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Old Skateboarders...

The Powell Skull & Sword with white Bones (?) cubics, colour matched copers and rails... drool.
 
Hi Big Tabs

Hope you and yours are well

Bought my Stacey Peralta Warptail 2, powerflex wheels and tracker full tracks from Alpine sports for an eyewatering price in about 1976-7

It cost 5p each way on the 68 bus to get to and from waterloo South Bank with a box of jam sandwiches and a litre of orange squash. Later I frequented the brand new Brixton skate park and a host of other (free) skate parks. Ended up swapping all the bits so many times - I cant remember what I ended up with before calling that phase over for me.

I really can't allow myself to have another go.

Regards etc

Mike
 
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I’ve very little knowledge of the ‘80s scene, but there are some great looking boards there! The artwork really took off in that era.
 
Just popped over to my The Daughters house (next door) and noticed she has dug out her old deck that I got her when she was about 9 years old.

It is an original Alva John Gibson Street, with a hint of Tri-Tail concave. Must he about 1989 ?

She hasn’t got it set up, so I have offered to set it up with trucks and wheels. Not sure she will bite as she has an every day stick set up for cruising.
(also noticed my drum kit which I haven’t had for a few years now)

Looked the deck up, looks like it would make £200 easy. Mental the prices for stuff that I don’t regard as that old. (I still have 1970’s Gullwings somewhere? and some ACS trucks I think. Definitely have a Lance Mountain deck in the loft.)

I hope she wants the Alva to be set up. I think I have some risers as nobody like ‘deck bite.’ :(
 
Hey all.
I started skating in either 88 or 89 at aged 10. My first deck was a Vision Gonzales with indies and slimeball vomit wheels. Donated by a neighbour who'd quit.
Skated until I left school in 94, at that point 2 members of my crew were on Heroin and it was getting weird. me and a few others got into the then fledgling sport of downhill mountain biking and I did that for 25 years. Recently started skating again with my son and its slowly coming back to me.
 
jason rockley said:
Hey all.
I started skating in either 88 or 89 at aged 10. My first deck was a Vision Gonzales with indies and slimeball vomit wheels. Donated by a neighbour who'd quit.
Skated until I left school in 94, at that point 2 members of my crew were on Heroin and it was getting weird. me and a few others got into the then fledgling sport of downhill mountain biking and I did that for 25 years. Recently started skating again with my son and its slowly coming back to me.
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You are spoiled for choice now, what with the excellent Flo that you know, and Asylum in Sutton in Ash.
 
The last branded deck I had was a Santa Cruz Dressen Everslick (had a urethane layer on the bottom, to aid slides)

At one point a deck would only last a few months, so I switched to 7 ply canadian maple ‘blanks’ popsickle shape.

I still have one somewhere.

Plus a fishtail shape something with purple indies :) and a very long long board. I need to find the Everslick - I hope I haven’t binned it :(
 
I've only just spotted this thread. As kids in the late 70s, we were skateboard mad. There wasn't much of a 'scene' in Southend-on-Sea until a lot later when they actually opened a small skate park, but I remember a little shop in Leigh-on-Sea called 'Red Hot Valley'. We used to drool at the gear in there and I can still smell the shop today (I think it was mostly grip tape adhesive!). Kryps were our wheel of choice. My mate had green and I had a combonation of red and blue. ACS 500 trucks if I remember correctly. We made our own decks in my Dad's garage - great fun that was too. Happy memories!
 
Jimin said:
What about the music? I still listen to Suicidal Tendencies, Anthrax
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I don’t think skaters are/were tied to one type of music.

In the magazines and fanzines that I wrote for we did features on all types of music.

That said, I saw The Stupids, Rhythm Pigs etc. Bizarrely, The Wife and I shared a lift ride with Anthrax a while ago! I preferred Metallica :cool:

There was a lien (see what I did there? :)) towards Thrash Punk & Hip-Hop, but people would skate to anything.
 
