Ultra Flex Primo Alley Cat

Ultra Flex. I’ve never heard of this company before, but they made skateboards and Primo brand wheels. The parent company was actually Special Products, a division of something called I.I.I., located in San Diego. I couldn’t find anything definite for them via google. They must have spent some cash on this brochure though. In the 70’s you couldn’t get a 1000 full color brocures for $100. First you had to have a photo shoot in a studio. The you had to pay for professional film developing, type setting, ad layout, and mechanical color separations. Plus there was stat camera graphic work too, none of this scanning and resizing in Photoshop, and then emailing a PDF. It was all done mechanically, and this would have been expensive.

UPDATE: Added pictures of an old Ultra Flex board.

This is an eight panel brochure. This is the cover and the back cover. Click to enlarge.

These two panels are the first thing you see when you open it. I love how they stamped “VOID” on the offer to “Buy three and get one free!” I wonder if they actually meant individual wheels and not sets.

Here are two pages of aluminum boards, both made by the Reynolds Aluminum company, you know, the same company that makes Reynolds Wrap! It says triple I beam construction. I’d like to get a look at one of the bottom of these boards. The Primo comes with sealed bearings while the Ultra Flex comes with loose bearings, and is also available for OEM purchases. They like to point out that these aluminum skateboards are reflective at night, as if that would be some huge safety benefit if you caught on the streets after dark.

The Alley Cat is the “value added” lineup, and is available in fiberglass and molded plastic, both with loose bearings. Funny thing about the term “Value Added,” in reality it usually means value decreased. The fiberglass one has neoprene shock pads. I don’t think I’ve seen that combo in the flesh. Primo Cat is their finest fiberglass board featuring the neoprene shock pad and sealed bearings.

I couldn’t find much about the old Ultra Flex skateboard brand. Someone is using the term now, but I don’t think it’s related to the old company. I did find this old advert for an Ultra-Flex floor display targeted at skateshop owners. You can see the full size graphic at

Cal Streets.

Update: Here’s a couple pic of an Ultra Flex skateboard that showed up on Ebay some 6 years after this post was originally made. Coincidentally, the seller used images of the brochure from this post in the auction listing.