Gravity 42" Bamboo Spoon. Radicalness and flow incarnate.

After seeing the rad video that Gravity recently posted of Robbie Lyons riding the 42″ Spoon Nose, I decided I had to try this board out. I’ve been riding my no-kicktail downhill boards almost exclusively for many months now, and had just felt the need to use a kicktail again.  

After a conversation with Gravitiy, and a little PayPal action, I had the board. I had them send me the same setup that Robbie used in the video – Tracker 149s, wedge risers, and white Gravity Burners.  

I’ve been riding this board in a number of locations over the last 3 weeks. A gnarly ditch with only about 3 feet of flatbottom, some buttery smooth mellow downhill streets, and the usual hill here I skate a lot. First, I was impressed with the way this setup performed in that ditch. 42″ is short enough (at least for me) to sling it around pretty easily in a ditch. The board has just enough flex to feel really nice, but it isn’t bouncy at all. It is plenty stiff for ditch riding. I weigh (today) a little over 210 pounds, and it is pretty stiff.  If you weigh less, it will absorb some shock but that’s about all.  

Just to give you a little more idea of the board’s ditch/transition functionality: Like I said, this ditch had only about 3 feel of flatbottom. Walls about 6″ high, and actually pretty steep. Transitions were good, but not curved. The whole ditch is about 100 yard long, and slightly downhill. A really good surf-style ditch. Oh — good roll-out/Drop-in lips on either side, the lenght of the ditch. Sweet. Even with only 3 feet of flat, by hitting the transitions at an angle this 42″ board went up and down the walls very smoothly.  I can say without a doubt it handled this ditch better than any other board in my quiver would have, including my Libtech longboard. By stalling at the top of one wall and going fakie at an angle, going up the next wall backwards and into a fakie 360 was also quite easy. So this board and setup passed the ditch test with flying colors. Wish I’d gotten some video footage, but it was well over 100 degrees F that day, and we were just trying to skate and survive.  

Stalefish grabbing carve, on the 42" Spoon. Click for full-size. This board is good for everything.

Riding down a hill, this board is also pretty nice. I’ve been riding a my Comet drop-through boards a lot for the past year, so it took a little while to get used to the higher-riding board, but not too long.  

The board has very functional wheel wells. You can ride your trucks pretty lose and not get significant wheel bite. They might rub a little bit, but not enough to be a problem. Keep in mind I’m using Trackers, wedge risers, and 66mm wheels. With this truck and riser combination I wouldn’t go over 66mm. You could run 70mm wheels on it, but I think you’d need to tighten up the trucks quite a bit, and that wouldn’t be as fun.  

This board has a very simple shape, but it is functional. The nose is slightly upturned, and the board has a very mild concave. Enough concave to help out, but not enough to really make your feet feel too locked in. In other words, it’s very easy to move your feet around for board-walking tricks. The nose is long enough to be functional. I like to do pivots off the nose to fakie a lot, and the nose is long enough and wide enough that you don’t feel like you’re going to slip off (that’s what she said), when doing a pivot. The tail has a good angle, and is long enough to provide really good leverage for kickturns, etc.  

Carving it up with a spoon. Fun.

The 42″ Spoon comes with a clear grip surface. If you are familiar with the clear grip surface on Loaded boards, this is nothing like it. The clear grip surface on the Gravity 42″ Spoon is much rougher and grippier. It does the job. I don’t say that to slag Loaded. I love Loaded. Great guys and true innovators. I’ve just never liked their clear grip. To the touch,  the Gravity board’s clear grip actually feels rougher than normal grip tape, with larger grains in the grip. Weirdly though, it isn’t hard to move your feet around on it, so it is easy to do board walking, or simply to reposition your feet. I wouldn’t say it is superior to normal grip tape, but it isn’t any worse either. It works. I like it. I was skeptical from the get-go, but I was quickly won over.  

Set-ups: As I said, I ordered a standard “build” of this board. I liked what I saw in their video. However, I can envision some other setups being pretty good with this board. I think that if you were running some narrow wheels, you could run R-II 180s and it would be pretty nice. In particular, some of the new 66mm ABEC-11 Freerides, with Randal 180s and maybe 2 thin risers under each truck, would be pretty nice.  