I am occasionally haunted by the memory that somewhre there is/was a box with my Green Kryptonics and ACS 651's in it. Three house moves have obscured it's whereabouts. The Kryptonics were 60mm IIRC, a beautiful translucent green and wider than normal. They were "slalom" versions I think. To me they were precious jewels (the reason I kept them) to be admired. It's possible my dad dumped the wheels in a fit of pique about "mess" being stored in his garage. He dumped my Wurlitzer electric piano too (which I haven't entirely forgiven him for).
The ACS trucks were black/gold. A home-made deck of mahogany-veneered plywood with grip tape, translucent green riser pads completed the machine.
My pal (with wealthy parents) had a Simms Taperkick, Gull-Wing trucks and white "Bones" wheels. Jammy sod. When he ordered his board ("Please allow 28 days for delivery") he was accidentally sent an extra set of four wheels which he refused to give/sell to me ( I had none at the time) preferring to keep them "good" in a cupboard.
We were lucky to live near a housing estate under construction and got to skate for a while on the ultra-smooth, freshly rolled asphalt pavements. I was at the opening day of Glasgow's new skate-park in Kelvingrove, later criminally filled in for flower beds when the skateboard "craze" died down. Idiots.
"Skateboard!" magazine was my reading of choice and the photo pages would later be used to cover my various school jotters and books, giving me a powerful (imagined) credibility in the class-room. I remember a class-mate once pointing out that one of my skating heroes, dramatically pictured on the coping of a pool, had a testicle hanging out of his shorts. Much guffawing.
Even today, the magazine covers have a powerful resonance.

phantasmagoria poem
 
wulbert said:
one of my skating heroes, dramatically pictured on the coping of a pool, had a testicle hanging out of his shorts.
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This happened to me, aged about 15 or 16. We had a wealthy neighbour with a pool, he had a party one warm afternoon and I was invited/coerced into going in the pool along with a schoolmate of mine who lived in the next village. I didn't have any trunks or shorts so I ended up going home to get some that belonged to my Dad. I did the waist up with a string, happy days. Into the pool, then a sit on the edge while I talked to my schoolmate, the lovely Julie. After a minute or two I started to feel a bit warm in an area that never saw the sun. I glanced down to see the family jewels lying on the side of the pool and the lovely Julie in the pool only a few feet away in perfect position to see the whole affair. Oh dear.
 
My mam wouldn't let me have a skateboard, as she viewed them as dangerous.........

So in my mid 30's I'm working in York, and it dawns on me that the riverside path I walk down every day would be suitable for boarding down and speed up my commute. So off to world of skateboards, bought board and pads, charming man said I wouldn't need a lid yet, as I wouldn't be doing stunts. On reflection this was not the best advice.

So...I was working in the railtrack offices in York, think its a fancy hotel now, but anyways built in the halcyon days of colonialism it had a wonderful smooth tiled floor and massive long corridors. So I manage to scoot up and down the corridors, but I couldn't turn, I assumed you leaned a bit left/right and the board turned in obedience.

This was not the case, so I popped back in the office and consulted a young person who said I was going to slow to lean, at this speed you had to kick the board round.

So I scoots up the corridor, gets to the main reception area and shifts my foot towards the back of the board and it just shot off like a missile into the wall and I launched into free fall, fortunately the back of my head made contact with the floor first and broke my fall, think I was out cold for about half a minute. The receptionist said she had worked there for thirty years and seen nothing like it.....

Thus endeth the foray into skateboarding....its appears my dear old mum was actually right :)

S
 
wulbert said:
The Kryptonics were 60mm IIRC, a beautiful translucent green and wider than normal.
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There were two distinct generations of Kryptonics, yours sound like the first generation, which I bet are worth a fortune now in good condition! The second generation were the lime-green ones with rounder edges, you can see a set of 70mm on my Taperflex board back upthread somewhere. IIRC the hardness was similar between ranges; red soft, blue mid, green hard. I was more a downhill speed freak than having any discernible trick skills so I went with the largest greens as they really shifted!

PS With ACS 651 that sounds bang on for slalom. What deck style did you have?
 
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