When I posted the Switch Board a couple months ago, longtime friend of the site Danimal informed of prior art in the form of Qwik Trucks. Qwik Trucks are the same concept, but with a patent, allowing you to switch out your trucks or board in less tha 30 seconds. The Qwik version seems a little more professional looking than the Switch Board, but it its the same concept. Who knows, maybe Qwik licensed the technology. It works, but it’s expensive and the practical benefits are are little questionable.
The working bits are made up of a deck mount and a truck mount. To be able to switch you need either two decks set up with one pair of trucks, or two sets of trucks on one deck setup. To that end they offer two starter packs priced at $125 and $150 respectively.
So for roughly the price of a complete deck you get the option to swap out trucks quickly, but that doesn’t include the price of the trucks. I can’t recall ever wanting/needing to swap my trucks on deck quickly. I’ve wanted to switch wheels for sure, and you could accomplish this by switching out trucks, but you’d lose part of the control aspect of this experiment, the trucks wouldn’t be the same. It should be mentioned that these effectively add a 1/4″ aluminum riser to you deck. If riser pads and a few grams of extra weight might be deal breakers for you. Also of interest, the baseplates incorporate a short length of nylon filament that act as a lock nut. The recommend replacing it if you move baseplates from one deck to another. See the last picture in the gallery, which is a still from the replacement how-to video. There’s no mention of replacement filament anywhere on the site, so maybe they advise you to use fishing line or weed whacker line.
All in all a masterfully executed concept. The manufacturing on these looks excellent and the idea is clever. I’m just not convinced on the actual usefulness, unless you were in some sort of a downhill or slalom contest situation. Another situation where these might come in handy is if you broke a board while skating, and you happened to have another setup with baseplates ready. Again, entirely possible but certainly not the kind of thing the average skater has to deal with constantly. A for effort though. The skate geek in me definitely wants to try this out.
Update: I just took flight with 2 packed boards and it was annoying. With most airlines charging for each checked bag and packing skateboard in a suitcase being next to impossible, not to mention how disruptive a skateboard can be in overhead storage on a packed flight, this solution makes a lot of sense for flying. Could you accomplish the same thing with hand tools? Yes. Would this method be more convenient? Definitely. Is it worth it? That depends on how often you fly and how much disposable income you have.
Here’s a couple vids from the site.
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