Blake Carpenter.

Vinyl me, please.

Blake is from Daytona Beach, Florida. He rode for Toy Machine up until 2022 and then floated around without a board sponsor for a couple years. There were rumors of a spot on Nyjah Huston's Disorder, but that never happened. He also moved back to Florida from California. His other sponsors are Nike and Spitfire. He recently started his own company called Vinyl. The team includes Art Cordova and Thomas Dritsas. Blake had a really smooth part for Spitfire in 2024. He has a solid grasp on quality technical skateboarding with a few big handrails thrown in the mix.

Skateboarding has been a chore lately and not fun. I’m trying to work through it with minimal progress. I'll get a couple tricks fine and then struggle with others that I normally can do easily. I hadn't done any switch pop shove-its in a while and then rattled off a bunch of decent ones no problem the last two nights. I'll follow that up with not being able do a boardslide or a 50-50 on a ledge. I guess that's how it goes. This happens to me every few years. I think it might be more of a mental thing, although it has been weird gear issues in the past. I don't exactly know. I'm going to keep on trying and hope things get better.

Jonathan Mehring took the photos.

Thrasher - July 2013 Volume 34 Number 7