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News Update #52

We are a skateboard company.

We make the skate boards. Literally, the board part of the skateboard. The wood part. That's the part right there that we make, here at Fickle Boards.

We can't tell you how much we appreciate the calls we get from folks looking for a proper skate shop, and we will continue to steer you to The Galaxie Skate Shop, because that there's the place closest to us that's doing the best job at being a local skate shop. Here's a pic of some of us (Punk Rock Kenny's back, Viles there on the end,Sunshine, High School, MMatt) enjoying the Galaxie!


But we aren't a skate shop. We would also direct your attention to the fine folks at Demented Skate Shop in Fairfield OH, or Blacklist Skate Shop in Lawrenceburg, IN, or any other shop in our sidebar... But we only make the wooden part... the actual board part of the skateboard.

And about that, there... let us show you something:


That there is a picture from inside our special wood storage room. Yep. We have a special room for that stuff. It's sealed, insulated, sealed again, and paneled all in wood. It has a controlled atmosphere: temp, humidity... all that... it's kept nice and dark and cool and proper for our little veneer buddies there to sleep until they are slicked up with glue and pressed into sweet skateboard decks for your enjoyment.

Our process is very simple, actually. Each board gets 4 hours in the press, with a max of 3 boards per mold. That means that those little glue molecules get to hook up and get comfy under proper pressure for more than quadruple the time that your chinese/mexican/californian/whateverwhereverelse companies are letting them hook up.

Fickle is committed to the marriage of glue-molecules under proper pressure...

Then, we let those bad boys do what we here have come to call SEASONING. We put them right back in the controlled room for a good long 4 day Seasoning to cure in those glue bonds before they hit the saw.

You see, a saw is a funny thing. It sends a whole heck of a lot of shockwaves through those there little glue bonds. You don't let 'em cure in, and they're gonna give you a chippy edge! You can claim all the claims you want about your shop, but if you're not going to cure the wood right before it hits the saws, routers, and sanders... well, those little glue-bond buddies don't have a fighting chance. That edge's gonna be kinda sucky.

That might seem okay to most folks, because the whole industry right now is full of some of the most inconsistent wood quality we've ever seen! I mean, I got a friend right now with a Creature Sam Hitz board that broke on hour 4 with NO reason at all, other than that it's probably made overseas by kids locked in a sweatshop in some factory that the California heads never saw at all, because the SHOW FACTORY that they toured was on the coast, and they were busy with a whole bunch of other stuff when they visited...

We know another guy with another Sam HItz that has lasted for 2 users! Now, why in the heck did the one Sam Hitz last so long, and the other didn't? Well, that may well be because the second guy only weighs one Weston worth of human being. But it may also be because by some accident of grace from above, that very deck found its way to the inner places of some pallet on some shipping container, just far enough from the soupy confines of some boat on the way to Cali from that faraway Orient whence it first saw light... that it didn't sour from wet, or punk out from dry and heat... and it found its way to the hands of Matt, then Weston, and has survived in horribly chipped edge glory...



...yeah, that's right. Inch-wide chips out of the tail. Gotta re-grip the thing with some shoe-goo or epoxy... danged chinese lumber...

Forget it. No matter how bad our boards might turn out on our worst day, you'll always have our guarantee that if it isn't right, we'll make it right. Why? because we're small, we're local, we're regional, we come by, we have a rider in your area, we care, we... because we are fickle boards and that's the way we're doing it.

So look for us in April-May 2011, when we'll be releasing our first official round of Fickle Wood, handmade in the lair here in Cincinnati Ohio. We aren't from here, but this is where we landed, and where we are hand-making your board! please, go thirty on your skateboard today and get your head straight. it's all about the wind in your face.

Lew for all of us here at Fickle Boards Ltd.