Everyone gets the wobs. Whether it's the mild shimmy you just rode through or the sudden feeling of disaster just before a gremlin wrenches the deck out from under you, we've all dealt with it.  Of course, the first thing for us all to learn is to keep weight on that front truck, but for those looking to know and understand more about how that gremlin does his dirty work, and how you can dial your board in to castrate the bastard, we have skateboard truck engineer and longboarder Neil Stratton's detailed article from Concrete Wave Magazine...

Speed Wobble Hunting

When I was asked to write about speed wobbles for the magazine, it made me realize that while I had spent the better part of my life on a skateboard, I didn’t really know that much about the wobs. Sure, we all have our stories, complete with tales of how we survived them. And from these we’ve created all kinds of homespun theories,many of which seem to contradict each other. One skater I asked said he crouches down and touches the nose of his board to gain control during wobble onset; another said not to crouch or make any drastic body movements. So how do we know what is good advice and what is fiction?

I decided to explore the wobble phenomenon from two perspectives, alternating between the scientific and the experiential, in hopes that between the two a better understanding of wobbles would emerge.  I start my inquiry into the science behind wobbles by looking at the laws that govern the phenomena we’re experiencing. But the more I look into the physics of wobbles, the broader and more complicated the story gets. There’s the kinematic analysis of the geometry of motion, the harmonic motion of sine waves and the properties of self-exciting oscillation. Then on the mechanical side there are steering systems, dissected into the basic geometries and their performance characteristics. At first I wonder how much of this will actually relate back to my skateboarding speed wobbles, but the more I read, the more I’m amazed at how wobbles occur in everything, from vehicles and wings to electrical systems and the stock market. They’re the gremlin in the works of everything.