Longboard Buyer’s Guide (pilfered from Silverfish)

Buying your first board can is a huge step. There are lots of decisions to make. This guide is meant to help the uninitiated understand what they should consider. There are many awesome products out there, and the aim is to give you the foundation for making a good decision. After all you want to start your collection of right.

 

What is a longboard?

 

There’s a lot of debate (really) and this is probably the broadest definition you’ll find…. You might think Longboards are…well…longer, but there are plenty of `longboards’ that are shorter than your average shortboard. A longboard is a combination of things. Probably the most telling components are the wheels. Longboard wheels are softer and bigger (60mm all the way to 145mm-see rolls rolls cruiser). The size makes them go faster, smoother, and roll over little obstacles easier. Softer wheels grip the road better and give a cushier ride (harder wheels are faster on very smooth surfaces like skateparks, but softer wheels tend to ride faster on rougher surfaces like roads, see wheels). Next, a longboard tends to have trucks that are wider and turn better than shortboards. And last most longboards are longer.

 

So let’s consider what board length you want.

 

Your desired length should not determine too much which board you choose. There are more important decisions to make first that will narrow down the length choice. So let’s split up board length into two factors, wheel base, and stance.

 

Wheel Base- Board length is closely tied to wheel base, which is the measurement from the back wheels to the front wheels, so wheel base depends on how long the board is and then where the trucks are mounted on the board. The length of your wheel base directly effects how tight you board will turn. The longer the wheel base the less tight (or larger turning radius) you’ll be able to turn (your trucks are also a large factor in how tight your board turns). Besides making u-turns and being able to maneuver through obstacles, having a board that turns tight is important for downhill carving. When you are riding downhill (assuming you aren’t sliding yet) the major way to keep yourself from going faster than you are comfortable is to carve out your speed by making S turns (like when you are snowboarding down a steep run). The tighter your board turns, the steeper the hill you can ride and still limit your speed. The only drawback of having a tighter turning radius is that your board becomes less stable once you do take it up to a high speed (More on this under `Trucks’)

 

Stance- Beyond wheel base, you want to consider stance width and deck room. The longer the board the wider the stance you can sport. Your stance width is largely affected by your height. But once you get up to 42 inches or so, the board is pretty much wide enough for anyone’s stance. Past 42 inches, and now you are talking about how much room there is to move around up there. Boards above 42 inches increasingly give you some room to play around, kind of like a surfboard.

 

Boards above 50 inches (see the 57″ Ed Economy Bank Rider and Street Rider by Gravity) are pretty much used for either serious downhill speedboarding (remember: a long wheel base means more stability at high speed) or for people who want a really mellow board walk cruiser so they have a lot of room to move around, and a lot of stability so you can totally relax while “hanging ten” and checking out the scene.

 

A board that’s really short (34 inches or less) means you are increasingly sacrificing some stance comfort for really tight turns (a smaller board is also easier to carry around and store). This is slalom board range. A really tight turning board can be very fun for tearing about as it’ll be super responsive, and can let you carve REAL tight downhill. (Check out the Loaded Fish, Gravity GS, and Landyachtz lil’gaffer!).

 

…Alright so now you should have an idea of what range you wanna be in for length, or at least what to consider…Length is a characteristic of the overall deck shape. Here are a number of other factors to consider:

 

Deck Characteristics…

 

Concave/Flat/Convex – The vast majority of boards are either concave or flat. Concave means that when you are looking at your board head-on from the front at street level, the right and left edges of the deck curl up slightly so that it looks like a very subtle `U’ shape. People that like concave will tell you that they get better grip on a concave board because it helps you “lock” your feet in while carving because the walls of the `U’ help keep your feet from slipping off the deck. Also, concave helps gives you more carving leverage for quicker turns, because more of your weight is transferred to the outer edges of the board as you lean into a turn. Another benefit is that you can feel where the edges of your board are without having to look down. The only real draw back of concave is that it’s a little harder to move your feet around on top of the board, so you might want flat for a big long board that you want to cruise and play on.. There are only a few convex (opposite of concave, rising up in the middles, down at the edges) decks I know of, one is the Carveboard Bubbler, the other is a turner slalom board.

