So, we went to Maryhill and nearly forgot about ASR.  Was that real recent?  Y'all are persistent, we'll give you that.  Here's the second half of our walkthrhough at the September ASR: 

The Silverfish ASR Tour, Part2

 ASR wouldn’t be what it is without craziness, hot women and clandestine reservoirs of ice-cold beer.  Since all three of those things would be in abundant supply at the GFH Boards exhibit, I made a beeline there each morning for “breakfast”, where I would be regaled with ideas from the coterie of beautiful coeds that Garrett Hurley’d brought in to provide retailers a diversion from the steely-eyed surf pros doing double duty as sales reps and site security during ASR.   There, surrounded by the new line of GFH Boards’ minis and longboards, I’d hear tales of the girls’ conquests over contestants at the beer-pong table as I planned out my day.

The new line of GFH Boards includes some cool new shapes and a full set of new 65mm wheels.  With a shape so similar to the ZigZag that I had to look twice, the new wheels are poured by an older wheel company looking to make a comeback with bouncy new urethane formulas and some neon colors.  They’re soft and feel like they’ll be grippy little carvers.  We’ll let you know after we get some time on them in the coming weeks.

Moving on to the gear zone, we came by the extremely large Bern helmets display.  Most other safety gear companies were either represented inside a distributor’s booth, as with Bell, or in the variety of small distro’s there to display various wares.  Bern, however, is charging forward with many new helmets and designs, some of which look pretty good.  They’re still selling the teeny-bopper soft-foam helmets, though, and they’ll never be really credible in the safety gear world until they move beyond that stupidity. 

Now, here was something exciting!  Developed with the Earthwing crew out of New York City, these are the very first of the 888 slide gloves.   Can you see the mark of Jessica Scorchia and Brian Petrie on them? 

Solid fit and construction. 

We’re impressed:  the gloves are very sturdy and fit the hand well.  This shot gives you a look at the construction and stitching, including the wrist wrap.  Note the finger pucks:  888 is going to ship each set of gloves with both styles – you’ll get a finger bar and the split-finger discs with each set. 

Thick pucks and choices, too. 

These aren’t available yet:  as you read this, the first retail sets are coming out of the factory and into shipping.  We’ll predict a reliable supply in November.

With visions of slide gloves in our heads, we cruised over to see the Landyachtz crew.  Stoked to be at ASR and fully decked with boards, wheels, flat-screen displays for the Concrete Wave Evolutions DVD and their own Landy disc, Tom Edstrand, Mike Perreten, Ryan Theobald, Sam and Striker were all there –and all needed:  there was a steady stream of retailers and skaters coming by to see the “booth with the crazy speedboard guys”. 

2007 has been a good year for Landyachtz, and ’08 looks to be better.  They’ve got a  number of new designs on their boards, the refined Evo with tree graphics, a catalog of their own wheels ranging from the Krypto-inspired classic Hawgs to the excellent, Gumball-inspired 77mm centerset Hawg, now available in both the performance ‘thanes you’ve already seen and a cool-looking, clear, cruiser version.

They’ve also got a lust for more racing wheels and it was this monster on the right that drew my attention.  Look at it next to the 77mm Hawg… it’s big, it’s soft, it burned my eyes with brightness and it’s the super-secret Landy race wheel, to be tested under Meatball’s board at the Maryhill Festival of Speed!  You weren’t supposed to see this.  Heck, we weren’t supposed to see this… but now you’ll know what was on Tom’s board in practice runs…look closely at some of Malakai Kingston’s shots from the first day of skating.  He switched back to BigZigs for the finals; these yellow giants may have been too soft up at Maryhill.  

Another note on the Landyachtz guys:  what a stoked crew!  Between the massive Striker chatting and charming passersby with his stoke and accent, to their provision of cheap beers for our outlaw session on Friday night, they’re welcome in San Diego, anytime.  On the subject of outlaw sessions... 

Saturday morning, the first people I saw were Garrett Hurley and Tom Edstrand.  As I walked up, Tom was quick to give some stoke about the Silverfish Session the night before…and to tell me he still had one of our helmets.  Every ASR, it’s our privilege and stoke to invite skaters in the industry to come skate our crown-jewel garage, “Banana Bay”.   This round, we finally got to take a few laps down 6 floors with the Landyachtz crew…

…and about 55 others.  That pic is about 2/3 of us, the largest session ever in Banana Bay, and all while there were cars in it, along with more trash and dust than we’ve ever seen in this normally pristine spot.  The Honey Skateboards crew, Loaded gang, Pool Kings, Bennetts, and a buncha locals didn’t seem to mind the huge dust trails spewing off the back of boards as we descended, nor that the pesky management had turned off one of our elevators, so we skated for two and half hours, trading boards, trying out the new Bennett wheels & truks on different setups, laughing and shootin’ the shit.  Once again, we had skaters hitting a garage for the first time ever, some on longboards for the first time, too.  This was the best part of ASR for me.  I got dropped by Edstrand, nearly took out Yandall and traded the inside line with Tatum on a few runs, laughing the whole way.

So, the next morning, Edstrand was apparently over to get the straight stuff about “the Watergate Break In” at the GFH exhibit.  This ASR was marked by more vandalism and theft on the “secured” floors, overnight, than ever.  Honey Skateboards’ hardwood panel booth was tagged with a paint pen, then trashed while the show was closed!  Wheels and boards disappeared from another booth.  Totally lame stuff.  But the kick-off for the looting season was apparently before the show even started, when GFH himself was finishing up their exhibit and reportedly caught a member of Big Corporate, already broken into the GFH Boards truck and pissed to be found!  Witnesses abound, but GFH passed on calling the cops as long as the head honcho came over to…  Anyway, so Tom and Garrett were discussing their market share relative to the big guys and I took the opportunity to head over to Exkate.

