If you are a skateboarder or just recently got a skateboard for sale, or one that has been skating for awhile now, there is going to come a time when you must assemble your own skateboard. You may not be assembling everything from scratch, but what if you wanted to upgrade your wheels, change your trucks, or just replace the grip tape on the skateboard? This is something that every skateboarder out there should know, sure you can have the local skate shops do all of this for you, but this usually comes with a price also. Plus if you assemble the skateboard yourself, you can take great pride into knowing that you did it all by yourself, and you can trust that nothing is going to come loose or off, because you did it yourself and you did a good job, right? There are many Skate Tools
available that will help making this a very easy process.
Install Grip Tape On a Skateboard
Let’s begin with the grip tape assembly. All you really need to do this is a razor knife, or something sharp. Start off by peeling the back of the grip tape off, and covering over the skateboard deck. (Assuming that the deck doesn’t have any grip tape on it….) Try to get it as smooth as possible, and you do not want it bubbling up at all by putting it on all crooked. Once you have the entire skateboard deck covered, cut the excess grip tape from around the board, the grip tape should be about 1/8th of an inch inward. Some people may use a file to file it down on the sides. That’s it, now let’s move on to the trucks.
Install Trucks on a Skateboard
Some people like to put the skateboard deck in vice when performing this, it makes the job easier, but can be done with out it. First you want to poke holes through the grip tape so that you are able to slide the truck bolts through. Next, if you want to have riser pads, put them on the back of the deck first, sliding them up through the screws. When putting the trucks on, you want the king pins to be facing each other, meaning that circular little thing on the trucks should be pointing toward the other one. Next just tighten the nuts down, nice and firm, then that’s basically it.
Installing The Wheels and Bearings on Your Skateboard
Most skateboard trucks, you will need a 1/2 inch socket to do this. There are 8 bearings in a skateboard, 4 for each wheel. Push the bearings into the wheel, by applying pressure to the outside of the bearing, do this for all 8 bearings. There are also types of skate tools available that make installing bearings a whole lot easier. It can be a pain doing it by hand, sometimes you can put an optional spacer inside of the wheel right in the middle. Next all you have to do is put it over the truck, and tighten down on the bolt. Make sure that you tighten down on the nut slow and easy, you do not want it super tight either, you want just a teeny tiny bit of place within the wheel.
That’s really all there is to it when it comes to skateboard assembly, it’s pretty simple, now go give it a try!
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