Skateboard Buying Guide
This is for adults, I’ll do a kids one soon. I am going to try to outline some of the best advice I can on buying a skateboard based on years of experience skating and teaching skateboarding, mostly to surfers.
The first decision to make is whether you want to buy a ‘normal’ skateboard or a surfskate. There is so much variety in this decision, it’s not as simple as it sounds. There is so much detail to go into on this, I am going to keep it simple with ‘real life’ examples of the boards we own, use and why. Feel free to leave any comments on this post and I can address them there.
Left to right - YOW, Carver, Enuff, Custom.
Beginner set up.
This is the set up (the black one in the photo above) we’ve been using to get people rolling and pushing. We built these bit-by-bit from parts rather than a complete. We’ll include prices.
The deck (the wooden bit) was £25, its a double kick ‘normal’ deck, 8.5” wide, thats pretty wide which gives it a nice feeling under foot, a stable platform but it also means that carving turns is easier because the wider the deck, the more leverage side to side. This is the main reason we didn’t get a ‘complete’ (pre-made complete board off the shelf), as most completes come with narrower decks. We think width is your friend. The only reason skaters don’t always ride wider boards is that they are harder to flip over for flip tricks.
The trucks come in a pair and have to fit the width of the deck. These ones were £20. They turn by the ‘hanger’ being suspended off the baseplate by the kingpin and three rubber bushings, a cup bushing and two main bushings on the kingpin. You can tighten and loosen a pair of trucks to your liking by un-doing the nut on the kingpin, or even by replacing the two main bushings with softer bushings.
Wheels are really important to how a board feels. Think of it like this; road bikes use thin tyres with lots of air in them. They do this because generally, roads are smooth and a road cyclists main aim is to go fast for a long distance; the harder and thinner a tyre, the less rolling resistance but they will pick up on every bit of feedback the road is giving, you’ll feel every crack and stone etc. A mountain biker is concerned with smoothening out the ride and having as much grip as possible; therefore they run a wide, softer tyre with lots of grip.
Skateboards generally are the same concept; if you want to go fast around a skatepark, you want a hard wheel. If you want to cruise the streets that might be more rough and you want more grip, then a softer wheel will work best. For our beginner boards, we used these Enuff super softies 85a (this is a durometer scale - the lower the number, the softer the wheel, (99a is a standard hard wheel). These are 55mm which is a little bigger than standard 52/53mm. They’re £23. These smooth the ride out, roll very quietly and are great for skateparks, promenades or other smooth surfaces but they can handle cracks and stones ok too, they offer great grip.
Lastly to complete a skateboard you need hardware, bearings and grip tape.
Hardware, or bolts, are the nuts and bolts that hold your trucks to your deck. We use a standard 1” allen bolt. £2.
Bearings range from cheap to really expensive, they’re the bits that go inside the wheels to make them spin. The more you spend, the faster they will spin generally and the longer they will last. The ABEC scale is a measurement of the rolling quality of the bearing, you might see this used - ABEC 5/7 etc. We used these £12 Enuff bearings; they work well.
Lastly grip tape is the stickybacked sandpaper sheet that goes on top of your deck. It’s £3 a sheet for the Enuff one if it doesn’t come free with the deck. You can get all sorts of jazzy grip tapes.
TOTAL BUILD COST - £85
Pros and Cons -
Pros-
Low to ground
Stable
Smooth Ride
Able to roll both ways making ‘up and down’ on a ramp possible
Can still carve really nicely
Use in the park and in the street
Endless progression of tricks ie. ollies, dropping in etc.
Cons-
The design isn’t too exciting
Not so ‘Instagram cool’ as some other set-ups.
The Enuff set-up for a first time skater.
Carver Surfskate
Next up, we have this Arbor Carver Tyler Warren board.
This one has the carver C7 trucks on it and 65mm 78A wheels. The deck is 9.87” wide, the wheelbase seems short on this.
The main difference between a normal board like above and a surfskate is the extra articulation in the front truck. You can see from this image here that the truck still has a hanger and a baseplate and kingpin, but it also has a left-to-right spring system that not only allows the truck to turn when rocked from side to side like a normal board, but more dynamically. These often feel crazy to people used to a normal board feel and make normal boards feel like they don’t turn to people who are used to these boards. The big, soft wheels really smooth things out. I often find that people who start on these never really learn to push properly as it is quite difficult with the front truck.
This board is £209.99
Pros and Cons
Pros
-Pretty fun, loose cruiser style board
-You can tighten the front truck to control the crazy
-Nice flowly style
-Comes as a complete, no setting up
Cons
-Quite tall so makes pushing hard
-Loose on the front, makes pushing hard
-One direction only, no pumping back and forth on a ramp
-Quite volatile at speed, the looseness feels scary to me
-Picks up feedback, if I want to pump a ramp, it often picks up that movement and makes my line go squiffy
-Just about do-able to drop in but I would never learn to drop in on one of these
YOW Surfskate.
