ramp in bob's garage...

yeah bob doesn't know weston's name. no comment on the huge stack of empties he had fish-gilled on a string to the ceiling...
but bob does remember the sting of weston's board.  almost got hisself killt.

enjoy a well-edited view of the session from the other night.
many thanks to Bob H for welcoming us to his ramp, and cheers to all our skateboarding friends who shared a session with us that night.



let's all try to remember that this ramp is the best idea of what you need to do with any extra space in your garage, workshop, living room...

this might take some getting used to...

in the past, you had a choice of identical factory products, offered to you by "brands", whose only distinction was the heat sticker and the video part...

now, you can call us up and slate the actual MAKING of your board, to your specs, with a "wears like iron" guarantee.

All this from people who are skating WITH you, not AT you.
...this might take some getting used to...

Controversial Facebook Posting!

everybody loves a good "facebook drama-comment war", right?

or do they HATE them?

Well, I got this one the other day and I thought it pretty much sums up the vast majority of our customer input:

man, this guy's got our number!

The only problem is, among the hundreds of boards out there, they are lasting so dang long on average, that... well... we're going to have to have you guys get some more customers for us, or double up your board orders or I'm gonna miss a house payment!

Drop-Off and Skate service!

Free Drop-Off and Skate Service!

If you're in reach of our MidWest Blue Collar Workshop, you can save on shipping with our new Drop-Off and Skate service.  We will drive your board out to you and skate with you that day!

Bring friends and let's have a session together today!

Why are we doing this? Because the best thing about fickleboards is what's standing on it: YOU!

We don't know if it has ever been this fun to order a skateboard!
Don't be shy to call us with your custom order, either!

Rolling Glue...

You know what didn't make it into the "underachievers" clip below?
Sinner Lew's beard in the glue. 
If you are skating with Lew, check his beard for glue and paint...

good thing he tucks it in for all the power tool stuff... got a special technique to keep it outta the power tools..

Hey, you can call and order a custom board today! Or you can select one from our store! And if your skate shop isn't carrying us, they can call us any time! Hit us up. We are here to make you a board today!

How to Get a FickleBoard...

"How do I buy one?"

We get this a lot.

Click the Blue Voodoo Boy over there. That's how.

Or email us directly at fickleboards@gmail.com

Or call us. No Kidding. Phone Orders Welcome! (P.O.W.)

Or head to Anonymous Skate Shop in Cincinnati and peruse a large selection.

Or go to Woody's Skate Shop in Savannah, GA to peruse a large selection!

Those are great ways.

Or you can catch Lew, Matt, Ian, Andy, or Sunshine to talk about maybe choosing one a la carte.

Our boards are always $50, and always worth every penny. You won't find them getting slung for $20, any time. never have. never will.

anonymous Cincinnati

we have about a million boards up at Anonymous in Cincinnati, where we just built a big old display to show them off... pics coming soon...

come on down to Anonymous and pick out a True Cincinnati-Made skateboard. finally:

a skateboard company that MAKES your skateboard!

Order Availability: Earlier than we thought!

Rain choked up the front 2 days of our travels, and we ended up back home, missions accomplished, a day early. Tonight, we are putting in a load of orders to press! Thanks for holding off as long as you all could, but we are right on time to fresh-press your orders, and we took a full batch of customs on today! Old Lew and Wes are stoked to be making you your boards this week! Out they go to South Carolina and New Jersey to folks who want what they destroy to be... to be... ...Fickle! What an honor to craft you wood to kill!

Back from our trip... amazed again.

We ought to call this the "amazed again" tour, because once again, the folks on the road were the main attraction of our trip! From the hospitality of momma Viles, to the whole crew at Woody's in Savannah, to Joe B and his family holding us in their hearts year-round... to this guy Will the filmer, who took 12 days to ride with us and film our ups and downs on the road... All the way from here to there and back, it was love all day, even the hard stuff. And there was hard stuff, as there always will be when you build on reality and love. Love won't let you settle. when you love something, or someone, you'll fight for it to be and stay real. period. So we're back now. And we'll be releasing video stuff and photo stuff from the trip in a slow breakdown, because there was nothing cheap about it. For now, check out the quick video making skills of our very own Boe Parries in SAV:

Order Availability till 26th June

If you are ordering from our store, please email us or call us to check on your selections! we are on the road and have stock with us, but not all colors and whatnot... So please hit us up and we can get you taken care of from the road. Everything goes back to "normal" on the 26th of June. Until then, we are going to enjoy skateboarding every day.

