My First Powell Peralta - Brand new out the box

And here it is. The Powell Peralta Old Skool Ripper I bought over a month ago.

Unbelievably in that time I've barely skated it, apart from at the first run of the now infamous infamous Bombing Florida 2011 event.

I'm stoked I took these SLR pics of it looking all bright and shiny, because it's so friggin' cool to look upon, one can hardly decide on whether to thrash it or place it on an easel in the spot the TV used to be!

By now you guys know the drill, we're going to examine this thing like it's the rosetta stone and we're all aliens who are trying to understand it while marveling at it's sheer stoke capabilities. 

The leering face of the Winged Ripper is silkscreened in a single metallic gold colour. The deck itself is dipped in matte black and has a shiny jet black transfer base on both sides.

One of the main reasons I chose this model over a more familiar reissue is I'm often accused of living in the past. As a 10 x 31" deck, it's an early 80's pig shape but with very modern deep concave. A perfect blend of old and new principles in a very original retro board.

The reverse side is a re-coloured version of the classic Ripper graphics silkscreened directly onto a substrate which is then transferred onto the deck. Skateboards are way more concave now so screening complicated graphics can be expensive and challenging for companies.

In this closeup, the new Halloween colour scheme makes the 1983 graphic really pop. Look at the Escher-like detail in the hatching!

Powell Peralta's K15 concave is very deep with a sharp angled tail and plenty of clearance for monster size wheels.

You can see the shape of the tail is slightly rounded and very steep.
Helps this very heavy tank ollie into the contemporary parks.

The nose is a few cm's shorter than the tail and has a mean little upturned snout that isn't large enough to be used as another tail but clears pools and tight bowl corners with ease.

I own very few things with a stamped serial number, and this is one of them.
The decks also come with a warranty certificate and registration form.

Fast forward to November and the deck now sports Independent 169's, an original black Tailbone and a Nosebone. Behind the back truck there's evidence of the marks only coping can make when used for dropping in ...

Unwrapping the beast

My First Powell Peralta (Teaser)

Click for a slightly larger preview image.

And here it is folks, a 2011 Powell Peralta Old School Ripper. A real beauty and at 10"/24.5cm's wide, theres more to love than your common-or-garden-variety popsicle.

The concave, graphic detail and gold screened top logo are a sight to behold in person but you'll have to wait a couple of days longer for the next ramble, featuring meticulous closeups of every angle and detail, test fitting of tail/rail/nosebones and, exclusive to Board Brain®, candid video footage of yours truly going ape-sh*t upon unboxing it!

Who knows, maybe even some actual skating ;-)

Happy Friday you three!

Fat Friday 5 - The Chosen One

Powell Peralta Old School Ripper 2011
31.75" x 10"
K-15 Mega Concave

My weekend whip gets a new bumper

As amped as I've been to pop a tailbone on each of my setups, I cling onto them like I do with stickers, the philosophy being that there may not in fact be an object on earth worthy of sticking a rad one onto. It started when I sold a spare guitar with a really cool No Use For A Name sticker on ... I missed the sticker more than the actual guitar.
Anyway, KFD have got some awesome stuff on the go at the moment so I wanted to get a shot of their board set up my way - old skool - to show them. The tail is already a bit thrashed but never too late for a pink plastic facelift!

Out with the drill and through the tail we go.

Even though the groms think KFD made a really wide "filming board", it's still approximately 1" slimmer than the smallest size Tailbone of the late 80's!

Enter the electric planer to shave it down to size.

E Voila! KFD returns to the present day in a time machine.

And now, the final product! Yup, it's a "hero shot" with some Photoshop augmentation but this ride deserves it dammit! KFD Pool Deck, Powell Thin Ribs, Powell Peralta Tailbone, Independent 169's, Killer bearings, 65mm Gooeys. Feast away, lurkers ...

Peace, BB

Skate Art Satire 2

The skateboarding industry is the only one I know of where doing a tribute or satire of a famous graphic is allowed to fly and no one's feeling get hurt. With the incredible news that VCJ has rejoined Powell Peralta and is developing new graphics for them in his signature style, I bring you some of the most recent examples of tribute art. This time it's Element with Mike V and Ray Barbee decks that relook their first pro graphics from back in their Powell Peralta days.


