Thanks to Steve Quirke for these pictures of this skateboard made by EM, a company in New Zealand. These trucks are brutally primitive, ye the board is still quite beautiful as a whole. Nothing forged here, just some metal bending. What about those wheels? They look like a very hard composite material. I need to dig up some of my reference materials to figure out if this was from the 60’s or possibly even 50’s.

Valterra may have been a second rate skateboard company but they did make some memorable boards. Someone in the art department had a pretty good sense of humor. The Total Blast deck from 1989 really pops in some of these color ways. This is simultaneously pretty bad and also pretty good, depending on your mood.

While digging around on Julien’s auction site after the insane $115K Tony Hawk auction found a separate collection of listings titled Vintage Grails of the 70’s and 80’s and decided to see if there was anything interesting. It was quite a chore to sift through the 332 lots, and just as the tedium was about to win I spotted the thumbnail of what looked like a pretty cool old G&S team shirt from the 70’s and a Nash… hold on, that’s a Skate and Annoy shirt! The auction lisitng only says Nash because the topless lady had Nash logo pasties covering her nipples. At the time that illustration was used as the intro to a Nude Bowl trip I made in the late 80’s. The Nash logos worked great in this context because at the time we felt like Nash boards were cheap and exploitive, so it made sense with the graphic. Was there more than meets the eye on this graphic? Sure. Were we also essentially adolescent, immature young males at the time? Definitely. What cracks me up is someone at the auction house had to place this shirt on a mannequin and professionally photograph it. WHOSE COLLECTION DID THIS COME FROM????!!!!!

Another post borrowed from the Blockhead mailing list. This time is twas about the 40th anniversary of reissue of the Rebel model. The reason I’m reposting it is because of the attached scan of a short newspaper article titled “Sierra College student skates into business.” It’s history. read all about it. I too wanted a job that was related to what I like to do.

There is confusion about these metal Roller Derby wheels. Roller Derby definitely made skateboards for a while. Some people think they are metal wheels used in (old timey) speed (roller) skating, while others think they might be for making the casting molds. The casting mold theory does not seem valid to me based on the shield already present (and worn) for the loose bearings. Holy cow, did you know you could still buy open bearing roller-skate wheels? From Sure Grip, of course.

– Thanks to Dennis Allgeier for the pics.

Is it worth $1196? Is it worth $20? On the left, an auction item shipping from the U.K. that is in excellent condition, but seems to be overvalued for sure. On the right, this one sold on Facebook marketplace, locally in Ballarat Victoria, Australia. I dare you to find a web site with more coverage of the Skatewing, it can’t be done!

A reader in Italy (!) sent in some pictures of their own Commodore 64 skateboard after trying to find some info on it online. At this point in time it looks like Skate and Annoy is the premier authority on this phenomena. And by “premier authority” what I actually mean is, we’re the only one posting about it, and we’re quick to capitalize on the 2 people in the world searching for this. What’s going on here? It seems likely that whatever discount Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturer that originally made the legitimate Commodore 64 promo decks decided that they could make some more money off bootlegging what they assumed was a skateboard brand with some brand recognition. Another possibility is that this is a promo product for the C6 Game Maniac Mansion. The game actually features a doctor as character. However the board omits the word “mansion” so who knows. UPDATE: Thanks to Dan for pointing out this is the graphic from the English company Pacer. A quick internet search brought up a post we made about the Pacer Maniac in 2014. I’m slipping…

– Thanks to Simone for the pics.

Check out this refurbished tennis court in Sokolov, Czech Republic, built by Bonidee Skateparks. These guys have some good looking sites in their portfolio, mostly street plaza oriented but with the occasional very light sprinkle of transition. Stuff that looks fun even to an old zine editor…. This park is a little confusing to look at in pictures, almost like bad AI, but not as jarring as this tennis court from 2008.

SOURCE: Blunt Magazine. (Hey web-scrapers, see how easy that was to do?)

I was in Forest Grove to watch the mighty Boxers play soccer and had some time to kill before the kickoff, so I walked over to check out the local skatepark. Lincoln Park Skatepark was (poorly) designed and built by Site Design Group in 2004. It has that early 2000’s vibe of “I know how to pour concrete but I don’t understand the scales of transitions or how to set coping.” There are some street plaza elements that are successful, but the concrete picnic table looks like it was made to fit NBA players and the volcanoes are steep and tall, one of them comically so. There is one section of a very long quarter pipe that has “noping” and nothing on the opposing. side. Still, the skateboarding locals are friendly and it’s better than nothing. That’s Xavier on the long rail slide above.

I can’ get enough of these Cold War era Russian skateboards. Here’s a board from 1986 courtesy of a cat named Jah Fish of Facebook. Translated text says the price was 26 Rubles, or about $34 possibly, according to some speculation found in various discussion on the internet. It’s impossible to say because you could not legally trade Rubles for dollars then. I have no idea what the buying power of 26 Rubles would be other than this skateboard. I’ve seen sources claim average monthly income in Russia would have been anywhere from 190 to 266 Rubles, so this skateboard would have cost about 12% – 14% of that.