Some unusual skateboarding history from 1970’s South Africa. The Mother of all kicktails. Thanks to Mark Tulleken for the pics.

I just added 62 advertisements from Volume 2 Number 6 of Skateboarder Magazine (1976) to the Vintage Skatemag Advert Gallery, bringing the total in the gallery up to 674 ads! 1976 was a good year for skateboarding.

The Huffy Skateboards extravaganza continues in part 3, which focuses on non-wooden and non-plastic skateboards. We’re talking glass here. Plexiglass and fiberglass. This whole series started out as what I thought was just going to be a quick post about the clear model seen top right, but quickly ballooned out of control. Thunderboards!

It’s never simple. I’m already wasting a lot of time compiling a Huffy skateboards resource, and in the process I find an 80-ish skateboard that looks like someone accidentally included the Instructions or marketing materials on the actual graphic. It’s absurd enough to warrant its own post, but then I find another wonderful example. No board manufacturer is visible, but some well crafted googling unearths two more models in a couple different color variations, as well as the manufacturer “American Sports Services. Barry E. Smith.” You’ve heard of them before, right? Giants in the industry! But what, there’s more! Update: Most , if not all of these decks can be seen in a catalog for Athena International.

As promised, here’s part 2 of the series on Huffy skateboards. I’ve got 11 different models to show you from the 70’s and 80’s, plus a couple of weird ones. Some of these were hard to track down because Huffy had the annoying habit of using the same model names for bicycles and skateboards, so trying to find better pictures is next to impossible when you have to wade through a thousand bicycle pictures because Google thinks it knows what you want to see.

There are rabbit holes and then there are all engulfing black holes of time wasting. I Had an idea to do a quick post about a clear plexiglass skateboard from Huffy from the 70’s that I thought was interesting. Huffy sure wasn’t the first bicycle company to get int o skateboarding (probably ACS,) and wasn’t the last one (Haro) either. My buddy Shawn still has his first skateboard, a wooden Huffy Quick Thunder. I asked him to send me some pics for the post and decided to dig up what I could in the meantime. It turns out they made a host of plastic and wooden skateboards (some in the 80’s), and even a fiberglass model, not to mention some prepackaged accessories. I had over 80 photographs, so I’m going to break them in to 3 or 4 posts by category, starting with the plastic boards.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation has a program aimed at curbing impaired driving called Zero In Wisconsin. Their newest campaign posters can be seen at various rest areas, bus stations, and other locations. These posters feature people engaged in various Extreme!® sports and the tagline “Do this drunk!? That would be Crazy!” At first I was a little bit confused by this, because it almost seems like a suggestion and not a warning. As in, “That WOULD be crazy, let’s try it!” Turns out I’m not the only one. It’s not just a poster, but also a TV commercial, both of which were shot in the bowl at the 4 Seasons skatepark in Milwaukee. – Thanks to Daminal for the tip.

VibeRide claims to be home of the world’s first longboard brake, the BrakeBoard. At first I thought this was just another iteration of the Board Brake some 10 years prior. The position of the foot lever is almost identical, but the braking mechanisms are noticeably different. BrakeBoards lever applies pressure to the inside rim of the skateboard wheel instead of applying pressure to the pavement. It turns out this original implementation also dates to 2013. VibeRide bought existing technology and revamped it. It’s more sophisticated than the Fred Flintstone approach of the BrakeBoard, but with that sophistication comes a $150 price tag for one truck equipped with the brake, a set of wheels, a paddle bit for drilling the required extra hole, and a skate tool.

While it may look like product placement, this post is actually a PSA. In 20 years from now when some other nerd skate historian finds a beat up board with this graphic, they will know it actually came from Brand-X Toxic and was not another weird 80-90’s bootleg mashup. Technically, this model is called the Weirdo Stick, and it is essentially a mashup of the classic Brand X Weirdo and a Vision Psycho Stick.

Some 9 years ago I posted a pic of a package of Flex-o-Thane wheels, and now it’s time for an update. Surprisingly, since that time I have not managed to add any Sport Fun advertisements to the Skatemag Advert Gallery, but I did find photos of Flex-o-Thane wheels in different packaging. In the original post there was some question about what the extra long bolt was, since it was too long to be a kingpin. It was suggested by a reader that this was for a slip-through axle, and here we have photographic evidence that this is indeed the case with Sport Fun Wide Track trucsk.