Awesome! No complies in all of its variations have a special place in my heart ever since I watched Ray Barbee's part in Ban this as a kid, and instantly fell in love with his super laid back, flowy style.
The chinchiller looks really cool. I tried a dinghy (admittedly a pretty beat up one) at the indoor park the other day and it was... ok, but felt pretty sketchy.
I spend some time after initial setup carving as hard as I can at low speed trying to make it bite deliberately. If I can make it bite, I tighten a little bit. If it's too tight, increase the riser and start again. When I just can't quite make it bite deliberately, I tighten a tiny bit more for paranoia's sake.
Sweet, I dig the specs of the chinchiller, how do you like it for freestyle in particular?
I just ordered my very first freestyle longboard (this was solely skateboard terrain for me up to now) today and I'm beyond exited - but also more than skeptical about my ability to transfer my already dubious skill set to a board of much bigger size, but well, I digress..
Well, I'm a complete beginner when it comes to freestyle and practice basic tricks like 180 pivot or shuvit. And I get what you mean by transferring your skills from board to board! Coming from a much longer, wider and heavier board (a Loaded Tesseract), I'm still a bit disoriented by how much lighter and easier to pop the Chinchiller is.
I may be wrong, but I think that the Chinchiller's length will make grab tricks like tiger claw or aeroflip harder to perform than with a longer board. But I haven't tried yet, to be honest.
By the way, which board have you ordered? And please let us know how it goes when you get it!
Yeah, I'm sure that's a change, but these fancy mellow dancer kicks on a compact board like this definitely have their charm for me. In general this board looks pretty fun and chill, hope it meets your expectations.
180 pivots were my first trick too, and, as a relatively slow learner, I was that proud, when I finally got to make them consistent at 180 degree.
After long back and forth, I decided to play safe and went with the Switch Muskrat (deck only).
I own one of their earlier cruiser boards (2018 maybe? A friend from Poland gave it to me back then) already, so no doubt here about quality, and above all, durability.
Usually riding shorter and more skinny boards myself, I'm still a bit intimated by its size though. Your "I think that the Chinchiller's length will make grab tricks like tiger claw or aeroflip harder to perform than with a longer board" is my "how should I be able to pop a tank like this more than 1cm high, let alone flip it?" But in the end, I'm quite positive both of us will adapt to our shiny new toys. Hopefully.
Yes, I'll make sure to leave a review here after I got some time with it (now, if only GLS could hurry up a bit..).
My daughter (4) helped me paint this. First time I've done a skateboard, I've been meaning to for ages because this board was crying out for more colour.
Process was simple:
scrape the stickers off (this was probably the hardest part)
lightly sand to get a key on the existing paint and smooth any gouges in the board.
2 coats of water based primer
poster paints and sharpies for colour and design
several coats clear polyurethane spray varnish
allow it to dry fully, lightly sand and buff to get a smooth-ish finish
I'm happy with how it turned out, although I'll give a bit more thought to the graphic next time. I didn't have much in mind so just went with my daughter's rainbow suggestion
Ahh I was reading (on ampskate) about how a 180 slide is basically a pivot just without lifting your feet, and going a bit faster 😅 pivots are fun, they're a nice entry point to a bunch of other tricks.
Wheels are Powell snakes, and the patch I'm riding here is actually a bit damp which made it much easier to initiate a slide at slow speed.
When I started longboarding last summer, cracks, bumps and little twigs were a real problem for me. My Dinghy came with 60 mm wheels, but I replaced them with 72 mm Plow Kings and suddenly I became unstoppable!
Climbing up curbs is still a problem. I can get one foot on the ground and push to pass small ones, but I wouldn't mind learning one or two tricks to climb them with style. The method described by Lotfi in his video looks nice, but I need to practice my manuals first.
For passing smaller curbs, just approaching them diagonally, de-weighting combined with reasonable speed will do. Else, look into boneless, no comply, no comply 180, tiger claws, footplants, and endless variations of grab tricks, you can really get creative here. All of these are fun to learn (with boneless maybe the most easy to start with) and look cool, you should be able to find plenty of tutorials on youtube.
All of the above is pretty fancy, but doesn't work too well at higher speed, and since my ollies are rather crappy to put it mildly, I usually resort to lifting the nose and doing just a tiny hop, no popping, no sliding, like this. Same for major cracks and similar annoyances.
I like the punk attitude of this dude, who pops his board over the ledge by confidently slamming his back wheels into the curb while moving his weight, though I gonna have to admit that this didn't end too well for me, your mileage might vary ..
I don't use tail guards, but that's mostly because I don't freestyle much. Right now, my only freestyle board is a Bustin Shrike that I picked up dirt cheap on a Christmas sale they had a while back. If I ever improve on my freestyle capabilities, I would probably invest in some tail guards.
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