

And they also buffer the obstacles on the road such as pebbles and cracks, making longer rides much more comfortable. When it comes to the wheels, longboards have bigger and softer wheels, which makes them faster and suitable for all kinds of surfaces. Like skateboards, you should choose your truck according to the width of your longboard.Ī deck with 9” width and more, needs 180mm trucks. They have a reverse kingpin (RKP) and hangers are mostly 150mm or 180mm. Generally, skateboard trucks are narrower and use a traditional kingpin (TKP). Skateboards have trucks that are more rigid, which makes them perfect for grinds and makes the tricks easier to perform. We ended up with a sleek and smooth board that provides perfect classic surf-style riding, land-paddling and noseriding.īoth skateboards and longboards have trucks at the bottom, but they are very different.

The Fish, for example, aka ‘The Longboard Porsche’, is one of the best high-performance street-riders on the market precisely because it was shaped just like the actual fish surfboard.Īnd we designed our Classic with the original longboard surfboard in mind. Hamboards collection has 7 different models all designed after famous surfboard models. Longboards, on the other side, have long, narrow decks and come in many different shapes and sizes that provide a different surfing experience. Its deck is usually curved upwards on both ends, which helps skaters do the Ollie and the flip. When it comes to the actual shape, skateboards can have many different designs, but the shape stays pretty much the same. It's precisely their size that makes longboards more stable and provides rail-to-rail balance, which is why they are so awesome for beginners. They are on average 33-60 inches long and 9-10 inches wide, while skateboards are 28-32 inches long and 7-10 inches wide. Like I said, longboards are usually much longer than skateboards. Longboards started becoming more and more popular precisely because they were versatile in shape and size and could be used on various terrains.

Īnd even though the longest longboards were much shorter than the actual surfboards, they had an almost identical design. The 90s also saw a change in truck technology, boards became more stable because of reverse kingpins. The idea was to keep the original shape of the surfboard and add flexible, soft wheels to recreate the feeling of riding the waves. These people started putting roller-skate wheels on their boards and slowly started shaping the longboards as we know them today. This was the era when sea-surfers and snowboarders joined hands to get a real feel of the surf on land. In 1990s the longboarding culture really exploded on the scene and this was no fad. Skateboards never really managed to fully recreate the surfing sensation, but that's because their design was nowhere near the actual surfboard. Longboarding came later and it became popular in the recent decades. Of course, the first skateboards were far from what they are today, but over the years, they were perfected into the shapes we know now. A group of surfers decided to make the most out of the flat days, and they created the first generation of skateboards by putting wheels on wooden planks.

The history of skateboarding started in the 50s as the side product of surfing. If you're in impasse and unsure about which one to go for, you need to know the main differences and benefits of both. We at Hamboards couldn’t stay away from this ‘Longboard vs Skateboard’ debate and wanted to weigh in on the topic and try to settle the debate. There are even debates going on as to which one is better and which one is more fun. These two forms of sidewalk-surfing are starkly different. Skateboarding and longboarding may seem similar to an untrained eye, but take a closer look and you’ll find they are actually quite different.