This was a cool group to meet: the new owners of Exkate.  They’ve upgraded the electric boards “under the hood”, created the "Altered" name for the electrics and added a bunch of new shapes and high quality decks to top them with.  A steady stream of skaters were launching themselves down the carpeted walkways on the electric dragsters, so I took the opportunity to ask some hard questions about QC and their famous trucks.

The good news is, these guys didn’t fluff me.  They acknowledged some recent problems with QC on the trucks, explained that the issue came before they bought the company and said they’ve stopped all production of Exkates by the factory in question.  Adamant that the next time we all buy an Exkate, it will hold up, they certainly cheered up George Orton, who stopped by and asked when he’d be able to sell Exkates like “the ones Sean Mallard and I used to ride”.  He left satisfied.  By the way, Mallard was on Exkates in Banana Bay with us the night before, looking aggro and stoked.

From Exkate, I headed upstairs to the big deck, overlooking San Diego’s bay.  I found Ryan and Eric from Ladera, along with this little mini you see, above.  It’s nicely made and it turns out there’s a cool story behind it:  see, when the three Ladera dudes were in High School, they took a woodworking class that required a “project” to complete the course.  Since they were already making their own longboards, they figured to make a hardwood skateboard and were sent  by the teacher into a dusty attic to find wood.  What they found were a stack of solid Purpleheart minis, produced by their teacher in the 1970’s and long-forgotten.  Those decks became the inspiration for the entire Ladera Longboards operation, and this deck is traced directly from one of them.

No, it’s not solid Purpleheart.  That would be obscene.  It’s dyed ply, with a little concave, a kicked nose the original didn’t have and super-turny Bennetts. It's got some nice pop, not too much flex and feels graet underfoot.

These Nike guys have more models than I could count, and were flooded with “pros” I could swear were cursing Nike’s existence what, a year ago?  Times change.

Fashion, function…all here.  Too bad we couldn’t figure out a way to make ourselves matter to Oakley.  Dang, that persimmon lens rules on Pump Station!

Anyway, back to the upper deck.  This round, ASR had an entire section of the show that was technically open to the public (you just had to walk around the back of the convention center, climb 6 flights of stairs and then come in) and that featured “green industry” in the action sports world.  Hemp shoes, hempen surfboards, tea-stained shirts, you get the idea.

But among the green were some interesting things:  some nasty, hideous-looking energy bars, made from lawn-clippings and who knows what, but that actually taste pretty darn good and are full of those vitamins we’ve been hearing so much about…  Anyway, they were good stuff.

Even better, we found the Men from Comet.  There, in the “green” industry section were guys that have been dedicated to “green” for a long time, even if it nearly put them out of business.  Well, they’re back and they had something remarkable.

This is going to sound as granola as it is (and I promptly dubbed a deck “the Granola Board”) but these maple decks are bonded with Soy Protein Glue.  Now, I’m paraphrasing here, but these fellas from Cornell developed a soy polymer that’s as strong as epoxy and at least as waterproof.  They make flooring with it (that’s what you’re seeing above) and now, Comet makes decks with it.  They wet-mop the maple veneer or jute-fiber to be used in the structure of decks, let it cure, then dry-mount the entire stack into their presses for a major clamping and some heat.  The soy reactivates, bonds without any air bubbles and cures.  Voila, and the whole board is “100% non-toxic”.  The trimmings and scraps are shredded and… composted!  These guys actually are cutting edge in the green biz.   

From Comet, we were off to see the fellas from San Diego Speed.  Yeah, they’re really from Pomona and the boards are from China, but this is not the point.  The point is that they continue to offer $100 completes in big box stores that don’t totally suck.  In fact, the new line looks and ride great, for the price they sell at.   SDS is bringing the stoke where they can and we like these guys. 

When we got back to the main floor, things had definitely changed:  somebody opened the doors and let hundreds of kids in to roam the floor.  The chants of, “Hey, can I have this?” were coming out of every booth, and we watched them strip the Never Summer Booth dry in seconds after they guys figured it would be cool to hand out a few shirts.  Moments later, every loose piece of clothing had been stripped off the displays and the NS dudes were latched onto decks that nearly went, too.  Pretty funny!

And then, the show was over, according to the voice on the PA system.  Get your stuff and get the heck out…  and so, we did.  After a stop at several exhibits (“Hey, can I have that, bro?”), it was out the door and over to the Irish bar used as a post-ASR respite every time we’re all in town.   The Carrascos were there, fresh from their Skate Jam on the Embarcadero that attracted the typical crowd of freestyle skaters there for the jam and totally amazed tourists, simply blown away by what these guys do on street boards.  So was Michael Brooke, eccentric genius Thane MaGee with his new board we’ll show you soon enough and a few others.  After some beers, some food and some stoke, I headed out across the night, back to where I’d stashed my car in Banana Bay.  Now dark and empty but for discarded flyers and energy drinks.  It was silent…and worth a few runs on the 44Pin I’d slapped some Vipers on a few nights earlier.  Silent running

So, the Fall ’07 ASR was notable for the increased presence and importance of longboard companies and product, in numbers and in the eyes of retailers.  That was good to see, even as it became more apparent that mainstream skateboarding business is jaundiced and spooked by the changing market.   It was also notable, however, how many new products were being prepared for market, but that we didn’t see official roll-outs at ASR, where it’s traditionally made sense to do it.  In the coming weeks, you’ll see new trucks, new decks, new wheels and more that were either “eyes only” and kept from prying eyes at the show or simply held for release on the internet.  That’s our report this round.  Go Skate, will ya?