No products in the cart.
How to Flip the Kingpin on Your Carver CX or C5 Surfskate Truck
The Carver CX and C5 are among the most popular surfskate trucks. But if you do any coping or curb grinds, they have a problem. The kingpin sticks up higher than the truck hanger. This means you can grind on your kingpin nut and it can even fall off.
Thankfully, there’s a fix to this. All you have to do is flip your Carver CX/C5 kingpin upside down. This will make it ride lower than the hanger and enable coping grinds without any problem.
In this article I’ll show you how to flip the kingpin on your Carver CX or C5 surfskate trucks.
The only benefit to flipping your Carver CX/C5 kingpin is that it enables you to grind without your kingpin catching on ledges and coping.
There are a lot of cons to having your kingpin flipped, and I’m going to show you.
Difficulty Visualizing Tightness
The first drawback is that you can’t visualize how tight or loose your nut is on your kingpin. Once you flip it, the nut that you tighten is buried beneath the baseplate.
Here’s a Carver C5. You can see the threads and tell how tight or loose the truck is.
But with the kingpin flipped, you can’t see this because your nut is hidden under the baseplate.
Maintenance Challenges
The next inconvenience is that it makes maintaining your Carver CX or C5 more difficult. If you want to change the bushings or grease your pivot cup, you have to remove the entire truck from the deck. That’s because the kingpin nut is sitting inside the baseplate and will fall off.
So unless you do a lot of grinding with your Carver CX or C5, it’s probably not worth it to flip the kingpin.
Step 1: Remove the Truck from the Board
Remove the truck from the board using the four hex nuts on the bottom and the four mounting bolts on top.
Next, use a skate tool or another hex wrench and take the nut off the kingpin.
Step 2: Disassemble the Truck
Remove the hanger and the bushings and washers from the baseplate.
Step 3: Hammer Out the Kingpin
The next step is to hammer out your kingpin. You can use a hammer, but a rubber mallet is best.
When you do this, you want to make sure to protect the threads on your kingpin. To do this, put the kingpin nut back on the kingpin to where it’s almost flush. Then hammer against then nut instead of the kingpin directly.
Step 4: Reassemble the Truck
The next step to flip the kingpin on a Carver CX is to reassemble your truck. Put your bottom washer and taller cone bushings on the boardside. This is followed by the hanger, then the shorter bushing and the other washer on roadside.
Push the kingpin through and use your rubber mallet to tap it in.
Step 5: Tighten the Kingpin
With the kingpin reversed and sticking all the way through the bottom, rest the nut on the bottom and hold it. Then use your skate tool to begin tightening.
The only way to check how tight your truck is by looking at the baseplate and seeing the nut with the kingpin thread sticking out of the top.
Step 6: Mount the Truck Back to Your Deck
After you’re done, use your mounting hardware and mount the truck back to your deck. You’re now ready to grind.
When flipped, the kingpin a softer, rounder shape. It might sometimes grind across the coping a little, but it doesn’t affect grinds at all.
If you don’t do a lot of grinding, then flipping your kingpin is probably not worth it. However, if you do, then it might be worth it to reverse the Carver CX kingpin.
