Fake Valterra (and Variflex) decks  with graphics like the ‘Ramp Champ’, ‘Skate Zombie’ and this 1986 ‘Land Shark’ show up all the time and are hardly worth mentioning, since the graphics are mostly identical to the original ones and look like they were produced by the same manufacturers.  This ‘Land Shark’ is a bit different: it has the worst shape ever and it comes with the original box! It’s a miracle the seller kept the box for all this time, maybe he used it to hide this piece of crap while he was not skating. For sale on eBay.

I had a Turbo II deck in the 80’s and it said ‘Aloha Hawaii’, but this one has a graphic that looks like an advert for a skate shop from back then with brands and names like: McGill, Caballero, Skull/Sword (spelled ‘sward”), Staab, Roskopp, Tator which probably means Gator, Gonzales, Thrasher, Powell Peralta, Alva and even bands like Misfits, Die Kreuzen, Agent Orange and JFA. Anyone remembers these shirts that had brands like Armani, Iceberg, Burbery, Gucci, all printed on one shirt during the 80’s? The deck is for sale on eBay, more pics after the jump.

Yes, this is a crapppy complete and Reflex doesn’t mean anything to you, but it’s also one of the funniest bootlegs. Can you see it? More after the jump.

Can’t afford a NOS Santa Cruz ‘toybox’ by Jim Phillips? What about this ‘Grosso toy’ full of pink plastics? We had some ‘Alice Grosso’s’ in the past, but this one looks pretty accurate and you can even read ‘Jeff Grosso’ on the box. Anyone ever heard of the FAS brand before? For sale a while ago sur leboncoin.fr.

This is clearly a Kevin Staab bootleg. More than one company seems to have copied the ‘Mad Chemist’ graphic in the past. We had some here and I have seen some other fake Staabs around.  The original deck was designed by John Lucero in 1986 for Sims. Also, this fake one is made by Saturn, the same company that produced the fake Monty Nolder from December. It was also the same seller who sold this deck on eBay. This one went for £10.73 after 5 bids. Thanks to John William Davies for the tip and Chandra Ruegg for the pictures.

This crazy thing is obviously a copy of a 1988 Vision Psycho Stick.  The psycho on the Free Former  looks even more mental than the original one on the right (as seen in eBay Watch August 2010). The guys at Free Former must have liked their psychos, since they did a Gator bootleg too. Spotted this one on eBay.

Three Sims boards in different colorways? No, the middle one is a Speedent, copied from the Sims ‘New Wave’ team deck from 1981 by Bernie Tostenson. The legit Sims images are from (left) eBay Watch March 2010, and (right) February, 2011. The Importers and Exporters Association of Taipei turned up some history of Speedent: ‘Charles Yeh, CEO of Speedent Corp, has been exporting Taiwan-made sporting goods world-wide since 1975. The first line that Yeh introduced to the international market was skateboards …’ Considering the original date of this early graphic (1981-1982) and Speedent’s origins in 1975, I’d say that Charles Yeh was a pioneer of crappy bootlegs!

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.

This is a pretty recent Flame Boy graphic on the same old, pig-like-shape that most of the fakes have. Companies have been producing these completes from the mid 80s untill now, without changing anything on its crappiness.  How long will this insanity go on?  I guess for a while, if you take a look at the new rip-offs on Alibaba. Anyway, the hairy Flame Boy looks absolutely ridiculous, although it fits well on this piece of thrash. If you want your kid to love his iPad even more, you should consider buying this for €10 on leboncoin.fr.

This fake Kryptonics complete is even less well known than the first Kryptonics bootleg that I posted on S&A.  I had to check AOS  to find out that the original graphic came from a 1989 team deck, called ‘Footprint’. Also, I have never seen bootlegs with this shape and coloured grip. Kryptonics started to make crappy boards near the end of the 90s (I think around ’97), but this is definitely a bootleg, since the seller confirmed that he got it when he was a kid in the 80’s. Price: £0,99 on Gumtree! Thanks to Nicola Rushent for the pictures.