 

Flat/Cambered/Rockered – Just as in surfboard terminology I use camber for a board that rises up in the middle so if you are looking at it from the side, with your eye at street level, it makes a slight arch. Rocker is the opposite, with a slight upside-down arch lengthwise (some people say ‘concave’ for rocker and ‘convex’ for cambered, but for clarity, I prefer to use those word only for describing the shape width wise). A board with rocker has a lower center of gravity (like a Barfoot) which is important for stability in a deep carve or transitions in and out of turns. A rockered board tends to feels like it’s cradling you as you go in and out of turns as it sort of `swings’ from side to side (see hammocks). Cambered boards tend to be the type that have more flex, and Flex is characteristic that deserves it own heading. So the only thing I will say here about camber is that it doesn’t sag down as far as a flat board of equal flexibility because the deck starts from a higher point, and cambered boards tend to have more springback.

 

Flexibility – Flex is measured by the amount a board will ‘give’ when you put weight on it. There are boards that range from totally stiff and don’t flex at all (a Tierney rides or Flowlab/Flowboard DCS is totally stiff), to boards that if you jump on, you can get the deck to touch the ground (Take a big bounce on one of the flexier Loaded Vanguard). Flex gives you a softer ride as it can absorb some of the impact when you go down a driveway lip or off a curb. It’s also nice if you are jumping on and off your board a lot. A stiffer board is generally preferred for higher speeds as it tends to be more stable (at high speeds, you want to absorb any bumps in you knees, you don’t want the board bouncing you up and down after going over a bump at 40mph+). Some people consider a stiff board more precisely controllable, because your feet and body movements are directly transferred to the trucks without being muted, exaggerated or distorted by the flex of the deck. However, an intelligently shaped deck that fits well with the trucks you are riding on can really increase the amount of precision and control in your ride (again, see the Loaded Vangaurds, Hammerhead DCS and Fish).

 

Springback or Quality of Flex – No no, you ain’t the flex masta’ yet my brotha’. Fo’ Sho’ you gots ta consida’ the QUALITY of the flex…or Springback. Some boards have pretty dead flex. This means the deck doesn’t rebound and push you back up as you un-weight the board a bit.

 

What do I mean `UNWEIGHT’? Damn glad you asked. Well if you are standing straight up on a scale and you quickly bring your legs up, you will weigh less as you begin to `fall’ or move downwards. This is unweighting the board. Then when you start to slow your `fall’ and then begin to stand up straight again, you will weigh more as you are pushing into the scale to slow down and then accelerate your body up. This is how you weight your board (seriously, go practice for a sec on a scale, especially if you have the old non-digital kind with a needle, practice moving up and own on the scale to make yourself weigh less and then more, so that you are controlling the needle and making it swing back and forth. This stuff is really important later when you learn to PUMP).

 

A board with a high quality flex and a lot of spring back will store energy when you weight it and it flexes down, and then spring you back up when you unweight it a bit (by, for example, picking your legs up a little) . If you are doing some big hard pedaling (kicking off the ground with your food to gain speed), a deck with quality spring back will lower you closer to the ground as you weight the board going into a pedal, and then when you transfer weight to the foot pushing off the ground, thereby un-weighting the deck, it’ll spring you back up. Most importantlythough, and most fun, a board with quality spring back or a high-rebound will spring you out of a turn and into the next one. When you are riding, you weigh more when you are in the middle. of a turn and the G force pushes you into the deck, and then as you come out of a turn, you can unweight the board and let the board spring you up. You can then use that upward momentum to fall back into the next turn, and tranferring energy back into your deck. Now we’re talking about good times! Overall, even before you get this unweighting and weighting stuff down, and are bouncing in and out of turns, many people just find a flexy deck with good springback to be a lot `livelier’ of a ride. (the first time I hopped on a Loaded Vanguard I literally felt like I was riding a live beastcompared to alot of other decks which felt either dead or asleep). Good springback is also important for Pumping, which is when you propel yourself forward without kicking, simply by throwing your weigh from side to side. Learning to pump is certainly a bit challenging, but you’ll eventually want to do it (for a good how-to-Pump, click here) while it is possible to pump a totally stiff board, I personally find it more enjoyable on a board with good quality flex (however too much flex can sap your energy and slow you down) .

