Slalocybins For Surfskating
tl;dr; Don’t try it, it does not work. If you want to know why and why slalom trucks are still nice to ride read below.
The surf skate truck landscape isn’t so amazing if you are into it for a while. The concept of the trucks on the market is quite often pretty much the same. Most common trucks are just slightly different flavours of the same concept, especially in the springless surf skate field.
While looking through a lot of skateboard patents the other day, most of the major brands even use 50 degree up front and 10 degree rear angle, plus some extreme rake and possibly even a mix of kingpin systems. This creates the unique surfy feel of surf skates as we know it. Most likely this is the best angle for surf skates, but I wanted to experiment with it.
Slalocybins
A bit of markt research later I stumbled on DT Slalocybins. These trucks are used for slalom races, but they are very popular in the long distance pumping world too. Slalocybins are adjustable between 40-75 degree up front, and 10-20 degree in the back. For my tests I acquired the 125-131-137-143mm version. Yes they are even flexible adjustable in their width. 143mm was close enough to most common surf skate trucks, the other version available was too small for this project.
Long Distance Pumping
Long Distance Pumping is essentially a longboarding discipline which also uses pumping for forward movement. But the boards are far different to surf skates. LDP puts speed and distance over style. You don’t want to ride long distances with a surf skate or surf skate with a LDP board.
LDP pumping has much less flow and lacks the surf-alike movements as they are found in surf skating. Here is a video which should help you to get an idea about LDP and the desired movement:
LDP setups use something between 55 -70 degrees up front and 0-35 degree rear. You notice a pattern if you compare these angles with the adjustable radius of the Slalocybins. This might be the reason why Slalocybins are also used here.
Slalom
Slalocybins originate from another longboarding discipline called simply slalom. Slalom is what the name suggest, people ridding around pylons with high speed, trying to win a race. There is a lot of technical knowledge involved in this field. Riders use different wheels in the front and in the back of their board to create maximum flexibility. Winning setups are fine tuned to the max. How does slalom look like? If you don’t know it yet, take a look at the video below.
Carving Along
But since we are all into pumping and carving, why not trying to use their fancy technology for our needs?
So I picked up a pair of Slalocybins from a European dealer of choice. Don’t Trip is US based and pretty hard to get here. I waited nearly 4 weeks for the delivery. But here they are!
Slalocybins are something different, they are made using CNC and have adjustable truck widths. Nothing like the common cast trucks you get of the shelf for surf skating. I assembled them to a board I used to use with Carver CX before. Even rode the board once for an hour to be able to tell the difference.
After that I removed the old trucks from the deck and attached the new Cybins. I adjusted the angle to 50/10 which is the most commonly used angle in the surf skate world and tried it out. But hell, it didn’t felt like surf skating at all. The board was much harder to pump than expected.
I played around with the different angles and went up to 70 degree in the front. With this drastic angle it started to feel remotely like pumping a crappy surf skate but you simply cannot get into the flow you are used too. Another trick from the LDP world was flipping the rear, it makes the setup even more pump able but felt a bit weird and wasn’t super for surf skating either.
The rake and the other parameters of the surf skate trucks seem to add in here, as well as other bushings. Bushing of the Slalocybins are hard to replace as the bolt sits pretty stiff, so I stopped here. Still they are not that hard that it should make big differences.
Takeaway
What to do with such expensive trucks now? Well, I tried the setup on a pump track and it was amazing. It’s still different to surf skating on a pump track, but you could get to much higher speeds with the slalom setup. I now run a 65-15 split and have to say that I am quite satisfied with the result. If you are coming from surf skating and you want to have a different experience on pump tracks, go for a slalom setup. Slalocybins are not the cheapest trucks you can get, but what is money worth if you cannot have fun skating. It’s worth it, promised. I will also try it out with different angles in some later downhill attempts at softer hills.
Alex is a passionated engineer and skater who discovered surf skating as a hobby to fill the days between his windsurf sessions. Skating now takes so much time that it became his primary hobby. Alex runs this website as a platform for his hobby and discoveries.