The best thing about these vintage 70’s era open bearing wheels from Trickray is the Ed Roth inspired package illustration featuring a guy that is some sort of greasy salesman or evil landlord riding a skateboard. With that striped suit, he’s either escaped from a 1920’s prison or a silent movie. I’m not sure why these “official” Trickray skateboard accessories carry the U2 moniker, but they do. Evidently these urethane wheels were meant for spy missions.

Skate Culture has a good guest article written by Rick “Spidey” Demontrond that talks about the process and history of his 2 pro models for Santa Cruz and his new one (Swindle 2) for Pocket Pistols. It’s a nice companion piece to an earlier profile on Skate Culture.

This is the third appearance of the Disney character Goofy on Skate and Annoy. This time he’s on a Whitman puzzle from some point in the 70’s, or possibly even the late 60’s as this source places the first usage of the Whitman Kid logo as early as 1967. The board style in the illustration certainly has a 60’s, steel wheel look to it, even if S&A readers have seen that commercial illustrators tend to lag behind current trends a half a decade or more when drawing skateboards.

Recent additions to Pokhara Skate Park in Nepal, which has been around since 2011. Who knew? I mean, besides the skaters in Nepal. – Thanks to Adlan Farazi for the tip.

This graphic is clearly stolen from the Sims Eric Nash Bandito deck from 1987. That Deathbox sticker is huge (And awkwardly placed.) I always liked the big Deathbox teapot as in my youth, but I thought it was more like an Aladdin lamp and missed the whole point. Anyway, I bet the guy here spent more cash on the stickers than the whole complete was worth, I did the same when I decorated my California Pro with 2 Vision stickers and a totally useless, too small Rip Grip on the nose.

In modern times the skateboard transfer conjures images of going bowl to bowl, or spines on a miniramp. In the 70’s the skateboard transfer was all about t-shirts. This guy either has a gigantic stock of these or he’s completely unable to sell them, because I see these same couple of t-shirt transfers for sale all the time. Hot Dog on the dates to 1977 and Asphalt Animal is from 1978. I like how the seller backlights them so you can see what they look like on a shirt, minus all the parts where it doesn’t adhere or gets wrinkled. As you can tell, I never had good luck with t-shirt transfers as a kid.

I recently took a trip with my extended family to Costa Rica. It was one of those all inclusive vacations, and although we did take some day trips, I was unable to explore skateboarding in Costa Rica, even though I knew there were a few skateparks in the Guanacaste province where we were staying. In the small town of Playas del Coco I ran into the Costa Rican equivalent of Zumiez known as Arenas Skate and Surf. It was a bit odd, because most of the town (admittedly, only what I saw) seemed pretty low rent, yet there were a few almost self consciously glossy stores. In fact, I didn’t see a skateboard the entire time I was Costa Rica. OK, so I barely got out to see the types of areas where you would expect to see skateboarders, so this not be taken as a review of the Costa Rican skate scene by any means, just my own very myopic experience.

Mr Plant, although he goes by his semi-French moniker Monsieur Plant on the inter webs, makes art primarily about and with sticks and flowers. Sounds like a bunch of hippie crap, right? It’s actually pretty cool. Mr Plant has a pretty cohesive aesthetic, some of his work is quite beautiful. [Source: Bitchslap] – Thanks to Matthijs for the tip.

PhET is an online series of physics, chemistry and other science simulators made by the University of Colorado. What does PhET stand for? Good question. I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even on the About PhEt page. Sheesh, eggheads… They have two physics simulators using skateboards. The simulations run in Java, which can be a pain in the butt depending on your browser and OS, but some run in the browser via HTML5. The screen capture above is from Energy Skate Park, and yes it is possible to make the loop. You can toggle various graphing functions to show energy types in proportion to each other. Tackling two stereotypes/inequities at once, the main figure in the HTML5 version of Skatepark Basics is female, proving that girls are good at science and skateboarding! – Thanks to Tallboycan for the tip.

Chris Chappell out of Louisville, KY put together a collection of glass skateboard deck reproductions based on his fondest memories of skateboarding in the 80’s for an art show called Glassics. Although they have the same concave and shapes as the originals, they are purely meant to be wall hangers. The decks themselves are typically a 1/4 inch thick to save weight, although he has done some that match the traditional thickness of a 7 ply deck. The graphics are painted and then fused into the glass at 1400 degrees. Some of them have lights behind them as well. These works are not for sale, but he does have a website where you can commission a reproduction of your own design. If you’re keeping track, this is the second post about glass skateboards.