AZTEC CRUISER – Home-made
As promised here is the write up for my recycled custom cruiser…..enjoy!
Once again, Inspired by my discovery of Reskate, I decided to begin crafting my very own Cruiser skateboard out of one of my old ply wood skate decks. I ordered some 59mm Penny wheels from ebay, along with some 1/2″ riser pads. To add to the elevation of the board and also help in making sharper, tighter turns when ripping up the street.
I began by deconstructing the board, taking off the wheels and trucks, stripping the grip tape and then drawing out a rough shape in pen on the underside of the board.
I was originally going to do a subtle fish tail design as mentioned in the previous post, keeping the middle nice and wide and then finish with a short, stubby little nose to keep the board short and fast! But instead of the fish tail I opted to keep a bit of kick on there to enable me to still pop the some ollies and maybe even nail a few other tricks too. Once I drew out my design I cut around the shape with a lovely blunt, old saw that I got from the local recycle centre (www.xtremewaste.org.nz). I cut the board out in small sections doing each end, nose and tail in about 4 – 5 cuts each.
There were some sharp corners left where my cuts started and finished, so once I had fully cut out the desired shape I then started to sand around the edges and over the entire underside of the board to get the edges nice and smooth and the underneath prepared for a banging new board graphic.
Once that was all done I got my paint face on and started drawing an Aztec-styled pattern with some paint pens, looking for inspiration on google and creating some of the patterns myself it gradually started to come together. After a few hours of steady pen work and almost no mistakes my board graphics were finished. I then put a hefty coat of lacquer on top to stop the paint from getting easily scratched off and re-gripped the top side of my newly re-cycled deck.
With the old deck successfully transformed my final step was now to attach the new riser pads, trucks and wheels and get the whole set-up ready to hit the streets!!
BOARD STUPID 