Ride Precision Tech.
Blueprint was started up in 1996 by Dan Magee and Alvin Singfield. It was a second board brand to Panic, which was started in 1995. Panic was initially the more well known name, but Blueprint soon eclipsed them and the companies merged. Blueprint had a solid run up until 2012 when the world ended. They released a number of quality videos over that time span. As a sign that they were doing it right, American companies tried to poach some of their team riders. Fortunately skateboarding had grown to more of a global industry so many of their riders stayed. They even put a couple of blokes from the states on the team, too.
We all know John's story. He was pro for Blueprint, joined the Zero army, and is still out there today fighting the good fight for mental health awareness.
I took a refresher course on British skateboarding last night by skimming through all my issues of Sidewalk. This week might be lean on details. I apologize in advance. Also Sidewalk had a lot of great photos, but they used strange fonts and had the text way too small far too often. Some of that can be chalked up to the new technology for desktop publishing that was being used in the late 1990s.
Odds & Ends
The trucks with the curved hanger were called Navigators. I'll do another feature on obscure trucks from the low 2000s in the future since there were so many of them. I'm burned out on trucks right now.
Toy Machine is celebrating their 30th anniversary as the company debuted in the fall of 1993. Ed Templeton is posting some neat stories about the early days on Facebook. It looks like they are doing some guest boards for former riders, too.
What if SOTY season is chill this year?
Thrasher - May 2001 Volume 21 Number 5
4 comments:
Might go get either the B.A. or Elissa reissue this week...although why they're so much more coin than regular decks is annoying. However those led me down the internet rabbit hole to Pusher Wheels (?) and the Philly (Getz, Bam & M.M East Coast Powerhouse) part in a TWD vid - which still holds up and is a fun watch.
Those Blueprint levels of deck construction seem a bit much.
TWS obviously. They had a string of videos that were must watches.
The Blueprint board constructions mirror what Element was doing. I wonder if Giant was helping out with their boards?
The Maldonado deck looks really cool. I wish Ed would simplify the graphics a little. The heat transfer process allows for more art variations, but he's been carried away with things the last few years.
The guest boards are $71 vs. $68 for regular decks on the Toy Machine site. No idea what happens when you run that through Canadian dollars.
I'd never heard of Pusher wheels.
The guest boards here in shops are roughly $20 to $25 more than a regular pro deck and obviously more than a team deck. However I don't think Mike Maldonado is getting whatever the difference is...which with the way the Cdn dollar is going would work out to about $1.38
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