SGC
New Member
But the thing is, you don't need a more durable print for a street skateboards - they have a in service life expectancy of 2 weeks to 3 months for someone who is a regular, skilled skateboarder. When I speak on how the print feels in action, I truly just mean how the board slides on rails, concrete, metal and so on.
If we're talking the need for a durable, that mostly lies with the longboard industry. They have a ton of cool ways to make boards that yield a really durable print. Since the board is meant for riding, not grinding, they can do anything they want when it comes to how the graphic is applied. Resins, sublimation to polymers that are laminated to the bottom ply, all sorts of cool stuff.
As for weird printing tech in street skate decks, your normal skateboard you take to the skate park, it's more interesting. My market research, both as a producer and as a retailer (I had a retail store as recent as 2017), along with conversations with those higher up than me in the food chain doubles down on the customer is very reluctant to try new things. The market spits out new stuff, new ways to spin the wheel if you will, and it almost always ends up being pulled from the product line within a year or two, while the traditionally made skateboards stays a forever constant. Introductions of new board tech - using things other than north american maple - was largely ignored by the customer at large, as every single one of these attempts to reinvent the wheel came at a cost increase to the customer. They always do. There's a printing tech called "slick", where its a sublimated thin polymer fused to the bottom of the board, this was introduced in the early 90's I believe and has saw come and go status ever since, to very little fan fare. This created a very durable print, but added weight to the board, and for some, made the surface slide too much.
In the last couple years only one attempt to reinvent the wheel in terms of a commercially made and publicly sold street skateboard has been successful. Pretty much everything everything before it was a commercial and marketing failure.
This leaves the small and large companies in quite the pickle when it comes to R&D efforts. If the customer doesn't want more, just a certain price and a certain threshold of quality, why not double down on that. There's obviously flaws in this mentality, but everything follows the market you're in.
Have you ridden a current generation truck produced by Independent, Venture, Thunder? There is no such thing as the perfect truck, because every skateboarder develops a style and a way-to-ride that dictates how they want their board to feel and perform. Each truck and truck manufacture, in terms of the trusted, tried and true name brands in the marketplace designs their models for specific performance reasons. Being a jack of all trades doesn't work here.