On Tour!

Attention all friends of FickleBoards! We leave this morning for the Louisville Skate Park (extreme park), with 2 vans and a dedicated filmer for the next 2 weeks on the road... Today and Tomorrow we will be at Louisville, leaving toward Knoxville tomorrow. Our final destination lies somewhere south of Savannah. Probably Kona Skatepark in Jacksonville, FL. We have some stock with us, so we can ship you boards from the Road! But colors and graphics are limited, and models will be as we shrink that stock. We will be back on the 22nd, with fresh pressed stock ready to cut on the 26th, but for now, we are crushing road miles and stacking clips! haha. that was very slogan-y. sounded like something out of thrasher.

settling in...

...the third press is finally finished! We will be settling into a known-quantity of production this month! That means that you'll probably see a lot more of our boards around in the Cincinnati area, at shops that believe in the kind of grassroots board-crafting that we're doing here. Again, let me (Lewcif) stress to you that... FickleBoards is a workshop, not a factory. The boards we make here are pressed 2-deep in 3 presses, for 4-hours minimum. They are cured for 4 days, so all the glue bonds are solid. Then they are hand-shaped into our classic and popsickle designs... The holes are calibrated to the thousandth of an inch, centered on the plank at the center of the truck... the graphics are screened directly on the raw wood, then the poly is applied in multiple layers over the top of the paints. and the boards... they are all a skateboard can be. within reason.

YESTERDAY

Barney has Risen!

Here at FickleBoards, we take the term "Barney" pretty seriously. This comes mainly by merit of us being made up of castoffs from skateboarding's "core", or "mainstream". You see, "Barney" is a term coined long ago among the surfers of Hawaii, referring to non-islanders (farmers from the mainland who had "barns").  These mainlander "Barneys" choked up the surf scene when word got out.

Skateboarding is different from surfing. Barneys don't choke up anything for us. The "Noobs", beginners, and Old Men are an important part of any scene. People who love to fly on a wheeled board, no matter where they are from are skateboarding (activity), and they are Skateboarding (community), when they love it enough to dream it.

Barneys don't fit the molds. Not the "Mainstream" mold of super-ripper-machines, winning contests and bagging up high-dollar sponsorships.

Not the "Core" mold of super-serious elite iconoclast, "holding it down" "on the block".

Nope. Barneys are just skateboarders who go skateboarding. Some do it a lot, and some get good at it. Others are not as proficient, but used to be 25 years ago. Some of us are on the rise.  Others are in their twilight. But the one thing all Barneys have is in common: Barneys love skateboarding.

Barneys love skateboarding in the face of how bad they are at it.
Barneys love skateboarding in the face of how good they used to be at it, and never will be again.
Barneys love skateboarding despite how good they could have gotten, if life had gone differently...
Barneys love skateboarding without the hope that they will win the comp, get the girl, or have a crew.
Barneys love skateboarding without fatcat sponsorships and cool points.
Barneys often go skate under the dark cloud of disapproval, because they didn't know you couldn't wear that.
Barneys often have no manners, when it comes to giving a shit about skate trivia prowess.
Barneys tend to be grateful for skateboarding, even if Skateboarding has loaded scorn on them.
Barneys who hang in there become heroes of a story nobody is reading, because those books are in the grown-ups section.
Barneys have to pick their kid up from school, or go to meetings, or go to dialysis...
Barneys have useless skills like being engineers, pastors, or Man At Arms for the Iron Horsemen...

Some of the Barneys are religious kooks.
Many have kids.
some even still have a wife or two in tow.

Some Barneys are hitting their forties and fifties.

Most of them have passed through the dope and party phase and would like you all to know that that's not going to work out well for any of you. ...and it'll kill more than a few of you.


When they got a snootful of "Anti-Barney" talk, they don't pull out of their scenes, tuck their tails and take up canasta. They hunker down and get the business of blessing their scene front and center.

You can find them in the Old Man Movement that's popping up on Sunday Mornings at parks across the USA.
You can find them holding it down with companies that are more than generic sticker-factory fashion show wannabes.

Companies like Bart's Legion, or Richard's Big Mess. Kits like Cockfight, Five Points, and guys like Bud Stratford.

Barneys are what they are, no apologies: Human Beings who love skateboarding (the activity) and Skateboarding (the community).

