Find in this guide all our advices to take care and maintain your skateboard, longboard or surfskate. A small summary of the experience acquired in store and feedback from our customers on the subject.
1. No water!
Before seeing how to maintain your board, let's remember the basics: a longboard or skateboard board is mostly made of metal and wood.
As such, water is one of the worst enemies of your board!
Whether it's while riding, or during storage, we advise you to expose your board to water as little as possible. To do this, don't use it on rainy days, and store it indoors. If you ride during or just after the rain, remember to clean the board, trucks, and the bearings afterwards, and dry them quickly.
Ideally, disassemble everything, and do a quick check as you remove the water.
2. A little housework...
As seen above, disassembling to clean each part can extend the life of your skateboard or longboard.
Depending on how often you use your board, you may want to disassemble it from top to bottom every couple of months to remove any dirt and debris that gets in.
We recommend that those who have just built their custom board disassemble to clean their board from street after the first use. This allows you to clean the remains of grip stuck in the screw threads after assembly and to see if the screws hold well against vibrations.
Clean the grip of my skateboard.
There are gums at grip to clean the grip of your board. These "Grip Cleaner" are very useful to scrape the impurities that accumulate between the grains of the grip. They also have the advantage of giving your grip a real facelift by restoring its black appearance.
Be careful, it is mainly a visual improvement. After a certain time, it is necessary to replace the strip of grip which remains one of the principal consumables on a skateboard.
3. Clean the bearings
Cleaning is especially useful for the wheels and bearings, which pick up anything that is lying around and attract dust, hair and other ingredients :)
By cleaning the bearings regularly, you can extend their life. There are kits that allow you to soak them in a solution to get rid of all the impurities that infiltrate them. You can also take the opportunity to grease them again using, for example, oils dedicated to this purpose.
Above all, clean the bearings well before applying grease, otherwise you risk killing your bearings prematurely.
To know: Everyone has their own little magic formula for cleaning bearings: gasoline, WD40, acetone, degreaser... On our side, we believe that a good external cleaning of the rings is mandatory. Then, we almost systematically use the cleaning kits provided by the skateboard brands with an acetone-based solution. Remember to remove the plastic ring first!
4. Check the tightness of the screws
Whether it's the trucks axles, the chainring, or the Kingpin, we advise you to check regularly (not to say at each session), the tightening of the screws.
Concerning the screws that fix the trucks on the chainring, they have an annoying tendency to unscrew with the vibrations, in spite of the plastic brakes that are in the nuts. If these screws loosen, the truck becomes loose, and we increase the risk of breaking the base, the screws, and the risk of falling.
As for the nuts of the axles of trucks, it is a question of checking that the play that we leave to the wheel to roll correctly does not increase too much, at the risk of increasing the risk of breaking the bearings.
Finally, check the kingpins, especially to avoid losing the nut in the middle of a session, which is quite dangerous.
5. Bonus: increase the life span of bushings
We often see beginners in skateboarding or longboarding tighten the Kingpins to the maximum to gain stability in order to reassure themselves during the first sessions.
Our advice: do exactly the opposite and loosen the kingpins as much as possible (as far as acceptable!).
Indeed, if you tighten the gums too much to gain in hardness, you will quickly crush them and deform them permanently, which will have the opposite effect, making your board even more manageable.
To prevent this from happening, ride with loose kingpins. We think this is the best way to start skateboarding: it's better to get used to a board that moves a lot at the beginning, than to learn on a "frozen" board that doesn't allow you to move with agility.
What can I do if my bushings is making noise?
To begin with: nothing!
From experience, we notice that one out of three new boards "squeaks" from the beginning. While the noise can be annoying, it turns out that it disappears by itself most of the time after a few hours. In fact, some boards only start making noise after a few sessions!
At first,we recommend that you do nothing. If the noise persists, you can try disassembling and reassembling the gums to see if that fixes the problem.
Don't grease your rubbers from trucks to reduce the noise, it will increase the chances of loosening, and it will greatly dirty the trucks after a few uses.