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Detailed Tips for Assembling Custom Surfskates
Over the past few years, I’ve assembled hundreds of custom surfskates. In the process, I’ve learned tons of tiny details and nuances that can make a big difference. There are a lot of mistakes you can make along the way that can really screw up your setup.
If you want to build custom surfskates of your own, pay attention to these details. This way, you won’t make the same mistakes that I’ve made and you can get everything right.
I’m going to assemble a custom Surfskate Love Soulboardiy surfskate. It will include:
- Upgraded Carver CX trucks
- Riptide bushings for Carver CX
- RipTide pivot cups for Carver CX
- Surfskate Love surfskate wheels
- G|Bomb bearings
Watch My YouTube Video on Detailed Tips for Assembling Custom Surfskates
Cutting Holes in Griptape
The first step is cut out holes in the griptape where the bolt holes will go. Ideally, these should be countersunk. Fortunately, Soulboardiy does countersink their holes. But we still need to remove this material.
There’s a bit of an art to cutting these holes just right. If you cut too little, the head of your bolt will push down and create air bubbles, like this:
There’s really no way to escape this entirely. But cutting the holes well will minimize these bubbles.
I use a utility knife to carefully carve out the holes. Avoid cutting too much to prevent the deck from showing under the bolt.
Clean out all the sand from the griptape. This is important for reasons I’ll point out later.
Removing Old Pivot Cups
Before I start putting my trucks onto my deck, I’m going to replace my pivot cups and bushings.
My trick for removing pivot cups is to use a screwdriver. Carefully screw it into the pivot cup and push it out. Then, use needle-nose pliers to pull it out.
Installing New Pivot Cups
Now I’ll install Riptide pivot cups for Carver CX. These will prevent any pivot cup squeaks. Riptide pivot cups have a self-lubricating compound on them that prevents squeaking.
As you push the pivot cups in, you can see that little white substance that looks like chalk. That is the self-lubricating compound.
That’s how to eliminate pivot cups squeaks in your custom surfskate.
Replacing Bushings
Now I’m going to replace the stock bushings. I use Riptide bushings for Carver CX trucks. They are just a lot more lively, give you more rebound, and just a better feel than stock bushings.
Carver CX bushings come in two sizes, two taller ones and two shorter ones. You want to make sure that your taller ones are going on the boardside and your shorter ones are going on the roadside.
Put the taller ones first, then the hanger. This is followed by the shorter bushings on the roadside, then the washer and nut.
Now the surfskate trucks are ready to go. I’m ready to start assembling my custom surfskate.
Before I do, there is a very critical detail to know. If you push your bolts through the holes in the deck, you’ll get sand particles on the nut. The effect is it will seize up your nut and you won’t be able to get it off.
This can be a huge problem. If you don’t remove it carefully, you can ruin your deck.
Here’s an example of one where I got that nut stuck because of a particle of sand on the nut. In this case, I had to remove it with a hacksaw. You can see the damage that that did to the deck.
There are other ways to remove it. For example, you can use a Dremel tool to slice off the nut.
I’m going to show you how to take care of this so that you don’t get any grains of sand in your bolts.
The trick is to take any bar of soap. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to just run your bolts over this soap to basically coat your bolt. Now you’ve got soap covering that bolt. That’s going to eliminate that problem of potentially having a particle of sand from your grip tape locking up your nut.
Before I put my truck in, I want to show you an important detail about nuts. Here I’m comparing a Carver nut to a standard 10-32 nut. You’ll see that Carver nuts are shorter.
I find that it’s harder to bite onto the shorter Carver nuts with a skate tool and turn. Personally, I replace all these Carver nuts with ones I get from boltdepot.com.
Now I can install the truck. I’m going to use a drill to tighten these down. But before I do, I want to show you some important settings on your drill.
If you’re using a power drill, ideally you want one that has both speed and clutch settings. This is your speed setting. One is our lower setting, two is a faster setting, so you want to be on the slowest setting.
Then here you’ve got your clutch settings. On this drill, you’ve got up to 22. All drills are not equal, but you want to find the clutch setting.
In my case, I set it to eight. That’s a lower setting and you want to be able to hold this and that not spin. That’s what the clutch does. That prevents you from doing any damage to your deck.
It’s also important that you tighten from the nut side, not from the bolt side. To do that, you’re going to use a deep socket. This is a 3/8 deep socket and you can use whatever drive size you want. In this case, it’s a quarter-inch drive.
This is going to latch onto our nuts and allow us to spin from the nut side. That is going to prevent damage to the deck. It’s going to make the griptape look better.
Ideally, you don’t want your bolt to spin in there. I’m going to use an Allen key to just hold the bolt on the top side while I spin it with my drill. Now that stops without doing any damage to our deck.
With the bolts as tight as the drill on the low clutch setting will go, now I want to tighten them by hand. Again, you want to tighten by hand on the nut side, not the bolt side.
To do that, you could use a skate tool. Or you can use a rotating ratchet like this with your deep socket on it. This allows you to control the force or the torque that you’re applying.
With the trucks installed, now it’s time to install wheels and bearings.
I hope you found this helpful as you are putting together your custom surfskates. By following these detailed tips, you can avoid common pitfalls and ensure your custom surfskate is perfectly assembled.
