A snowboarders point of view.

By Todd Bradford

No one has ever accused me of being the most talented skater. In fact quite the opposite is true. My skating ability is limited to staying on and jumping off before I crash.

After weeks of agonizing waiting I finally got my hands on my new freebord. Just looking at this took my breath away. It truly is a piece of art. It's a lot longer than a regular skateboard or even a longboard. The trucks are longer and the third middle wheel looks a little out of place. My first time on it was a little weird because to start off you need to ride only on the middle wheels. After a few times I got used to the ride and started to feel a lot more comfortable. One of the major differences I felt right away between snowboarding and freebording is that with a snowboard you feel a lot more stable because the whole board is in contact with the snow most of the time. With the freebord you only have two little wheels in contact with the street at any time.

Later that day I got the opportunity to really try it out. Marcus came to my work (I'm a janitor at an elementary school) and we got down to business. We started out outside, but there were a lot of rocks and we were still pretty shaky, so we moved inside and rode in the halls. After about 20 minutes I was able to ride with ease and felt pretty comfortable going straight. It took a while but I started to try sliding and found that it really did feel like snowboarding. I was able to do a 180 slide after ten minutes. It felt really good, but it was still shaky and I felt that something just wasn't right.

I got back on-line and looked at the owners manual. It gave some hints on tweaking and customizing the freeboards trucks. After fooling around with the tensions and height of the middle wheel I finally got it to where I felt good with it. Getting back on the board I started doing 180's with ease and tried a few 360's. The first few times I had to jump off before falling, but then I finally hit one. It felt like the FREEBORD GOD was smiling down on me. Although I'm not perfect with the 360's I am able to do them about 75% of the time now.

In total it took about two hours from start to finish before I was able to do a 360 and feel comfortable doing it. This is by far the greatest skateboard ever made! This was a lot easier to use than a regular skateboard because of my background with snowboarding. Even though this was easy to learn the basics, I know that there's a lot more to learn before I venture onto the big hills.

For more information on the Freebord, visit their website: www.freebord.com.

If you've ridden (or ride) a Freebord and would like to add your impressions, email them to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or read other comments and add your own here.