In case you didn’t read the comments on the previous custom board graphics post, JF pointed out the Board Pusher website. They have a much better range of sizes and shapes and are skate-centric. I wonder how the quality compares.

Slob-Air form Skull and Bones Skateboarding forum has posted a ton of images from the ASR show. Looks like neon is going to be big again in 2009. I guess that only took 15 years or so to recycle. Speaking of recycle, there’s tons of pics of old boards, old pros and new reissues, plus art boards and of course, the booth babes. Maybe I should have said “Sea of ass.” Check it out.

Globe has teamed up with the band that brought you the first ever music video featuring skateboarding. Of course I’m talking about Devo’s Freedom of Choice. Prove me wrong if you can. Skater Dater doesn’t count, it’s a short film meant to showcase skating, not to provide visual accompaniment for an existing song. You might recall that Globe had the limited edition Clash shoe collaboration that I had a hard time wrapping my head around. It certainly makes more sense in the case of Devo, a band that always had a marketing and merchandising strategy. You used to be able to order the yellow hazmat suits and red energy domes from the inserts in the albums. What the heck does this have to do with skateboards? Globe’s collaboration goes beyond shoes to include, among everything else, a complete skateboard with a Devo branded wheel. Devo had an allegedly unlicensed skateboard before courtesy of the now defunct (?) Punk Rock Skateboards. Although that was Gerald talking, and perhaps it was a case of the right hand of Devo not communicating to the other right hand of Devo.

Our research department looked into the similarity between the skater sculpture in Naperville , Illinois and the one in Milton Freewater, Oregon. We found a few additional examples, but no catalog yet. Apparently sculptors are also over the handplant.

L to R: Bronze Boy on a Skateboard by the people who brought you the Bronze Girl on a Skateboard previously mentioned on SnA,
Ollie the laurels,
Naperville, Illinois example,
Skater Boi in Albuquerque, NM,
Czech triumphal skateboarder,
The Milton-Freewater skater.

I can’t get away from my wasteful lust for old-growth maple veneers. I’ve been skating for too many years and am set in my ways. But my ever aging and growing inner-nerd can’t help but be intrigued by the innovations of using alternative materials to make skateboards. Aluminum boards have been around forever, but boards like Corbus Boards are all together something new. Made to be a functional piece of industrial art, these boards are meant to be ridden claims Corbus. A runaway board could make one of these metal monsters an ankle guillotine. Images via Corbus, link thanks to Make

I came across this during an image search for a post on the Screaming Hand for my skatecomics site. This guy posted about it and points to
AK37 as the source. I couldn’t find it on their site though. I wonder if they got a C&D from SantaCruz. They have some pretty cool designs which I would totally wear if I was a girl! Hmmm, they might make good presents for girls.

Collectors are probably bummed, but guys who just want to ride their favorite old boards again will be stoked, as long those old boards are some of these Santa Cruz re-issues slated to ship in August. These images are from SoCal Skateshop. Get in line now, these will likely sell out fast, and then we can all comment on the ridiculous prices the reissues fetch on eBay. Olson is always mentioning how he didn’t get paid by Santa Cruz in interviews. They must have reached an agreement. Also, I think this pushes Duane Peters over the top as the guy with the most simultaneous decks out on different companies, a record that might have been previously held by Hosoi.

I was checking out the Black Label web site (See, those promotional tours really work!) when I came across something I think I remember seeing in Transworld Business that I had meant to comment on. This is the Blackhole series of “anti-wheelbite construction” decks from Black Label, and if I’m not mistaken, those are a modern take on good old fashioned wheel wells. I don’t know about you, but I miss wheel wells. On every deck I ride I get little burn spots from wheel bite. I don’t really worry about slamming from wheel bite, I think it’s only happened to me once in the last five years. It’s more of an aesthetic thing really. I just like the way wheel wells look. This new version of wheel wells doesn’t quite do it for me though. A few longboard companies have been doing a more extreme version of this for years actually. The wells actually punch through the entire board resulting in a fully functional but goofy look. (Can’t find one the damned things online when I need it.) So actually, this post should have been titled “The return of the wheel well to contemporary skateboards.” I wonder how these are selling. I imagine the techy kids would be worried about the structural integrity.

I like to geek out on multiple levels. The SkateDrive allows me to (over)spend money on two of my favorite areas of interest at once, computers and skateboarding. These are USB memory drives that come in the shape of skateboards with Santa Cruz logos. So you can put a bunch of skate rock MP3s on the drive and use it as a fingerboard when it’s not plugged in. Of course, you’ll pay a premium price for dual use “functionality.” In fact, it will cost you more than if you were to buy a 2GB memory stick and a fingerboard packaged separately, which hardly seems right. They must have done their market research on this one. I am a skateboarder who is smart enough to know how to use a computer, but dumb enough to pay an absurd amount of money for a skateboard shaped flash drive. – Thanks to Dr Brad for the tip.

If you think Tony Hawk has the market cornered on skateboarding birthday paraphernalia, well, he does. but there’s always room at the top… of the cake. Har, har. Shoot me.