We have a YOW Arica 33” Surfskate with the Meraki S5 trucks and 66mm 78A wheels. This deck is 10.5” wide. €265.
For me, this is by far the hardest board to learn on, pushing is very difficult, it’s really unstable, especially at speed and it wants to send me in any direction it wants. We have two of these and I would literally never use one at the skatepark personally, not even for cruising around. I think any time you are seeing someone rip on one of these, they are already a good skater on a normal board and would rip harder if they weren’t on one of these. That said, for flat ground cruising around or doing drills around cones or that sort of thing, these are the kind of board that is really good for that.
I also see a large disconnect between people who surf midlength surfbaords, mini mals, longboards, foamies or even a shortboard really and then ‘training’ for surfing on one of these. The idea is that they emulate the movements of a surfboard; I don’t own or never have surfed a surfboard that feels like a YOW; the front end of a surfboard is stable, the back end where the power and manoeuvrability comes from.
If you are interested in cruising around a park or a bowl, my professional opinion would be to only get a YOW or Smoothstar if you want to make learning as difficult as possible for yourself.
Other Options
The Arbor Pilsner Cruiser
A cruiser could be a cool idea; this one from Arbor is 8.25” wide, has 61mm 78a wheels and normal trucks with riser pads between the baseplate and deck to accomadate those big wheels. These are a smooth ride; run the trucks loose and they’ll turn, great for cruising the streets or simple cruisey lines around a bowl or park. £129.
This is the GRLSWIRL Carver Surfskate - GRLSWIRL are a huge movement of women at the epicentre of the Surfskate movement. They chose the Carver CX trucks for their signature surfskate- way less loose than the C7 that are on a lot of the Carvers. These could be a really good option, any of the Carver CX trucks are going to be a lot easier to handle than a proper surfskate - just check out the GRLSWIRL Instagram for inspiration.
Pool board/Cruiser Custom Set up.
This I think could be a REALLY good direction for a lot of people to go in when building a skateboard for learning a wide range of skills on that will transfer over to surfing. A wide pool or ‘shaped’ deck like this 9.75” wide one from Blast Skates from one of our favourite skaters Amanda Perez @destroyedbrains. Paired with some Independent 169 trucks (169 is the width, these are wide to fit this size deck) and a set of bigger wheels like these from OJ Wheels that are whats called ‘double durometer’, the core is soft, the exterior is hard so they absorb bumps, feel like soft wheels but roll like had wheels.
A set up like this covers all bases; run the trucks loose and it will carve any corner of any bowl or skatepark you could wish to carve, it will feel stable underfoot, smooth to ride and you will be able to progress onto learning kickturns, pumping forwards and backwards and all the way up to dropping in and beyond. It will also signal to other skateboarders that you are there to soulfully cruise; that you aren’t trying to be doing tricks.
You could choose any wider pool shape from any board company that you like and you want to support. I just built my dream pool set-up on the Native website for an experiment and it came to £243.55.
Sallys board
Lastly, there is similar to the top board in this post, a normal skateboard. Here is Sally’s, it is a 9” Santa Cruz Eric Dressen ‘Popsickle’ Deck (normal shape), Independent 169 trucks, Snot Wheel co 56mm 99a wheels, bones red bearings. Sally started on the Carver Tyler Warren but as she’s been skating more and getting better, more in control and more confident, she switched from a Carver to a 8.75” shaped deck, normal trucks, soft wheels and then onto this 9” normal board with normal wheels - she is skating the bowl so much better on this, she’s so much more in control at speed and looks way more confident skating around on this than on a surfskate.
My set-up is an 8.38” Toy Machine deck, Independent 159 trucks, Spitfire 56mm 99a wheels, Bones Red Bearings. I skate mainly bowls, pools, transitions and don’t do many ‘tricks’, I just like to carve about and go fast. I would not be skating a park or bowl on a surfskate as I feel that it makes it very difficult and I like to have fun and an easy life while I skate. I’d consider a Carver with CX trucks at a push perhaps.
Conclusion
If you have made it this far, wow. Nice one.
Hopefully you find the information you need on this blog. I have written it from my experience of skating and teaching skateboarding from the perspective of being a surfer. Nobody paid for a feature, I am not loyal to anyone or any brand. I would encourage readers to try as many peoples boards as possible, keep an open mind and SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SKATESHOP.
Skating WILL help your surfing. Sliding sideways is sliding sideways. I don’t think you need your skateboard looser than your surfboard; I think drive, speed and control are closely linked and a surfskate is awesome for going round cones but shares little relationship with surfing which occurs in a 3D, dynamic, moving environment. That being said, fun is fun, sliding sideways is sliding sideways; I would never judge or tell any of my students to do otherwise but I get asked advice a lot, so here it is!
Tom, the author skating Ojai pool in California.
Tom, the Author, doing a similar movement on a surfboard in Mexico.