 

Materials- so what makes a board have “good quality flex”? Great question. Largely, the deck materials are responsible for the quality of flex. Your most basic board is made of simple plywood. When a piece of plywood is concave, it tends to have more rebound or springback… But to get some really good flex takes composite materials like fiberglass (Sector 9 Cosmic Rider series, FibreFlex, Flex Dex, Comet skateboards, Loaded, and Landyachtz are all example of composite boards that use some fiberglass) Boards with fiber glass are more expensive to make though, so you are looking at paying a bit more. A further improvement in flex seems to come with the use of vertically laminated wood cores (normal ply wood is horizontally laminated, as the layers, `plys, ‘ are laid one on top of the other, while vertically laminated means the plys are placed side by side in thin strips next to each other, so you can see the different `layers’ when you are looking at the top or bottom like stripes going down the length) in conjunction with fiberglass, which is basis for the technology that Loaded Boards and Comet Skateboards use.

 

So you’ve got, length, wheelbase, and deck charactertistics (i.e. camber, concave, rocker, flex…) all figured out. Now its time to talk about deck shape.

 

Deck Shape…

 

O.K., if you understand this next stuff, you will understand the basic issue of skateboard design and consequently be able to look at a skateboard and really tell what’s going on there. Skateboards started with roller skate trucks, which barely turned, they veered slightly to one side as you leaned, and were very very narrow. Then they started making trucks a bit wider so that you could make the boards wider than a water-ski without the thing tipping over. But the trucks still couldn’t get you around a corner, and in order to make a fast turn, you had to kick the back of the board up. This describes your average eighties board and your 90’s new school shortboard. But if you really want to simulate surfing (and snowboarding) and don’t care so much about tricks, but rather for the feel of the ride, then you got to make trucks that really turn, so you can carve hard and lean into it. Now the problem is, if your trucks turn a lot, and you are riding larger wheels, that means the wheels are gonna hit the deck as you turn hard, which is called `wheel-bite, ‘ and immediately causes the board to stop in its tracks while you get a face full of street. Longboard design is largely centered on how to deal with this problem: how do you make a board that turns well but doesn’t get wheel bite? And each board has its own strategy. Most of the boards being sold today (Sector Nine, Gravity Boards (most), Dregs, Vision Skateboards, Fluid Longboards) use a two or three pronged strategy.

 

TRUCKS…

 

1. They use trucks like Tracker B-2’s or the Sector Nine `Pivot Trucks’, which don’t turn very tight, and 2. they mount the trucks on the board with a riser so that the deck is raised up a bit which affords the deck more clearance over the wheels, and 3. sometimes, the deck is shaped so that at the point where the wheel might hit the board in a turn, the deck is narrower or there is a piece cutout. Notice how a Gravity HyperCarve has little half-moons cut out above the wheels (called wheel cutouts) in the front, and the deck gets narrow above the back wheels. Or picture the classic longboard shape, a Pintail. The front trucks are mounted way up on the nose where the board is still thin and way back on the tail where it gets thin again. The drawback of using a combination of these approaches is that you end up with not-so-turny trucks, and when you use a riser, you are making the board less stable than it could be as you raise the center of gravity. Another strategy is to make the deck shape so narrow above the front and back truck that you can use really carvy trucks with no riser, and you still don’t get wheel bite. I’m talking of course about a Loaded Vanguard, and that explains why the board is totally cut away at the back and front ends, so it can use the Randal R-2’s which turn a lot sharper than your Pivot truck or Tracker B-2. Another option is to use REALLY wide trucks like Independent 215s which stick out past the deck. (what you want to know about truck width is that the wider the truck, the more stable the ride but the slower the trucks will react in a turn). And yet another strategy is to make trucks that turn sharp and quick, but have a built in turn stopper to stop the truck before the wheels hit the deck, like the Exkate and Baku torsion trucks (Bakus only come on Barfoot and Hobie completes).

