Are these bootleg Vision Street Wear shoes selling for less than $14 a pair on Temu? Does it even matter? Established (err… uhm… Make that “Fstablished…”) 1985.

Insert tariff joke.

I thought I’d seen every option of the Skatewing until I saw a post with this Turbo II branded abomination called the “Scorpy.” One thing you’ll notice right away is that the Turbo II version has rounded casters on the wings instead of the single, fixed skateboard wheels. Turbo II was a toy store brand skateboard popular in the UK. Digging around on the internet shows that they like to approximate some popular designs to evoke those designs without violating copyright. Maybe the caster wheels were the same kind of attempt to avoid a patent dispute, although it’s hard to imagine that the Skating was ever popular enough to make someone think it would be a good idea to copy it.

A non-skateboarding friend sent me a link to an online auction for the Ital Board, and I couldn’t find out anything about it on the interwebs, except for another auction of a slightly different version. It looks late 70’s to me, although possibly from the early 80’s.

There was a brief time in skateboarding when it was considered the height of hipness to have a full, color coordinated safety gear set. These days you can still buy a full set of decorative safety gear, but it’s’ all for little kids. These pics come courtesy of Butch Olivier who picked up this near-mint gear a swap sale. California Free Former – Made in Canada! I guess Canada Free Former doesn’t have the same ring to it.

If you were more than a casual skateboarder in the 80’s who lived in and around the orbit of Chicago, you would eventually hear tales of a mysterious spot called the Elgin Pipes, allegedly located near a mental hospital, and in 1983, the scene of a double homicide. You could say the spot defitnely had mystique to those who hadn’t been there. Here’s a few pics courtesy of Art Abasolo.

I just wrapped up adding 61 ads from volume 5, number 7 of Skateboarder magazine from February of 1979. There are some good ones in there. A few that caught my eye were for Turning Point, Haut Lamaflex (Lama-flex?), Hobie (skate shoes), Powerflex, Independent (w Henry Hester), and Caster with Wally Innouye. Also of interest, there are four winter-related ads in this issue, two for runners that attach to your skateboard, like the Snow Skate, one for ice wheels (wheels, not blades) and one early Burton ad shot here in the Pacific Northwest at ole Mt Hood. Check it the Vintage Skatemag Advert gallery for Skateboarder v5 #7. The total is up to 1,151 ads as of today.

When I posted the Switch Board a couple months ago, longtime friend of the site Danimal informed of prior art in the form of Qwik Trucks. Qwik Trucks are the same concept, but with a patent, allowing you to switch out your trucks or board in less tha 30 seconds. The Qwik version seems a little more professional looking than the Switch Board, but it its the same concept. Who knows, maybe Qwik licensed the technology. It works, but it’s expensive and the practical benefits are are little questionable.

Yesterday’s Snow Skate post with Archie was so unpopular that I decided to follow it up with more research just to spite you, the reading audience. These snow/ski/skateboard patents started showing up as applications in 1977. Curiously, I couldn’t find anything going back earlier that had a skateboard as the foundation. I would have expected something to show up around 1965 but no dice. We’re focused on snow, leaving ice for a later post. At least two of the patents I found are so similar to the finished products in yesterday’s post that they must have been filed by the inventor or manufacturers of those products. One surprise was finding a 1977 patent for the modern day snow skate, the kind with a skateboard deck attached to one small ski.

The cover of Archie #270 (published in April of 1978) features Archie predicting the invention of the Snow Skate, a product that would first be announced in 1979! I’ve seen ads for the 70’s version snow skates before, and I keep looking for them on my hard drive and online like it’s Groundhog Day. I wasted a good 30 minutes just now doing the same until, hold on, what’s this under a pile of crap on my desk? Oh yes, the February 1978 issue of Skateboarder Magazine, complete with an ad for the Snow Skate. That’s the one in the middle. The black and white version comes from Cal Streets. This post is going to cover some of the snow skates over the ages with the exception of the ones that are just a regular board, and those that have one ski mounted to the bottom.

In my quest to bring you weird/crappy/cool boards I found this Variflex board called the “Later Gator.” It’s crappy, but something about the look in that Gator’s eyes is appealing. As the manufacturers and bootleggers of those boards were wont to do, they produced versions with multiple top graphics, which is where the gold in this post really is. There is a bespoke Variflex Gator top graphic which is boring, boring, boring. Contrast that with the Variflex V-Man, which is pretty great. SO great that I’m going to make myself a t-shirt.