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"The Speedstick is a totally new
design. I build all of my boards around the
trucks and wheels, where as a lot of other people
build a luge to what they think it should look
like and design to that image. The focus of
my design is on performance and I design my
luges to be an interface between my body, the
trucks and the wheels.
Moe Speed who make Millennium Trucks, and other
really nice custom equipment out of solid billet,
showed me a set of really low trucks he had
made. The trucks got me thinking. If I were
to start with a set of really low trucks, I
wouldn't have to design such drop in the board,
and I could to keep the centre of gravity low.
We discussed things further and after
about a month or so a box arrived as a present
and it contained some of the new low style trucks."
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| "I
had previously been building luges out of curved
woods, which looks really nice but they are very
difficult to duplicate and manufacturer. You can't
send someone the plans because it doesn't really
translate if they don't get the exact same curvature
in the wood. I wanted to find something that had
the potential to be relatively easy to manufacturer
like the Lott Classic Buttboard that you now see
tons of people have |
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| One of
the criteria for the new Speedstick was that no
piece could be longer than 4 foot long so it could
easily unbolt and pack into the same bag as a
buttboard. I wanted to make it out of as few parts
as possible and of course I wanted it to handle
really well." |
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"If you have only 4 wheels it's very difficult
to keep up in a hard turn with say a Rogers
Luge that has 6 wheels. So I tried using the
side-by-side wheel layout which is another unique
thing about the Speedstick. So where you would
normally have 1 wheel per axle, I have 2 wheels
back to back. The Kryptonics have a narrower
bearing set so they take up less room on an
axle than a Cherry Bomb or one of the ABEC 11
wheels. So when I mount the wheels back-to-back
it gives me 8 wheels to the Rogers 6 wheels,
and it gives me only 2 trucks to worry about
tuning.
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I think this is my first big race with the
Speedstick, and its behaving very nicely. The
hand position and how your body is positioned
is like the buttboard. However handling wise
its very different. The buttboards have the
Randal luge trucks or the R2 trucks and at speed
those trucks want to go straight, so you can
play around on the board and really have to
grab on to it and really lean over to get it
to go around a turn which makes it a very easy
board for a beginner to ride.
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The Millennium Trucks have a Z-roller geometry
which are very twitchy and offer high performance.
It takes very little input to make it turn.
The Speedstick has a longer wheelbase than the
buttboard but it retains the same neutral balance
as the buttboard. So when you put it into a
turn all 8 wheels slide, and you are not coning
out the front and the back. I set out to distribute
all the weight evenly on the 8 wheels and to
provide as much traction as possible when going
down the course."
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| "Go
to Buttboarding.com
it has links with companies that sell them like
The Luge Store" |
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No.
1 in 'Buttboard'
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No.
3 in 'Street Luge' (in
2001)
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| "Broken
foot. I had it put in a walking cast so I could still
race with it." |
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| "A
closed version of 'de-gloving':
I got in a high-speed accident (+60 mph) where I hit
my arm on the road. It didn't tear through the leathers
but it was enough of a bang and a pull to rip the skin
off my muscles and then the whole thing filled up like
a big water balloon of blood in my arm. It was absolutely
grotesque looking for quite some time." |
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| Tips
and advice for those starting out? |
| Just do
it. Its very simple to start with just a regular skateboard
and if its not set up right try to copy the set-up of
some of the buttboards, which are more stable and better
suited to you body for laying down on. Make sure you
wear some really good protection and get some good gloves.
If you go really slow you can kind of get the feel of
it without going much more than 10 mph in a park, parking
lot where there's not a lot of traffic. Just get some
experience whizzing around on it and having some fun
and build slowly from there. |
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Getting
started
