- Hello surfskating friends, Steve here,
and this is a video for newbies.
And I wanna give you three quick steps to do
when you first open your surfskate.
And I'm making this video because
I've been working with some newbies lately,
and I keep seeing the same thing over and over again.
And that is that
they're almost like afraid of their surfskate.
It's like, they're afraid they're gonna break it,
they don't know what they're doing.
And especially if you're new to any board sports
and you've never worked with a skateboard or a longboard
and you don't know all the parts.
And so I wanna just help you in that process
to not be afraid of your surfskate
and the bigger theme of all these steps
is you're just out of the box,
starting to develop a relationship with your surfskate,
because it really is a relationship.
You're gonna be spending a lot of time on this board.
And I don't know about you, but as a man,
all of my surfskates are sweet, beautiful ladies
and I have relationships with all of them.
If you're a woman, maybe you can refer to your surfskate
as a man or whatever.
But the point is, have a relationship with your surfskate.
Don't be afraid of it.
This maintenance side of things
is a really big part of surfskating.
You really want-
because adjusting, for example, you know,
if you don't know how to adjust things...
in fact, you know, I've worked with newbies where
they've had their board for three or four months,
and I first looked at it
and they hadn't done a single thing:
they hadn't adjusted their truck,
their pivot cup was squeaking, all kinds of stuff.
And they just don't know.
So you just want to know
this maintenance side of it really well.
So the three things that we're gonna do
when we unpack our surfskate before riding it is
first, we're gonna get rid of any squeaking noises.
Secondly, we're gonna make sure
that our wheels are spinning properly.
And then the third thing is
we're just gonna look at the surfskate truck
and make sure that it's working properly,
make sure it's not making any noise
and make any adjustments as needed.
And in this video I'm working with
just a basic Carver CX bushing-based system.
But if you've got a spring-based system
like a Meraki or a SmoothStar Thruster or a Carver C7,
you're gonna wanna know how to take care of those as well,
and you can look on my channel for the maintenance videos
on those other spring-based systems as well.
All right, so the first thing I wanna do with any surfskate
is eliminate squeaking.
I've bought 40 surfskates
and I have yet to open a single one that didn't squeak
right out of the box.
And 90% of the time your squeaking is gonna come out of
your pivot cup.
And your pivot cup
is where your truck sits into right there
and where it rotates; it's where it pivots.
That's why it's called a pivot cup.
And you can see how I'm gonna just step on this.
This is the Loaded Bolsa, by the way.
I got it a few days ago and I haven't even ridden it yet
because I've been waiting to do this video.
But let's just step on this
and I'm gonna show you how right out of the box...
(loud squeaking)
So let's take care of that pivot cup squeak.
The first thing we're gonna do is
just remove our kingpin nut right there.
Don't be afraid of it.
You're not gonna break it, especially on a CX truck.
There's no spring to break.
So then we just slide this off
and that piece is gonna come off like so,
and that's the piece that sits into your pivot cup
and you can see how there's nothing in that pivot cup.
I've opened a few Carvers lately that I've gotten
and they actually put some lube in there,
but it actually still squeaks regardless.
But you can see that they don't have-
that's bone dry in there, and that's why it squeaks.
And sometimes you'll get squeaking out of the bushings too,
but 90% of the time it's gonna be that pivot cup.
Very, very simple to fix a pivot cup squeak.
This bushing's kinda hard on there,
but all we're going do is
you're gonna take some paraffin wax, household paraffin wax.
There's some waxes that are different than paraffin,
so make sure you're getting
just that basic household paraffin wax,
and all we're gonna do is
put some wax shavings in that pivot cup, like so.
Super, super simple.
And I'm sure that's probably overkill.
It doesn't take a whole lot,
but that will take care of that squeak nicely, okay?
And so now we will put our washer on the bottom
followed by the bushing, the bottom bushing.
And then we'll put our hanger back on.
And on this setup,
I actually have to kind of lift
this washer and bushing a little bit
so that this will sit over that
and then slide down into that pivot cup nice and easy,
like so.
Super simple.
Now we're gonna put our top bushing back on,
followed by our washer,
and followed by our kingpin nut.
And we will come back to adjusting this truck.
But that's it.
No squeak, that was it.
Simple, simple.
Let's do the same thing on the back.
And, in fact, I'm just gonna make this easy.
We'll just put some shavings out here
and I can just throw them in that pivot cup like so.
That's plenty.
No pivot cup squeak!
So first step done.
We've got our pivot cups taken care of
and we got no squeak on this board.
Second thing I'm going to do is
just make sure the wheels are spinning properly.
And this is really simple.
It's just that sometimes out of the factory,
maybe the bearings aren't completely pushed into the wheel
and so you have a spacing issue
or maybe this is tightened down,
but basically to check that,
we're just going to do a wheel spin here,
and we're gonna just see if any of them stop prematurely.
And you can tell that this one,
this one's a little bit tighter than this one.
One of the things that'll happen is
if you don't have the proper spacing
in the wheels or the bearings,
if you tighten down the nut on that wheel,
it will stop them from spinning.
In the ideal world,
when you have proper bearing spacing with the wheel spacing,
you should be able to
completely tighten down that nut tight,
and the bearings will still spin.
But sometimes that doesn't happen and that's okay.
