Maniac mania

Pacer was a brand from the UK that produced some decent boards during the late 70s and early 80s. Towards the end of the 80s they started to make rather crappy completes (pics after the jump). Still, the decks in the picture above (both from eBay) are definitely bootlegs from the original 1988 ‘Maniac’ deck, designed by Doug Cameron. The left one has the typical flat pig-like shape that most of the very cheap decks have and still have, but the funny thing about this one is that the front picture was stolen from a 1987 Valterra team deck called … ‘Ramp Champ’. The complete on the right seems to be a Rusher Sports, which surprises me, since Rusher Sports was a well-known company that had their own designs and the shape was different than this one, if I remember well. I have never seen a Rusher Sports that copied from the big brands, so maybe it’s a Rusher Sports/Pacer bootleg.

I also found two ‘original’ Pacer completes on middle-age-shred and eBay (two completes on the left). The right one, as seen on flickr, is probably the first, original Maniac from 1988 and it has a different shape than the complete on the left. I’m not sure about the middle one:

Detail of ‘Acid Drop’ Pacer wheels from the red complete:

This is a 1989 Pacer ad. The right deck seems to have the same shape and set-up as the Maniac complete, as seen in When We Was Rad:

Update: 11 years later – Found another Maniac bootleg and finally got decent pictures of the Pacer version on this post.