again at the age of 33. I'm almost 35 now and I'm out there every day if possible, weather and slam recovery permitting, at least in some capacity, even if it's trying to flip the board around in the driveway.

It's my hope with this at least I can share some of the experiences and fun that my friends and I have and have had from getting back into skateboarding and share our musings about the lifestyle from the ordinary dude perspective who have spouses, jobs, kids, careers, and mortgages, because you know there's nothing like picking up your kids from school while wearing a Black Flag T-shirt and riding in on your skateboard... 

TRR