The 3rd annual Mt Tabor Challenge is this Sunday in Portland, Oregon. Open class requires an “old school” tuck. There’s also classes for Masters, Groms, and bikes (no pedaling). Details on PDX Downhill. If you’re not familiar with Mt. Tabor, it’s a fairly mellow but fun closed route that isn’t very technically challenging, unless you start at the very top and have to dodge pedestrians and cars after threading the needle (gap between gate and pole) to pass through the parking lot at the top third of the course. Even if you start lower, you can still get going fast enough to get hurt though. Full flyer and illustration of the tuck after the jump, plus bonus footage of last year’s event courtesy of KC. Yes, there is a Major Media event happening the same day.

Web host issues. Ebay Watch and GVK are affected/unavailable in the mean time. Working to get this resolved. Hopefully back soon. UPDATE: Everything is as it should be. Please leave a comment here if you something isn’t working for you. Thanks for your patience.

In June there were (at least) 2 fake Brand-X decks for sale. The left one is a copy of a 1986 Sean Goff model that was designed by Steve Krajewski, it even says ‘Sean Goff model’ on the top right. The right one was based on the 1987 XEX-model by Bernie Tostenson. It’s actually the same like the one from last month, only in another colourway and I think it could have been made from another company  too, because the design looks slightly different.

Just shy of a year after we first featured this stair roving skateboard, the creator is back with a Kickstarter project to help bring it the masses. It looks like he added some sort of weird stabilization bar linking the trucks together. I’m not sure what the addition is for, but I’m sure this makes an already heavy board more unwieldy and prone to rattling. You’ve got to admire his determination though, just don’t let him know the whole thing would be made moot by a set of soft oversized wheels. It may just be the Wheelie Board of this decade, something you’d never buy when it came out, but years later you’ll recall it fondly while trolling through some guy’s obsessive skateboarding web site. I’m goin got get on my Long Rider right after I start my own Kickstarter project to fund backing this kickstarter project so I can get a Stair Rover for the “museum.” I’m going to put it right next to the Tarantula Trucks. (Crap, I still owe that guy a review…)

Sneeze magazine has a short but interesting interview with Chad Muska about his first ever pro graphic, which came out on Toy Machine in 1995. It’s interesting from a historical skateboard personality perspective, but maybe more so because it touches on the business and shift from screen printing to heat transfers that was on the horizon when this board came out, and how it changed the industry. Originally published in 2012, I’ve never seen an actual copy of Sneeze, but apparently it’s “poster-sized.” If you poke around on the site you can see some press sheets that are pretty large.

Spotted on a public tennis court in Seattle, not to far from the college.

I dropped the ball on this one, but this weekend the Smithsonian has got a lot going on in conjunction with Go Skate day. It’s called Innoskate, a public festival hosted by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center and IASC, celebrates skate culture’s widespread innovative spirit. June 21 and 22 at the National Museum of American History on the National Mall. Lots of incredible stuff will be donated into the permanent collection of the National Museum of American History. Tony Hawk’s first deck is grabbing the headlines, but other stuff from OG skater gals Laura Thornhill, Patti McGee, Robin Logan and Cindy Whitehead will be given as well as some pretty high-level skatedecks from the collection of Nick Halkias. Chris Pastras and Ryan Clements will be on the mike and demo skaters include DC and Baltimore locals as well as Chris Haslam, Kyle Berard, Brian Andersen. The session conversations will be really interesting (the one between Tony and Rodney should be one for the history books) and the skating demos will be strong—all in all I think this is a great debut for the Smithsonian If you can’t make the event, they will be broadcasting Innoskate live on Saturday from 10:30 a.m.…

The shot in the top frame of a newly completed skatepark in the UK looked pretty clean and made me want to find out more about the spot. In the course of looking it up I saw that the builder Four One Four Skateparks, are using the CNC process to cut transitions and horizontal some supports, especially on bowl corners. It’s interesting that they use a stepped completely horizontal approach in those bowl corners. Notice that where the surface meets the back braces are not perpendicular. Instead they rest on two adjacent corners. I’m not sure if that makes in difference in the longevity of the bowl, but it’s got to make the design and assembly process a hell of a lot faster. I’ve always held wooden bowl builders in high esteem, and this approach means any monkey could assemble it. It’s a case of nostalgia vs. progress, but I can’t imagine there are that many ramp builders out there with access to big enough CNC machinery. Some of the shots on the site make it look like the surface isn’t included in the CNC process though, so there’s still room for John Henry on the ramp building floor. This…