 

So let’s review the 5 strategies for preventing wheel bite, so the next time you look at a board you can tell which ones it uses:

 

• trucks that don’t turn very sharp
• riser pads that raise the deck up higher for more clearance
• deck shaping that gets narrower or is cutaway above the wheels
• wide trucks that extend past the edge of the deck.
• trucks that are set to not turn past a certain point like torsion trucks.

 

Other deck shape features… The wider the board is where you put your feet, the more turning leverage you will get. Also a few decks like the Loaded Vanguard have rounded-stand pads for multi-directional leverage that help you control the board by pushing on it from different directions. And of course you know what a kicktail is, and what it’s for, and some board like the Gravity Concave Maple Series have a `nose tail’ too. Then some decks like the Barfoot NoseRiders are built with a wide spot to stand on in front for some Longboard surf-style stuff.

 

Finally, you want to think about wheels. Most completes come with wheels attached, and most skate shops, don’t stock enough components and decks to let you custom build a board. But if you order online, you can choose wheels from a big selection. So take a look at the Wheels section for a comprehensive explanation of longboard wheels, that way if you are buying a complete, you’ll know what your wheels are good for, and if you are having a custom board built, you’ll get a better idea of which wheels to pick.

 

If you have any questions or want some help in figuring out which deck is right for you, feel free to email theguys@palermolongboards.com.

 

**I didn’t write this I just copied it – Respect To The Writer**

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Other Gear

I’ve had a few thoughts rollin’ around between the ears since my last post.  With the trucks and wheels I purchased, noted in my last post, I also ordered some slide pucks.  Slide pucks, if you don’t know, are skid pads on a set of gloves used to deweight your board, get the board out in front of you, and slide to a stop.  Otherwise, when I broke my wrist back in 2014, the orthopedist said that some hard plastic (like slide pucks) can be used to alleviate wrist injuries.  He was shocked when he was describing some specific motorcycle gloves, and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

My first pair of slide gloves was an old pair of mechanic’s gloves with Corian glued onto the fingers and palm.  That was an old trick from Silverfish:  Using Corian samples as slide pucks.  Walk into your favorite kitchen store, say that you’re renovating your kitchen, and you’d like to see 4 or 5 different color samples of Corian, then the shop gives you 2×2″ chunks of Corian to take home and compare.  I killed that pair of gloves and made a second, but the pucks were still intact.  I was fortunate enough to be hooked up with the infamous Ninja Bomb Squad out of San Diego, who were developing some pucks with Loaded Longboards…they sent me 6 or 8 4″ palm pucks, out of the goodness of their hearts, and I wore through one pair (and the gloves), gave one away, put one on my wife’s slide gloves, and wore out another pair.  I was sliding a LOT.  I bought my first pair of slide pucks in 2010 or so, and made another pair of gloves with some Sector9 pucks.  Well, those pucks burned through one pair of gloves, then another, and currently sit on their third.  So, that leaves me on my sixth pair of slide gloves, meaning I replace the gloves about every other year, and the pucks just as frequently.  My sixth pair are high-vis, and I bought some fresh Sector9 pucks to use.

That leads me to my main point:  Sector9.  They’re entering their 25th year in the business, and to say that they’ve changed the game is putting it lightly.  When nobody had ever heard of longboarding, skaters still knew Sector9.  They didn’t change the game, they invented it, and they’ve kept up with the game ever since then.  But, with ubiquity comes a great deal of publicity, and by sticking your neck out that far, you’re exposing yourself to haters.  2007 me was a hater.  Sector9 was for posers, kooks, untalented hacks, and clueless n00bs.  The reason I bought that first set of S9 pucks was for nothing more than to support my pals at the local skateshop.  Even when I got a job at my own skateshop a few years later, I could never shake the idea that Sector9 was somehow inferior.  Sector9 hate is one of my most deep-seated biases in longboarding, and it’s unfair, and it’s unwarranted.  They’re a great company, and yeah, they’ve done some shady things, but I wouldn’t be into longboarding (neither would you) without their influence.  I owe my life’s passion, and the greatest hobby I’ve ever had, to them.

