How To Make A Skateboard

Hi, I'm Bryce Campbell and I'm a sponsored skateboarder. We're here today to look at how to set up a skateboard from scratch using the different components, putting it together, gripping it, locking it and skating it. First off, you'll need one of these: blank skateboard, truck (thunder truck), four wheels and bearings.

First of all, we're going to need to grip the board. So, we've got grip tape here, it's coarse on one side and adhesive on the other. So peeling back, this gives us an adhesive.

Lining it up on the board so one side is there, placing the tip down, and then gently rolling it over, patting down as we go, like you would a sticker to stop any air bubbles forming. Now, file and we're just going to make an outline on the grip so we can cut it out, cool. Cool.

Peel back the edges, this will make it easier to bring the knife through. From underneath, pushing it up through the grip and then following the line that you've made with the file, all the way down. Next off, we're going to fix the trucks to the skateboard with the hardware, or bolts.

When the board's been gripped as you can see, it's flat over there so you can't actually see the holes that are underneath - see these four holes. So you need to make indentations in these holes so that we can fix the trucks onto the skateboard. Now lining it up so that you have your kingpin on the back of the truck facing inward on the skateboard, which is also very important, as the trucks were specifically made to be directional.

The trucks have been fastened onto the board now, we're going to put the bearings and the wheels on. First of all taking the nut off - the easiest way to get bearings - that's the biggest problem with, that I usually get asked is how to get the bearings out or put them in - you can put them in like that but if it's a tighter wheel or it's quite a dense, gerometered wheel, it'll be quite hard to get the bearings in there. So what you can do is place them onto the truck like that, put the wheel on like that and push down until you feel it pop, and then it's on, placing it on.

The nut goes on. So now we've got a complete skateboard all set up, ready to roll, just do the final checks. One being, need to make sure that there's not too much movement in the wheel up and down, so we'll just tighten it up a tiny bit.

We want it to spin freely so that there's no friction between the bearing and the nut. Secondly, we want to check that the trucks are on so that the base plate's not moving freely, which it's not. And we want to make sure that the kingpin is tight enough so that it's going to give us nice movement in our truck when we're, when we're rolling, which it is.

And as you can see that is how you set up a skateboard - nice and easy and ready to roll. .