[HN Gopher] The Curious Design of Skateboard Trucks ___________________________________________________________________ The Curious Design of Skateboard Trucks Author : bze12 Score : 50 points Date : 2022-09-25 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.bedelstein.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bedelstein.com) | bmalicoat wrote: | I really appreciate the technical write up of how trucks work. As | others have pointed out, skateboarding is all about feel, and not | efficiency. My favorite example of this is Daewon Song, one of | the most skilled and creative skaters of all time. Somehow he | rides a board with no top bushing on his front truck! [1] Even | most skilled skaters would have a hard time rolling down the | sidewalk on this, let alone tricking it in any way. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt--3DX-md0 | stevage wrote: | I met a guy in a pub once who had invented a new type of truck. | I'm not a skater so I didn't totally understand the significance, | but somehow it could flip 180 degrees while being ridden. | Apparently this opened up new kinds of tricks. | | He had patented it at vast expense and was in discussions with a | couple of big retailers, and manufacturers. | | This was late 2000s. I wonder sometimes if anything came of it. | captaincaveman wrote: | Sounds like he invented something gimmicky. | nopenopenopeno wrote: | That guy obviously wasn't a skateboarder. Inventing new tricks | with new technology is considered by skateboarders to be | inventing another sport altogether. | captaincaveman wrote: | Yeah, this guy doesn't (as he admits) understand a skaters | mindset or culture. If you ride Indy's you're buying into classic | solid trucks, and if you been skating a long time you are likely | to be nostalgic. | | On a more practical aspect, you don't want to relearn the feel of | your trucks, and for what benefit, if the word was they grind | better, or are lighter without a reduction in strength, maybe, | but neither are likely to be more than marginal. Also skaters can | be a bit superstitious, have a crap session, blame the stoopid | new fangled trucks. | | Anyway may take on it, but not skated for years. | alkonaut wrote: | > I was tempted to think that these were just glaring, negligent | design errors. | | As a software developer, luckily I always find out very quickly | why designs aren't as bad as they might seem at first sight. You | just delete the seemingly negligent design, substitute your own, | and wait for the reports of the regressions. Then in a hurry | substitute back the original design, with an additional comment. | | Software development is easy. | robert-brown wrote: | Roller skating plate trucks are similar to skateboard trucks. | | Kingpin angle affects cornering ability. Kingpins at higher angle | from vertical corner more sharply, so skaters doing figures tend | to prefer more vertical kingpins than dance skaters, who want to | be able to do deep curves. For instance, kingpin angle is the | major difference between Snyder Super Deluxe and Imperial plates. | | Durability is a serious consideration for roller skating kingpin | angles. It's painful when a kingpin breaks and more common with | less vertical kingpins, so most skaters doing freestyle will | choose a plate with kingpins closer to vertical. Roller skate | plates also often have a "jump bar" connecting the two trucks to | decrease the chance that a kingpin will break when a jump is | landed. Sometimes even a jump bar breaks. | bze12 wrote: | How exactly does the jump bar affect impact resistance? | Distributing the force evenly I assume? | robert-brown wrote: | One more thing ... | | Good quality skates have pivot pins whose length is adjustable. | I don't know if skateboard trucks generally have this feature. | | You tighten and loosen the pressure on the kingpin rubber | bushings by shortening and lengthening the kingpin in order to | adjust resistance for cornering. When you do that, you also | need to be able to adjust the length of the pivot pin. | Otherwise, lengthening the kingpin results in a pivot pin | that's not resting properly in its cup. You want it just | touching, not floating out of the cup or exerting a lot of | pressure on the cup. | robert-brown wrote: | A couple more details ... | | Good quality roller skate truck pivot pins end in a spherical | ball and the pivot pin cup on the truck is also spherically | machined. There's no bushing in the cup. | bze12 wrote: | Yes, it's odd that most skate trucks don't have spherical | pivot cups. | atoav wrote: | In skateboarding people tend to use angled riser pads to adjust | the kingpin angle. As a side effect these riser pads can (ever | so slightly) absorb hard shocks and decrease the chance of a | wheel-bite (when your wheel comes into contact with the wood of | the deck and stops you apruptly). This is not necessary with | most longboards as they usually have a higher clearance, or | even cutouts at the sports where wheelbites would occur. In | street skateboarding the tradeoff is a little different, | because the area where wheelbites occur are just next to the | area "the pocket" you utilize for nearly all flip tricks. Also | taking wood away there would have a negative impact on | stability so street skaters would rather live with wheel bites | than sacrificing wood area there - or as mentioned use the | stiffest pushing you can find, use riser pad, tighten the | trucks or similar. | fatneckbeardz wrote: | the cat food can thing is perfect here. | | there are, in fact, TKP trucks on longboards, there are extensive | discussions on r/longboarding about the differences, and what it | boils down to is that a skateboard is an individualized piece of | equipment, and it will work differently with every human being | because of the geometry of their legs, feet, ankles, muscles, | ligaments, shoes, the kind of riding they do, the type of | pavement they ride in, the weather they ride in,whether they do | vert skating or "transition" (ramps/bumps), rails, massive jumps, | ground tricks, carving, downhill bombs, long distance push, | pumping, etc etc, and even the way their mind works in relation | to their body. | | so the amorphous concept of "feel" is, basically, everything on a | skateboard. the top end skateboarding engineers like Paul Schmitt | ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18MRZq0bhpE ) will spend | endless hours interacting with skateboarders to get continuous | feedback about anything from wheel chemistry to changes in board | shape. There is another interview there with rider Andy Anderson | where he talks about how they shaved part of the sides of his | board down in a slight taper so that it would be balanced evenly | due to one side being slightly differently shaped than the other. | To a casual watching him at the Olympics, you could not even tell | which side of this board was front and back let alone if the | sides had gotten tapered. That was just one many things he had | put into the design of his board, all tailored around the style | he wanted to skate (which is a lot of older freestyle like Primo | and pogo hops combined with all the newer olympics stuff ). | | im sure there is some room to innovate trucks but it takes a lot | of back and forth with a rider, its not , like the cat food can | thing, a single variable optimization. | nopenopenopeno wrote: | This article doesn't even discuss the eternal problem of broken | kingpins. Skateboarders don't care about "turning efficiency". I | don't even understand what that is. | | If you want to make better trucks, make some where the kingpins | don't break all the time. Every skateboarder will be buying your | trucks within a year or two. You'll be an overnight success | guaranteed. | robert-brown wrote: | Having broken a couple of kingpins at high speed on roller | skates, it's definitely no fun. Unfortunately, the kingpins are | under a lot of stress and they're threaded. Invariably, the | break occurs on the threads. | | Titanium kingpins are available for skates and skateboards, and | are much lighter. I don't know if they help with breakage. | jimmaswell wrote: | Does it actually break or just come loose? Can loctite help? | nopenopenopeno wrote: | It's less dangerous on skateboards because they break when | landing flat from drops, but it still sucks. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-25 23:00 UTC)