Part of my bias came, no doubt, from the forums at Silverfish.  Legend held that in the early days of Silverfish, Sector9 actually did make an inferior product.  My only experience with a S9 board circa 2002 came from riding an old roommate’s board.  S9, if I understand correctly, had some cheaply made OEM trucks during that time frame.  My roommate’s board had bent axles (I may have, and probably did, imagine this part, but I would swear the axles were aluminum and part of the hanger), and simply would NOT turn.  The geometry of the trucks was so dead that you’d lean, but not turn.  He’d always complain of sliding out and losing traction on the sidewalks around campus, so the wheels were really crappy quality as well.  So, stories like this pervaded the forums on Silverfish and were giving Sector9 a great deal of bad publicity.  So (according to legend), S9 asked SFL to remove not just the bad reviews, but all reviews period.  This had the unseen consequence of getting the rumor mill fired up:  They said you’d be banned for discussing Sector9 gear, they said there was a feud between S9 and SFL, they said that there was a conspiracy to conceal just how bad S9 gear was.  There was no banning, there was no feud, and it was a private website, so what use would a conspiracy be?  All of this BS was just hivemind, and was probably more detrimental to Sector9, as Silverfish (throughout its entire existence) housed one of the most comprehensive, user-submitted review and rating sections on the entire internet.  By not having their name in there, S9 was missing out on a big chunk of publicity.

I’ve mentioned previously that my entire longboarding experience was shaped by Silverfish, so this whole S9 drama (no doubt there was drama) formed my opinions to be very negative towards them.  Fact is, in 2019 they’re survivors.  Other brands are dropping left and right, but Sector9 has stayed afloat.  Their capacity has shrunk, of course, but they’re still kickin’, so they’re quite obviously doing something right.

Over the years, I have acquired a few pieces of Sector9 gear:  I’ve got one of their fabled Raceboards (reborn as a DHD Daisy, if I’m remembering their names right) set up on Independent 215’s and Sector9 Goddess Of Speed wheels, for some great late-90’s downhill/freeride fun.  I bought some Sector9 Butterball wheels and while they’re currently in my spare parts bin, they did some pretty cool freeride and bike-path duty on my Earthwing Supermodel (on Randal 180’s)…gotta get those back out this summer.  And, I can’t reiterate this enough:  I was unfairly hating on this company for years.  They make decent gear, and they’ve cultivated the scene to an epic degree.  It’s time to live and let live, and this post is a step in the right direction for me.

The Demise Of Forums, and Their Slight Resurrection

There’s an odd resurgence in the skateboard world.  After forums have maked and breaked our beloved sport of skateboarding, Facebook took it over.  Skaters sought not good, solid information, but rather, to have their own opinions validated.  They sought Instagram glory over discussing wheels, bearings, and bushings ad nauseum.  And yet, there were holdouts.  There were those among us who shunned the instantaneous and superficial satisfaction, in hopes that true passion, heart, and knowledge would shine through.

There’s a common thread between skateboarding and forums.  There’s a raw energy that drives likeminded people to connect in specialized forums…that same raw energy is at the heart of skateboarding.  Skaters are creative, freaky weirdos. Skaters, by their very nature, are inquisitive and inventive.  That same creative, freaky, inquisitive, inventiveness drove the .com bubble in the late 90’s, spawned social media, continues to invigorate the gig economy and today’s DIY ethos.  So, it’s no surprise that skate forums, once having been left for dead on the side of the road, are still kickin’.  Here’s a brief rundown on a few of my favorites:

First up, we have the site Gnarwheels.  Gnarwheels formed from one of the malware attacks on Silverfish, after a couple skate geezers wanted to stay in touch.  There are a few SFL holdouts on there; maybe a dozen or so regular posters.  There’s a lot of cool, informative, tech talk here…a LOT of intelligent skate nerds hang out there.

