Fingerboard (skateboard)

A fingerboard is a scaled-down replica of a

Professional skateboarder Lance Mountain is widely credited with creating the first fingerboard.^[3] In the 1985 Powell-Peralta skateboarding video titled "Future Primitive," Mountain brought fingerboarding to the skateboarders of the world. Around the same time, Mountain wrote an article on how to make fingerboards in TransWorld SKATEboarding magazine.^[1] In the video, Lance Mountain rode a homemade fingerboard in a double-bin sink. It is widely accepted that this is where the idea for the ramp found in The Search for Animal Chin came from. Some consider this the earliest fingerboard footage available for public viewing. That homemade fingerboard was built from wood, tubes, and toy train axles.^[1]

The first company to notice the potential of the fingerboard was Somerville International's Fingerboard brand, established in 1987. They were the first to mass-produce fingerboards that weren't intended to be used with a figurine or accessories. They were also the first to include licensed graphics from actual skateboard graphics with the introduction of the Pro-Precision board.^[1]

Although fingerboarding was a novelty within the skateboarding industry for years, as skateboarding reached widespread popularity in the late 1990s, X-Concepts realized the potential for the fingerboards, specifically for products bearing the logos and branding of real skateboarding brands, and introduced the Tech Deck brand. Fingerboards caught on during this period and Tech Deck has since grown into a widely recognized fingerboard brand. Toy fingerboards are now available as inexpensive novelty toys as well as high-end collectibles, complete with accessories one would find in use with standard-size skateboards.^[4][2][5] Fingerboards are also used by skateboarders as 3-D model visual aids to understand potential tricks and maneuvers.^[6]

Fingerboarding is popular in Europe, Singapore, Asia and the United States. Although fingerboarding originated in the United States, it has gained much popularity in Eastern Europe. Fingaspeak, in

Fingerboards are used by a range of people, from those using them as toys, to skateboarders and related sports professionals envisioning not only their own skating maneuvers but for others as well. Similar to

These objects can be used simply for enjoyment and also to assist the visualization of skateboarding tricks or the "flow" from one trick to the next (colloquially referred to as "lines").

Components

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Similar to a skateboard, a fingerboard consists of several components:

• Deck: Fingerboard decks are made out of plastic or wood. The shapes vary from popsicle decks, cruiser decks, and old-school decks. Modern and/or higher-quality decks have a defined nose and tail just like a real skateboard. Over the years decks got wider, for example old decks made by various brands were 29mm wide, while today decks range from 26mm to 34mm.
• Trucks: Trucks are mostly mass-produced from metal for the toy industry. In recent years, however, there have also been manufacturers who produce special trucks specifically for the sport and thereby set significantly higher standards for quality in lower quantities.
• Wheels: Wheels are made of CNC, urethane , or resin, widely spread is polyurethane. Higher-quality wheels are also equipped with bearings. They are either cast, 3D printed, or machined on a lathe (or their industrial equivalent).
• Bearings: The bearings used in fingerboard wheels are also the same as skateboard wheel bearings. They are made of high-quality steel to make the wheels spin smoothly, the same as skateboards.^[10]
• Tape: For better adhesion, a grip tape is glued to the deck, which consists of either rubber, neoprene, fine-grain (similar to sandpaper), or foam skateboard grip.
• Screws: Are the screws that attach the trucks to the deck.
• Nuts: The nuts ensure that the wheels stay on the trucks. Widely spread are locknuts, that do not loosen as easily.
• Bushings: Fingerboard trucks have two bushings that usually smooths out riding the board. Cheap plastic boards sometimes only have hard plastic bushings, which can break easily and make it harder to do certain tricks on the fingerboard.

Fingersnowboarding, handboards and fingersurfboards

Similar to fingerboarding, fingersnowboarding is

Handboards, similar to fingerboards, are a scaled-down version of a skateboard roughly half to a third of the size of a standard skateboard (29 centimeters or 11 in) and utilizes a person's hands rather than just their fingers to control the board and perform tricks and maneuvers. Professional skateboarder Erik Ellington was the one to invent the hand board: "When we were kids, my friend Esao and I used to make little skateboards out of cardboard. They were actually way more intricate than that, but it would take a long time to explain... we used cardboard, clothes lines, pens for the trucks, bearings for the wheels. We got really good at them, surpassing anything we could actually do on a real skateboard. When I moved to California, I approached the company that was making fingerboards at the time and I showed them a video we'd made, kind of like a sponsor me tape. They liked it, and eventually went into production with it, giving us an inventor's royalty and a contract."^[13] Handboards, because of their larger size, more closely match the details of a standard skateboard. For instance, a skateboard truck, the wheel structure, would more likely match part for part an actual skateboard truck rather than be a cast one-piece construction or otherwise simplified. If a user preferred a particular type of wood or decorative style that could also more easily resemble a full-scale skateboard.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Skateboarding brands

References