[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)