Skaterscafe is a more traditional street skating forum, dating from 2004.  There are 6 or 8 OG members still posting.  Being more of a street skate site, the posters are a little more aggro, and a little less concerned with minutiae, but they’re some of the coolest, most down-to-earth guys I’ve encountered online.

AlwaysWill seems based out of the old freestyle skateboarding forums, and is centered mostly around flatland, freestyle, ditches and banks.  There’s a healthy bit of nerdliness here, but my experience is warm and mellow.

Skullandbones is a skate collector’s site, focused more primarily on skateboard art, culture, collecting, and old-school (pre-1990’s) skateboarding.  I’ve been an active, posting member for nearly a decade here, and I still can’t quite figure the place out.  There are a lot of big, dynamic personalities, which certainly lends itself to some fun drama and colorful e-suicides.

Death of a beloved forum

On September 21, 2017, the website Silverfishlongboarding.com went dark.  It’s not the first skateboard forum to go bye-bye, and it won’t be the last.  But, I’ll be honest, it was hard for me.  I wasn’t involved in running the site at all, but Silverfish was my very first introduction to longboarding, something that’s become a vital part of my life.  Hell, people know me as “longboard guy,” and that’s something that can’t be faked.  I’m not super skilled or anything, but longboarding is something that I’ve grown up around, and something that I’ve taken from college adolescence into post-graduate adulthood, all the while having my loving wife at my side, encouraging me the whole time.

Sometime between the 28th and October 3rd, even Google removed any links to Silverfish from their cache.  Whoever said “The internet is permanent” is only partially correct – the Internet is only permanent if anyone cares enough to save and backup all that data.  The thing with Silverfish is that the site dated to the year 2000…the site in its most recent iteration began a couple years later in 2002.  So, there’s over 15 years of information that went *kaput* in the blink of an eye.  Sure, there were millions of posts of drivel, asking which wheels were best for sliding, or if I can cruise on this board, but an online community like Silverfish is deeper than that.

A community like the one that grew around Silverfish transcended longboarding.  Relationships form, local skate crews used to congregate there, events were organized, people even fell in love and developed romantic relationships using Silverfish.  That’s not to mention the humongous exposure that brands got through word-of-mouth, product demos, and genuinely stoked users.  There were brands that existed solely within the confines of Silverfish, and while that’s not necessarily a long-term sustainable business model, people made a frickin’ living selling boards on this one website!  There were at least 2 brands I can think of offhand whose owners actually quit their 9 to 5 jobs to make boards full time!

I’ve been in contact with the owners of Silverfish for years…again, the relationships that form are pretty real.  I’ve got at least one of ’em on my phone, and the other on a few other sites.  Looking through texts and emails to me, as well as a few “in memoriam” pieces that I’ve read, it seems like the site’s demise was a long time coming.  I’ve touched on the longboard EXPLOSION of 2009 a little before, and that brought about dozens of new companies.  I liked to say that everyone and their duck had a board, truck, or wheel company.  With that came most of these brands looking to establish an online presence – what a better tool to use than Silverfish?  By 2009, they had over 10,000 daily page views, and at their peak, over 100,000 active users (making it, for all intents and purposes, the largest skateboard site on the whole internet).  Some of this was due to the great recession, no doubt.  Cabinet makers could keep their carpenters busy during the downturn by cranking out boards; machine shops could keep their employees busy knocking out precision skateboard trucks; urethane manufacturers could keep their guys busy by producing small batches of wheels.  Once the Recession was over, and they could go back to doing their own thing, they dropped longboards like a bad habit.  As a result, brands folded, and advertising dollars to Silverfish decreased.  As revenue decreased, so did the support for maintaining such a huge infrastructure…as support decreased, malware and spam attacks increased, which drove away page views, which drove away ad dollars, and repeat ad infinitum.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Reddit were also exploding in popularity, and forums in general were declining…I mean, who wants to remember a different username and password for 18 different forums when you can just go on the Facebook that you’re already checking 48 times a day and check on those 18 different interests in one stop?  The problem is that Reddit and Facebook don’t have the history, nor do they have a meaningful way of organizing what they have like a forum does.  And, in my experience, pseudo-celebs don’t really respond on Facebook or Reddit…I can’t tell you how many movers and shakers of the sport and industry I personally dealt with either by private message or in the chatrooms at Silverfish…most of whom have generic corporate accounts set up on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, and don’t get involved personally.

