You should go check out Miguel Melo’s 60’s & 70’s Vintage Skateboard Collection. It’s a beautiful site filled with photos of his personal collection. There are some of the usual suspects in there, but there are also quite a few lessor known decks, including some from well known brands.For instance, I can’t ever recall seeing the Cat by Nash, or even a GT Coyote III. I’m a longtime lurker.

I just added 23 ads from the issue #30 of German skateboarding magazine Monster to the Vintage Skatemag Advertisement gallery. It offers a bit if a break from the same old ads you probably saw run in multiple issues of USA based magazines. The content of the magazine is in German, but the ads are mostly in English for some reason. Bi-monthly at the time, this is labeled December 87 / January 88 in the masthead, and includes a 2 page spread on a then 10 year old event, the 1977 World Champions as held by the “World and United States Skateboard Association.” Check it out after the jump. Includes a bonus photo of Christy McNicol.

There’s a new addition to the Skate and Annoy Galleries, Check out these Skateboard Surfer trading cards from Wall Ice Cream, circa 1978. The gallery features the complete set of 20.

Some unusual skateboarding history from 1970’s South Africa. The Mother of all kicktails. Thanks to Mark Tulleken for the pics.

The Huffy Skateboards extravaganza continues in part 3, which focuses on non-wooden and non-plastic skateboards. We’re talking glass here. Plexiglass and fiberglass. This whole series started out as what I thought was just going to be a quick post about the clear model seen top right, but quickly ballooned out of control. Thunderboards!

Walt Disney’s The Beagle Boys #37, published by Gold Key in 1977. This issue does not feature any skateboarding stories or illustrations outside of another sales club advertisement with a Huffy 24″ Action Tail that you can earn as a prize for selling stuff, thus ending the mystery of what boards were in those illustrations, thanks to the plate-of-shrimp lattice of coincidence and my current lack of freelance work.

There are rabbit holes and then there are all engulfing black holes of time wasting. I Had an idea to do a quick post about a clear plexiglass skateboard from Huffy from the 70’s that I thought was interesting. Huffy sure wasn’t the first bicycle company to get int o skateboarding (probably ACS,) and wasn’t the last one (Haro) either. My buddy Shawn still has his first skateboard, a wooden Huffy Quick Thunder. I asked him to send me some pics for the post and decided to dig up what I could in the meantime. It turns out they made a host of plastic and wooden skateboards (some in the 80’s), and even a fiberglass model, not to mention some prepackaged accessories. I had over 80 photographs, so I’m going to break them in to 3 or 4 posts by category, starting with the plastic boards.

Super Skate Spray! While sifting through hard drive buried treasures I rediscovered these pics from a 2018 auction, and remembered Super Skate Spray from the Vintage Skatemag Ad Gallery. It came from the Lubri-Kote company in Texas, circa 1976. There does not appear to be a Lubri-Kote anymore, but there is an international Lubrikote company based in India that was founded in 1975. Are they related? Who knows. Maybe Super Skate Spray was so successful that it launched an international lubricating empire…

Some 9 years ago I posted a pic of a package of Flex-o-Thane wheels, and now it’s time for an update. Surprisingly, since that time I have not managed to add any Sport Fun advertisements to the Skatemag Advert Gallery, but I did find photos of Flex-o-Thane wheels in different packaging. In the original post there was some question about what the extra long bolt was, since it was too long to be a kingpin. It was suggested by a reader that this was for a slip-through axle, and here we have photographic evidence that this is indeed the case with Sport Fun Wide Track trucsk.

Until the advent of concaves and laminated board construction, the barrier to entry in skateboard manufacturing was pretty low, especially if you already had a business that manufactured wooden objects. That’s why there were a plethora of small, regional skateboard brands in the 70’s like the Land Glider, made by Kentucky Woodcrafts in Gray Hawk, Kentucky. Gray Hawk is a small unincorporated community about an hour and a half south of Lexington. My bet is there’s someone in that community that still knows who made these. There does not appear to be business with that name currently, but I did find one 11 miles away in Mckee, Kentucky with a. dead phone number. Yes, it is 12:30pm on a Tuesday in Portland, Oregon and I am calling random wood shops in Kentucky trying to find out (what?) about an almost 50 year old skateboard. – Thanks to Kurt Katnik for the photos.