From that love comes this wood, made by a bunch of "Barneys"...
 who never got their priorities screwed up enough to be fooled into a corporate mold...
whose skating always came from our hearts for fun, not a head full of elitist/competitive bullshit...
who think YOU are insanely rad because You are being You,
not because of some trick you learned to impress someone who's just going to let you down anyway.

So do yourself a favor: Be a Barney. Do life and enjoy skateboarding as it comes.
Be the guy/gal who has a real life and skates for fun.
Be someone who knows the difference between a thing and another thing...
who raises kids instead of being some "shred clone".
who stokes others without worrying about losing territory.
who gets under and lifts, by example, instead of stacking up and sitting on the accolades of men.

And if that earns you "Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride" status--GOOD. If that puts you on the "outs" with some established clan of rippers who'll look down on you for not knowing your "pro skater trivia"--GOOD!

Because you know the difference! That we're not skating AT each other, we're skating WITH each other, life long.

It is in keeping with this sentiment of dedication to reality and the skateboarding community, that we are Putting this Mayhem Barney graphic on stuff for a while. No catalog. No reservations. Just shred the wood.

Give a FickleBoard a good death this week, and if it doesn't wear like iron, for all its imperfections, we'll take care of you, because we have your backs when we're under your feet out there.

Thanks to Terry from Disaster 77 for hand-sculpting our original Punk Mayhem RFD Barney graphic.

Here's an email we got this week from J, in CT.

... this is what it says:

fook yah.

Thank you for making such good boards, I really mean that. You guys save me a ton of money. Before I bought your deck, I went through 4 decks in 6 weeks...that's $200+ from my skate shop (I still make sure to go there for wheels and stuff though, it's a great shop!)

But yea, my 8.88 is falling apart and has pretty much no tail left but I can still skate it which is amazing. 

Even the 9x33 Creature I had snapped pretty quickly, and that's a much better size for me than the 8's I was riding.

So yea, keep up what you're doing, it's well fucking worth it and I hope other companies catch on to this whole "quality" stuff. 

All I have to say is that our process is so simple, our tools so basic... we have emerged AMAZED that making great skateboards is this simple! Not easy, but simple!

and these ARE the best skateboards we've ever ridden.

We still can't produce ENOUGH of them, but are working on balancing volume and quality. This year we'll see how MANY FickleBoards there can be.

And as stoked as we are about quality successes, we are ever humbled by the prospect of failures. If your board ever fails to "Wear Like Iron" out there, PLEASE contact us right here in Cincinnati and let us know. We will make sure you're stoked on wood built to be destroyed by your skateboarding!

Now please go destroy!

Email order if you don't see it...

If you are looking for an 8 in. Size, just email us and we will make it happen, whether its a straight 8.0, an 8.38, an 8.5, or an 8.88.

At least that's what we will shoot for! Hand making can cause some variants. Just make sure you destroy it with your skateboarding!

slammin them out...

Thanks for your orders this week!

I've got them all done, and am shipping them today/tomorrow.

We just got 55 Gal. of our amazing glue in this week and its all safely stored, ready for mixing, in the shop. That means we are ready to make mass boards for you!

We are also going to update your choices of paint jobs, now that we're implementing more background and layering in our graphics... that will roll out in the spring, in earnest.

But most of all, we are WITH YOU, out there skating, daily, loving the freedom of motion and creativity of skateboarding!

mission accomplished: store up again.

we are still updating the new paintjob options, so you might want to shoot us a call to see what we can do for you on graphics... black on natural remains a favorite in the shop...

...but we have been playing with paints and new designs. hit us up to see which screens are loaded and running this week.

we make them fresh as you order them, so get into the store and lets get ypu rolling! just click on voodoo boy over there.

Working on our Store!

Attention all customers who want boards!

Until we finish tweaking our store and getting it all perfect for you, please email us directly for boards! We are able to handle your orders directly, until the store is back up!

Thanks for contacting Fickle Boards!

You can also call us directly and get taken care of as well. We'll have this stuff taken care of in a jiffy!

Focusing a Fickle? Think again!

The boyos at Woody's Skate Park and Shop in Savannah show you why Fickleboards fly off the wall there... unparalleled contour and strength. They keep their pop, even under extreme abuse.

Is it new technologies? Maybe kevlar or carbon fiber?
Nope.
Just the coldest grown Maple, plus good cure times and good press times! Workshop Production that rivals any mass-production factory for quality and character. Period.