Thank you, Fingerboarding.

I can still remember exactly where I was when I first saw a Tech Deck. My cousin had one at a family gathering and immediately, I was gripped. Before long I had one of my own, a Birdhouse. Iconic. Through primary school I rode the wave as most kids did, a board in my pocket, hiding them in class, or having them confiscated. Subtlety is not my strong suit. The wave came and the wave went the way of the yo-yo, the cool kids moved on to the next thing, but I couldn’t drop it. Cardboard ramps populated my bedroom, I cut logos out of ads in skate magazines and taped them to anything and everything.

And then came FFI. Finger Flip Inc. My second home for years. I’m at a loss for words to say how influential this community was for me. The hub for DIY fingerboard mods, FFI had us heating up the kicks of a Tech Deck to customise the shape, putting heat shrink around wheels to give a grippier ride, gluing sandpaper to a board in search of grippier griptape, making bushings out of rubber bracelets – the methods were endless. Then Brandon Jones had us pressing boards between two Tech Decks, and eventually heading to the hardware store to find Bondo to make molds. Boards were made, sold and traded, traveling the global mail system on a wing and a prayer that they’d arrive in one piece and that when they did, the holes were drilled straight enough to be able to get the trucks on.
We ordered Riptape and reused it on setup after setup, the precut sheets covering less of the boards as they grew wider.

We watched endless hours of YouTube; Fingers of Fury, the original Mike Schneider videos, Martin Winkler, Eric Smith, Taylor (Lucas and Rosenbauer), Jay Linehan and a multitude of others. We were blessed with the first bearing wheels, Substance went up against Flatface, we drooled over Berlinwoods and anything from Blackriver. Elias Assmuth blew our minds. The community grew globally, but unless you were in Germany or close enough to make it to a Flatface Rendezvous, fingerboarding felt very isolated. We were held together by the online forums like FFI in a pre-Instagram era.

After a young adulthood hiatus from fingerboarding, I was in floored to see what the scene had been up to while I was away. Boards are all beautifully pressed,  shaped, rounded, drilled, countersunk and finished. There are multiple high quality truck companies to choose from. There are endless options of wheels and formulas, single and dual bearing... the list goes on. We are so incredibly spoilt to have access to gear that we never would have imagined could exist back in the day.

Fingerboarding has also grown it’s own culture. Much like that of skateboarding, but very much it’s own thing. It has it’s own heroes and villains, it has hurdles, it has highs and lows, and we owe so much to it. For those of us who are a little short of attention, it’s a way to keep our hands busy. It’s an uninhibited way to express creativity and to have a style of your own. It’s a platform to meet and connect with people, to get beat by someone pulling out a switch laser in a game of S.K.A.T.E. and to do something that has absolutely no point to it other than joy. We’re not saving lives, but we’re having fun, and sometimes that’s actually okay. Sometimes you’ve just got to find some time for things like this. See what I did there?

Thank you, fingerboarding.