Anyone know anything about longboards?

Thinking about picking up a cheap beatup board on CL to mess around with.

Thoughts on this one:

http://fredericksburg.craigslist.org/spo/3845055685.html

?

Link fixed. Long board skate boards was the intended subject area :)

I had one when I lived in San Diego. The smaller ones are pretty nimble, but don't try bombing hills with them. That looks like a decent board if it has good trucks/bearings/wheels. They're an absolute blast to cruise around on, and you can get some pretty decent speed/glide.

I was way into longboards and slalom racing for a while. As w/ most hobbies I spoiled it by making it into a business. I was modifying skateboard trucks for racers - precision 8mm CrMo axles, facing the hangers, making them narrower or wider. Spherical pivots on the hanger nose, custom bushings, all manner of stuff. Even titanium parts.

For a basic longboard for cruising around, you don't necessarily need a drop-through. Drop through refers to the configuration with the "bottom" of the truck baseplate fluse w/ the top of the deck. By necessity the deck must then be sort of hairpin shaped to provide wheel clearance while turning.

For actual downhill racing drop-through is invariably used, but like my track car sucks to commute in, my regular daily rider longboards are all mid-length - 36"- 44" and tend to be sort of surf board shaped. What matters is setup to make them turn well. This is accomplished through wedging the trucks and tuning w/ bushing hardness. I recommend adding a lot of front wedge to increase front steering, and de-wedging the rear to add stability. In the front a medium barrel bushing around 84 hardnesss on the deck side w/ a softer conical outside. In the rear I go pretty hard inside, like 90, w/ an 84-86 barrel on the outside.

You can buy expensive bearings, but Ed's Pleasure Tools Bearings - the regular double rubber sealed ABEC 7s are great - I've got some I haven't touched in ages, and they're plenty fast.

For wheels: Chris Chaput's ABEC 11 And Dan Gessmer's Seismic Skate Systems have every possible application covered.

Safety gear:

• Wear a helmet! closed head injuries suck, and longboards can get you into trouble the same way as a 600cc sportbike. Very easy to find one's self going much faster than the talent can keep up with.

• Slide gloves! They let you put your hands down to drift and learn pendulum slides, and when you do a superman and land on your hands you're less likely to break your wrists.

• Speaking of which, when I was racing I always wore wrist guards. 888 makes nice ones.

• Pads: There's Pro Designed Pads , and there's everything else.

If you're not a skater already you need to figure out if you're regular stance of goofy (face right or face left when rolling forward) and if you push regular (front foot stays on the board, push with your back foot) or "mongo" (rear foot stays on, push w/ your front).

In addition to push and roll, push and roll, there's "pumping" where you can accelerate and maintain speed with rhythmic S-turns, swinging your arms, and weighting/unweighting. This has lead to a sub-genre called "LDP" - Long Distance Pumping. There's people who go out and knock off 50 miles on their (very odd, purpose built) skateboards.

Some of the lineup about 5 years ago:

When I was "Geezer-X, the king of hotrodded skateboard trucks" :

Spherical pivot:

I think longboards and I go back to many a summer spent surfing

man i got excited and thought this was about surfing. then i saw fredricksburg and a a skate board

Oooh Oooh, pick me! My daily driver might be a Model A during the summer, but during the school year it's a longboard!

Here's what I ride to class every day:

Though since that photo was taken I've changed to 72mm Abec11 70s flashback wheels and removed the risers.

The first question you need to ask is what is the board for? I use mine to ride to class on flat ground and tight sidewalks, so I've got soft wheels, a short board, and a kick-tail.

and here I was thinking 2x10x12's

motomoron wrote: When I was "Geezer-X, the king of hotrodded skateboard trucks" :

Cool picture. I have 100 old ones in a box somewhere? My wife will not allow me to make a table.

As a recently retired (although not officially) bowl skater, I'm puzzled by the longboard boom. I don't know when the memo went out that said "this is the thing to do now".

That said, it's nice to see skateboards being used for transportation again. 50mm wheels don't lend themselves to transportation purposes.

I used to use a skateboard to deliver papers in the 80's, right after we all discovered that it was okay for them to be a bit wider than the old banana boards. I'll bet I'd be using a longboard now. Tricks and bowls never attracted me at all.

When I was up on Glendale Mountain Road for a photo shoot, we followed a couple of longboarders down the mountain. One was running a steadycam, following a girl who was the subject of his attentions. They were really cooking and had a long, long fast ride. It looked like a huge amount of fun but not for the unskilled.

http://www.skatehousemedia.com/ were the guys we followed.

To me, a longboard is a windsurfer with a daggerboard

In reply to motomoron:

Awesome stuff! Looks like I'll be picking up another one with that info. I had a Sector9 before, was a pretty decent off-the-shelf board. +1 to wearing gloves and a helmet, I took a nasty crash going down a smallish hill because my board got some terrible death wobble and higher speeds. I'll always wear jeans and a long sleeve shirt when doing it from then on.

Ok, this thread has obviously died, BUT...  Anyways,

My kids are into long boards and they wear all of the safety gear and have had wipe outs as can be unfortunately incurred by such a sport. My mom in the 60's said that skate boards where illegal (Hmmm?) back when I wanted a skateboard. We had to make our own out of over the shoe clamp on skates.  I could get into such a sport IF they made a battery powered board that had brakes and electric power controlled with a cable hand controller. (Million $ idea?) And probably also with a seat. 

And... I was also in the emergency room at the hospital one time, late at night and the kid next to me had a broken wrist after a late night run down my town's Big Hill. He and his friends were obviously inebriated and were also obviously proud of their accomplishments. 

Broke my wrist skateboarding. 
 

I too thought this was going to be a thread about surfboards. 

Anyone know where motomoron is?  He always had good information

wrong longboard for me.  It's also been 30 years since I last rode a wave

Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) said:

Broke my wrist skateboarding. 
 

I too thought this was going to be a thread about surfboards. 

I know little about skateboards and while I've never gone surfing I did live in San Diego for 7 or 8 years, and it's hard to do that without picking some knowledge of the topic.  So yeah, both times this topic has shown up my first thoughts about it have involved water.

Speaking of San Diego, I lived there in the early 90s and at the time the local link to the backbone of the Internet (or "NSF Net" as the backbone was then) was called CERFnet (an acronym for the California Education Research Foundation, but also related to Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet).  It's pronounced "surf", so of course the main router at the time was "longboard.cerf.net". :)

(yes, OK, I'm a nerd)

I used to race slalom and DH (downhill). I owned a small longboard company and ran the Reviews section of a, at the time, prominent site, Silverfishlongboarding.com

So ya. I knew a thing

VolvoHeretic said:

Ok, this thread has obviously died, BUT...  Anyways,

My kids are into long boards and they wear all of the safety gear and have had wipe outs as can be unfortunately incurred by such a sport. My mom in the 60's said that skate boards where illegal (Hmmm?) back when I wanted a skateboard. We had to make our own out of over the shoe clamp on skates.  I could get into such a sport IF they made a battery powered board that had brakes and electric power controlled with a cable hand controller. (Million $ idea?) And probably also with a seat. 

There are quite a number of powered longboards out, they're super fun. We used to sell them at the bike shop I managed. It was mainly a play thing for the owner, but we sold enough to justify staying a dealer. Brushless motor and lipos give them some real kick. They would regen brake, and on the most aggressive setting you'd have to roll into it, otherwise you'd get tossed to the moon.