Shred Skateboards makes skateboards from castor materials leftover from the surfboard manufacturing process, which is about 6 lbs per surfboard according to Shred. They are cruisers and oversized cruisers in design, and they look really nice, but the starting price ($220 fro the smaller cruisers) is a hard sell. Part of that high cost is certainly the labor intensive nature, and the rest might be due to the probably expensive nature of the alternative high-tech trucks by Alpine. At this point you can only buy complete setups.

I randomly found an old message with link to a bendy Gabriel toys figure of Horshack riding a skateboard. I’ve got the Donald Duck version from the same company somewhere buried in a box, and I’ve posted on the Goofy version before. “What the hell is a Sweathog?” you may be asking yourself if you did not watch TV from 1975-1979. The Sweathogs were the gang of high school kids that were the man supporting characters in the show Welcome Back Kotter, the same sho that made John Travolta famous before Saturday Nigh Fever, Scientology, and arguably his finest work on celluloid, Face/Off…. But I digress.. In doing my due diligence looking for the best pictures I could find I discovered this post had obviously already been done better by Beach Party Attitude. I should have known better, but hey, that’s the online world of skateboarding toys from 1977 for ya…

– Thanks to Tim Jamison for the vintage tip.

Well, by pure luck I was able to find a 15 year old scanner so I could scan these 30 year old stickers. What am I talking about? LED backlit scanners cannot capture neon inks, and big surprise, there were a lot of neon stickers in the 80’s. Shout out to Diesel Fuel Prints for letting me borrow this compact fluorescent backlit artifact. Diesel Fuel is where Skate and Annoy get’s all their stickers printed BTW. The sticker gallery is currently at 151 stickers with about another 100 in my collection alone left to process and add, and another 200 from contributors! Until then, check out these 151 vintage skate stickers. And yes, the post title is a reference.

Yves Saint Laurent is selling a marble skateboard for £ 3,465, or about $4,800, and yes trucks and wheels are sold separately. This is an honest to Glob skateboard deck carved out of marble. If you absolutely must own a skateboard carved out of stone that you can’t really ride, I’d suggest you go this route instead. Would it really kill them to include the trucks and wheels? I mean, they probably should have had their own YSL wheels made and then they could have charged… you know…$5000 at least… Is the shipping free? Who is buying these? I guess the price is acceptable for a hand crafted piece of rideable art made by the world renown Italian marble… what? Oh… Just like most decks these days, it’s made in the People’s Republic of China.

– Thanks to Nick Mattison for the tip.

I heard he worked there but I did not realize that Jeff Kendall is the president and Chief Marketing Officer of NHS. I guess we can blame him for Santa Cruz’ inability to say no to any co-branding opportunity or strange accessory items. Madrid might be the only skate company out there with a lower bar. Scratch that, Vision is the worst. But I digress…. Jeff Kendall is one of the sources quoted in this article on NPR. Skateboard sales have risen dramatically during the pandemic, much like bicycles did. Kendall says he’s never seen more females involved in skateboarding in his life, and mentions something about that one International competition contributing to the perfect storm… what was that? Oh yeah, the Olympics. The most interesting thing in the article is the link to Proper Gnar, a black, female owned brand out of Ohio that is enjoying great success. The art direction is sort of a less sexualized hiphop influenced Hook Ups style but with women/girls of color and some 80’s retro thrown in.

Photo Left: Ruby Medina by Shayn Almeida on NPR. Right: Proper Gnar

I revived the Vintage Skate Sticker Gallery, a feature that hasn’t been live on this site in almost 2 decades after we switched from static HTML to WordPress. Unfortunately, most of my old scans were similarly in 1999 resolutions so I had to rescan them. So far I’ve got 80 up there, with another 80 that have been scanned but not separated yet. In a strange turn of events, consumer scanner technology has changed to LED backlighting which doesnt play nice with neon stickers. They look like they’ve been in the sun for 2 decades. So I’ve got about 90 additional stickers to scan once I get my hands on a vintage scanner with CFL backlighting. While digging through old hard drives I found about 50 sticker scans from various contributors. On top of that, While cleaning my basement this weekend I found a CD-rom that someone mailed to me (when???) that has about 130 mostly high quality scans of stickers from the late 70’s and some “official dealer” stickers that are rare. so thats’ what… 350 more stickers to add! Until then, check it out.

Sure, $148 might seem like a lot for Spam brand skateboard, but it’s more than it seems. It may look like a generic retro plastic skateboard, but the deck is in fact made out of recycled aircraft aluminum by Alluminati Skateboards. Where does recycled aircraft aluminum come from? Maybe they scour the countryside for airplane wrecks. In any case they have figured out a way to digitally print graphics on aluminum decks, most of which have a different appearance than this cruiser style. The Spam site does a horrible job of selling these decks, there are no alternate views or enlargeable photos.

– Thanks to Adam Jih for the tip.

I’m not sure if anyone at Carolina Herrera is paying attention to the interns or not. “Our Revolutionned Hormones” is the kind of thing you’r make up to be poke fun at this sort of thing. What is this sort of thing? It’s 212 a fragrance for male models in NYC judging by the promo video.

– Thanks to Andres Counyo for the tip

Just uploaded 4 new issues to the 80’s Skatezine Gallery, bringing the total to 42, with plenty more to come. These latest 4 have a Midwest focus, Skate Straight (#8 and #9) from Dayton Ohio, featuring lots of Surf Ohio / Cow Skates action, and Chi-town Shred (#3 and #6) from Chicago. Still trying to figure out who sent me the scans of Skate Straight, email crashed over a decade ago and all I have are a couple corrupt PDF’s.

I bought another issue of Skateboarding Industry News and included in the auction was an issue of something called Skate & Surf which I had never seen before, and didn’t really pay any attention to it. Glancing at it I thought it was an early 80’s mini mag or pamphlet or some sort of insert or giveaway. Turns out it was the 2nd issue of a new (at the time) trade publication dated March/April of 1978. Contrary to Skateboarding Industry News, the art direction of Skate & Surf made it look closer to something like Action Now than a stodgy industry magazine. Flipping through it you might think it was aimed at skateboarders and not skate shop owners. The huge bonus to me was finally finding a full page ad fro Skate-ball, some 14 years after I found the first one online, and here it is, freshly scanned and transcribed., starting at $25,000 in $1978, and a perfect business opportunity for the absentee owner.