It blows.  It blows hard seeing the former largest skateboard site on the internet just evaporate into the ether.  But, with that, I’ll close with a few inspirational quotes from the owner:

We knew the best wheel for sliding all along, but people have to find it for themselves.

The sage, Longboard Buddha, once said “A tree spends 100% of its lifetime in a static environment and only after its reincarnation as a deck is it allowed to move at fast speeds. When allowed, the wood will give thankless service if allowed to flow”

Social Media and Longboarding

Online forums save longboard maker’s sale from going downhill

That’s from a Canadian newspaper, talking about how Rayne Longboards really utilizes social media, specifically in the shape of forums, to help their brand grow.  I’ve often thought it was weird how all of longboarding has sorta snuck into the mainstream, using social media and Web 2.0.  Rayne’s a perfect example of that, as illustrated in the article.

I look at the skate scene in my home state as another weird example of how social media helps grow longboarding.  When I got into longboarding in 2007 (with much assistance from social media), I tried like hell to expand the skate scene around my college.  Meanwhile, at a State University, longboarding had been smoldering for years at that point.  The State University had been a hotbed of longboarding, and all the local shops treated it as something of a longboard mecca.  Now, the 2008 skate season ended with an injury to me, which spooked me off of the board for most of 2009.  I wound up losing my sole source of social longboard media due to some personal drama, and Facebook finally opened up their doors to everyone (not just college students).  It was during my year away from longboarding that, via Facebook, the whole state’s longboard scene EXPLODED in popularity.  The aforementioned State University, spearheaded by a young, ambitious student, stoked the longboard embers on campus up into a wild inferno that quickly took the entire state by storm.  Now, this young student had actually been in regular contact with me in years past, and I had given him some great ideas of mine, which he eventually put into place igniting the state.  It’s been phenomenal watching longboarding grow like it has throughout the state…I’m not trying to take credit for anything; I guess I’m just trying to express my disappointment in my missing it all.  And please don’t take that any of this as actual, historical fact…I’m just calling it through my own eyes, and from my own viewpoint.

Now, open up a new tab and check out longboard videos on Youtube…There are multitudes of videos about anything related to longboarding.  Many users have created their own music videos, product reviews, and promotional videos all about longboarding.  Some of the biggest names in longboarding today have gained untold popularity due to Youtube (and other video hosting sites) videos.  Loaded Longboards used Youtube as a platform to launch their Loaded Challenge video series, in which users submitted a series of trick videos to Loaded’s channel in return for a discount on boards.  Original Longboards gave discounts to subscribers to their Youtube channel.  This actually pertains to the skateshop in that the top 2 brands we get questions about are Loaded and Original, mostly due to their Youtube presence.  Sector9 went viral with their Blue Suit Bombers, which was actually featured on Tosh.0 if I remember right.  Skatehousemedia is an entire website devoted to Youtube (and Vimeo) vids.  Hell, I myself won some Veloz longboard trucks through a Youtube giveaway.

As I mentioned in Educated Idiots , a TON of people come in with bits of information gathered from online sources, be they Loaded or Original videos, skate- and longboard forums, blogs of all stripe, or Facebook groups.  So yes, I’ve seen this social media explosion happening right in my own shop.

https://shopmonkey.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/educated-idiots-11/