If you can only afford one longboard, and you want to do a little of everything, I can’t think of a better board than this. If you are travelling and only want to take one board but are going to skate hills, parks, ditches, etc., this is the board for you. The price is good too. $177 for a complete from Gravity. This board is going into my regular quiver, and will be sharing riding time with my Gravity Mini-Carve.

While on my previously posted trip to Austin and ditch session, I decided to try out some 77a Gravity “Burner” wheels I bought a while back.

77a Burners - on Tracker 149s and Mini-Carve. Good wheels.

For quite a few years I used to be a big fan of the Gravity Street-G wheel. Even when companies like ABEC-11 started coming out with some more expensive wheels made of a higher grade urethane, I still liked the Street-Gs a lot. Gravity made them for many years, so I was pretty shocked actually when they dropped the wheel completely and came out with an almost entirely new wheel lineup.

The Gravity’s 66mm Burner is one of the wheels in the new lineup. To the untrained eye, it looks a lot like the 66mm Retro ZigZag. It has a wide contact patch, kind of square lips. Looks like a slalom wheel to me. I’m posting a few pics of them on my Mini-Carve, so you can really see how they look. They are mounted here on Tracker 149s.

The 77a white formula really rolls smoothly over rough surfaces, but to my surprise it didn’t feel mushy at all. Sometimes a real soft wheel will feel like a marshmellow — like it wants to just pull right off the core under pressure. Sometimes you can feel a softy really deforming badly as it squishes around while you ride it. Not so with the Burners. True, the lips of this wheel do flex a quite a bit, but somehow the wheel’s shape doesn’t allow it to deform too badly. The result, I think, is a wheel that grips pretty well without squishing away all your speed.

Burners - Sideview.

While I was at the ditch for that session, my friend Army was riding the blue 83a Burners on his Mini-Carve. They also seemed to function real well. Very smooth, but with a little more slideability, due to the harder formula.

Another nice thing about these wheels is the price. They aren’t as expensive as some of the premium-grade wheels out there. Granted, they aren’t quite as fast either, but they are about $10 less expensive. I think it is a good tradeoff. They are still plenty fast. Unless you are actually racing, these wheels are just fine for most applications. When you use high-grade, expensive wheels for every day riding, I don’t think you ever really get the maximum benefit out of them, but you use ‘em up just as fast. My friend Mike “Grumpy Ol’ Bastard” Moore says I “ride light” because I don’t go through boards very fast. Perhaps that’s true, but I pump real hard in ditches, and I really can burn through wheels fast if I’m riding like that a lot. So its nice to save $10 where I can.

So I would say the Burners are a really good all-around wheel. I can see using them on carving boards, hill boards, ditch boards, whatever.

Mini-Carve with Burners.

On a slightly different topics I want to talk about riser pads on Mini-Carve decks. In short, you don’t need them. I have one thin riser under each of the trucks on my board, and really I could just get rid of it. The wheel cutouts in front and the tapering rail of the Mini-Carve just make wheelbite nearly impossible with most trucks.  I’ve run Randal trucks on mine, and no bite either. Army was riding Ace 33s or 44s on his board – no risers – trucks so loose the lock nut was about to fall off — and he said it will barely rub if he really gets down on it.

Now, Gravity sends these boards out (if you chose non-Randal trucks) with wedge risers to improve the turning. The wedges do, in fact, improve the turning. I rode mine like that for years.  Now, however, I like to keep my board as low as possible. And thanks to the many options you have for really great bushings, you can run a standard truck with no risers and still get great turning. On these Trackers, I am using the Tracker inverted “Grind-King” style kingpin with a Retro Lime tall bushing on bottom. The bushings really improve the turning to the point that wedges just aren’t really needed. If you really want to spend some $$, you could put some Ace/Core Hybrids from Milehigh Skates on there and still keep the ride low.

The standard Gravity setup isn’t bad. It works very, very well. But if you want a low ride, you can go that way with no problem. I’m not sure if I’d recommend the no-riser solution for wheels larger than 66mm, but I can tell you that up 66mm it works well.