Hi I’m an A-level student doing design technology and i just have a few questions i’d like to ask about skateboarding to help with my project and potential ideas.
Question 1) What issues do you have with skateboarding? (Equipment wise)
Question 2) What do you do with your skateboards when you’ve finished with them or when they break?
Question 3) How long would you have a skateboard for until you’d have to replace it?
Question 4) How do you feel about old skateboards that are not in use anymore being recycled and having its components being made into new products? If so what products would you like to see then incorporated into?
Question 5) What do you think could improve about the design aspect of skateboarding? Such as the parks, gear and skateboards.
Thank you so much, this is incredibly helpful!! sorry if the questions were too vauge, i’ll try to improve them for next time (infact i’ll edit them now)
Question 1) skateboarding is hard on equipment. Decks in particular delaminate, break and lose their ‘pop’
Question 2) I throw my boards away when they wear our. If I change my board before it’s worn out I’ll normally give it to someone.
Question 3) Depends on where it’s ridden. On the street or in concrete skateparks they can break quite quickly. In indoor wooden skateparks with nothing to smash against, a board will last a couple of years.
Question 4) I’ve seen skateboards recycled into furniture, car gearstick knobs, boxes. It’s clever when people do this.
Question 5) Some sports are designed - in tennis there are official rules about how big a racquet must be, what a ball must be made of, and so on. Skateboarding evolves - over the years, people have tried all kinds of shapes, sizes and materials for board construction, and we gradually end up with the things that more people have liked using, more of the time. It’s the same for skatepark design. Designers try new features , and some connect with skaters while others don’t. What I mean, I think, is that in skateboarding progress is very much an evolutionary process involving both designers and skaters. So it probably helps if designers are either skaters themselves, or are close to the community.
Or even just understandable truck sizing that relates to deck sizing. You want your truck/wheel combo to end up about the same width as your deck. But for people unfamiliar with all the different ways the different manufacturers size their trucks it’s a major research job.
I see that Ace have started etching the actual axle width onto their trucks. So if you look at Ace 44s, you’ll see the axle is 8.25” wide, and you know whether that’s right for your board. It’s a little thing, but it helps.
Whatever units you use it would be a big step forward if truck manufacturers could just agree on how to size their trucks in a way that makes sense. Indy 149, Ace 44 and Theeve 5.5 are all around the same size. It’s crazy.
As for metric vs what we call imperial and the Americans call US customary, that’s less important than setting a standard everyone agrees to. The US still dominates the skateboard industry, which is why a lot of stuff is in inches.
Those are the AF1s, where all the sizes are different to the classics whilst using the same moniker.
No one in the truck business seems particular consumer focused at this point. Although, maybe it’s somewhat by design, given the range of boards people might use with a 149 for example.