First up is the Mike V Elephant (renamed Patchyderm in the case of the Element version). With Mike V back on Powell Peralta, this deck is already marked down at most online skate stores and will be gone soon. The original on the left is Vallely's actual first pro deck.

Not sure which artist is responsible for the new elephant on the right but this Element ragdoll guitarist below is done by Sean Cliver, the ex-Powell Peralta artist who created the companies most prolific graphics, including the original ragdoll, after VCJ parted ways with them.

Skate Art Satire

By far my favourite thing about skateboard art is that it's constantly self-referencing and satirising.

Take these Welinder, Hawk and Rodriguez decks with their iconic VCJ* skull graphics; The images were prolific enough to trigger instant recall in anyone who saw even a corner of one not obscured by stickers.

Compare these later decks for Rudy Johnson, Jason Lee and Mark Gonzalez, and what you get is a small grin forming at the edges of your mouth. These are from the then-newly created blind skateboards, a company started by Gonzalez. The decks were a response to a Powell Peralta ad which poked fun at blind, and other new smaller skate companies like World Industries and Flip, which involved former riders of theirs.

Want to see how Powell handled it?

 

VCJ* is an acronym for Vernon Courtland Johnson, the artist responsible for all Powell Peralta art in the 80's. He seems to have vanished into obscurity, save for some new work, and a collaboration with the mighty Jim Phillips, for Pocket Pistols. Unlike the former, the latter has many books out liberally packed with eyeball-popping graphics and continues to turn out amazing and extremely influential artwork.

More old skool setups

Ahoy!


I found this setup on the Skate One forum a little while back, while surfing teh interwebs for other people who are digging the return of all these old boards as much as I am.

This setup belongs to a guy named Nick Spesia, and it's just about the loudest colour scheme I've ever clapped eyes on. The deck is a limited edition Powell Peralta reissue in metallic green, with a lime top. Nick's done a custom grip job that assaults your eyes and would actually critically injure anyone who wasn't around in the 80's to see this kind of thing the first time round! Steamy. Nice one, Nick.


The rest of the setup is as follows:

• Trucks: Independent 169's
• Risers: Tracker
• Wheels: Rat Bones
• Bearings: Bones Swiss
• Accessories: Gorilla Ribs / Tail Bone / Jaw Bone

The price of this setup in South African rands would buy you a small car! Admittedly, a car Xhibit would call "a bucket" on Pimp My Ride, but a working car nevertheless.


For interests sake, here below is the original board that Nick's reissue is based on.

 As you can probably tell by now, a Powell Peralta deck is the holy grail of old skool decks for me. That's not to say I am nothing less than a devoted fan of Santa Cruz and all of Phillips Studios graphics.

Last up is a Vision deck in lemon yellow with matchy-matchy Rat Bones wheels, a nose bone, and just about every accessory NHS ever made for skateboards! I never saw Vision boards around back in the day - I'm not sure if I mentioned but literally everyone had either a Powell Peralta or a Santa Cruz. There were a few Santa Monica Airlines and Schmidt Stixx but the former two were king. Anyway, I'm rambling ... here's the board:

Board Brain Begins

I have to confess, I've always disliked blogging.

It just seems so trivial yet so self indulgent but now that Twitter is around, blogs don't grate me quite so much. The lesser of two evils. Truly though, the reason this is a blogspot and not a website is because I can't be bothered to learn how to make a website and besides, I don't have a viable product or service to offer ...

I just want to talk about skateboards!

I have a few, but they currently do more hanging on walls than hanging on vert ramp coping.What I geek out to is old skool skating, graphics, setups and approach. They take me right back to being a grom with a Powell Peralta blank, hand-me-down-indy's, jaw bone, tail bone and rails. I've since dabbled in a bit of skating on and off since 1996 but I just never felt comfortable on a skinny popsicle and wearing no pads. I also can't believe no one minds grinding off the incredible graphics in a single session - Powell still manufacture rib bones and they slide just fine.

A good friend of mine recently gave me a Santa Cruz Kieth Meek Slasher reissue and I managed to get my hands on some fat wheels after much searching. A tailbone has been added, and the rails have arrived, now it's time to venture out from the front yard and into the world of skateboarding again.

I haven't got the stones to skate a half pipe again yet so don't RSS this - it may just be a passing phase.