And in that case, really all you wanna do
is just kind of back that nut off slightly,
but you don't wanna back it off too much because then-
see if I back this nut off this far,
you're going to hear-
or I don't know if you can see this or hear this
(faint clicking)
there's a little bit of play in that.
So you don't want that play.
But if you have a setup where,
like, for example, if I just tighten this down all the way.
And see these are,
you can see how that's actually really good.
I've really got that cranked. That's exactly what you want.
But a lot of times they'll do that spin test
and it's not gonna roll easily.
So a couple of things you can do on that,
you might even want to take the wheel off
and then just push those, use a skate tool like this.
Get a skate tool like this, you really need one like this.
They have them like this.
Grab a skate tool like this, and this is a bearing tool.
And so really what you can do to check this
if you've got a wheel that's not spinning good,
one possible thing to check is to take the wheel off
and just use your-
oh, these are nice and stuck, sometimes you'll get that.
And then a lot of times I'll have to-
Leverage, being careful.
You don't wanna hurt your bearings,
but I just wanna just kinda leverage that.
Sometimes your bearings will stick like that.
That's no big deal.
Again, if you've got that wheel stuck,
you'll just take your bearing tool
and you'll just make sure that both of those bearings
are really secured tightly in there, like so.
And this didn't come with any speed rings,
which is kind of interesting to me.
Sometimes they don't, usually they do.
Your speed rings are-
here, let me get you a speed ring.
This is a speed ring. Just this tiny little piece.
Typically though,
each wheel will come with two speed rings
and they're supposed to go one right here.
And the purpose of these is to eliminate friction.
It's hard for them to machine this edge good on companies.
And so the speed ring creates a-
makes sure you have a really flat edge there
for that bearing to spin freely.
So you should have speed rings
and you'll have one go over the top of your axle there.
You'll put your wheel on.
and then the other speed ring should go over the top there.
But since this didn't come with speed rings-
oh, and by the way, when in doubt,
if you don't have speed rings
or if you don't have enough speed rings,
let's say you just have four instead of eight,
as a rule, you want to put it,
make sure you put the ones that you have on this
and not on top of the wheel
because this machined edge
is gonna give you a bigger issue than on the top end.
So we'll put that speed ring back on.
If we had another speed ring,
that speed ring would go over the top there.
And then we would just put our nut back on.
And there's our spin test.
And there is a little bit of friction.
I'm just gonna back that off just a touch.
Just a touch, it's real delicate.
And this is that relationship I talk about,
you know, it really is.
You wanna care about this stuff and you want,
and you can see how that spins easier
with just the slightest little coming off of that nut.
So I think we're good on our spinning wheels.
That's how you take care of that.
Now the final step is
to work with the surfskate truck specifically.
And there's a couple things I wanna do on that.
The very first thing I wanna do is just make sure
that everything is in proper working order.
In this case, this is the Carver CX.
It's just a bushing-based system,
so there's really not anything to worry about.
It's like, yeah, we're working. It's all put together.
But if you're dealing with something like the YOW Meraki
or the Smoothstar Thruster,
that's a different thing.
And then the second thing I'm going to do is
I'm going to do some adjusting on it.
Now, as a newbie,
you might not know exactly how to adjust
or if you even need to or want to adjust.
So that might be something that you'll do as you ride,
not necessarily before you ride,
but adjusting is a big part of the process.
And again, I bring that up because
I keep seeing all these newbies who are afraid to adjust.
They don't know how to adjust.
They are afraid they're gonna break something.
Don't be afraid.
Just experiment.
It's all about personal preference.
Some people like their trucks tighter,
some people like their trucks looser,
and you're just gonna want to play with that.
But have that mindset of-
I'm always adjusting, always.
People ask me, "Do you adjust your trucks?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, of course."
They're made to
so that you can suit the ride to your preference.
Speaking about, lemme show you something on the Carver CX.
Now, for me personally,
since the Carver CX especially
is one of the tighter truck systems,
it's just a bushing, not a spring.
I personally like to ride the CX as loose as possible.
So typically when you open it up,
you'll see some of that bolt sticking up there,
which makes it tighter, and I just want that CX looser.
So personally, every time I get a CX,
I just back that nut off
until it's basically flush with that bolt.
Although kind of as a rule of thumb
is if you can spin that washer,
you might have it a little bit too loose.
There might be a little bit...
see there's kind of some play in that,
which we don't really want.
You can see that sliding off of the bushing like so,
and that's gonna create kind of a weird sensation
in the ride.
So we'll just make sure that you can't spin that washer.
And now we've got all of the flexibility
without any of that looseness around the moving parts there.
Now let's just give this a quick,
I call it the island test and that's,
I just ride around my little kitchen island here.
And let's make sure that my adjustments on my truck
that I'm loose enough
and that I'm not making any squeaking noise.
And then we're off to the races
to take this sweet girl out for a ride.
We're gonna just ride it around
and we're gonna just test for squeaking.
And we got no squeaking
and I'm testing for-
Ooh! Let's not hit the carpet here.
But I'm testing for the looseness of my truck
and make sure that that's all adjusted how I want it to.
And we're golden.
We've got a nice loose CX.
We got zero squeaking.
We are ready to take this baby out for a ride.
So newbies, I hope you find this helpful.
Don't be afraid of your surfskate,
develop a relationship with it.
Really know your moving parts,
and that's gonna help you a lot
in your surfskating journey.