Longboarding part 2

So what is the physical difference between longboards and shortboards? It's not necessarily the length. Slalom boards are around the same length as shortboards, and slide boards match the shape. note: shortboards are between 28-33" long

Rundown of longboard disciplines:

1. Sliding: 28-40" boards, but any board can be slid using the rock-hard sliding wheels. Hard wheels means less grip and slides/rotations /drifting can be performed. Skate wheels have too small a contact area with the road and tend to grip because of the higher force per unit area. Here's some extra-pro stand up slides.
   
2. Slalom: 20"-34" ish boards, very soft grippy wheels, normally grippier back wheels than front wheels. Done like any other slalom, but with foot high cones on smooth steep hills, normally in parallel with another person in competitions. Video!
   
3. Cruising: Anything from 20" to 80". Any w heels. Freestyle riding -just enjoying mellow hills, flat beachfront etc. This includes cross-stepping as shown here by Adam Colton, superpro.
   
4. Carving: 20"-80" ish boards, but steeper hills. All about cutting across the slope to give a snow/surfboard feel and slower descent. Don e with medium-soft wheels with decent grip. Video!
   
5. Bombing/downhill: 30-44" boards. Medium /soft wheels. Ddifferent type of truck (the bit that holds the wheels). Fast. Very fast, no prisoners steep mountain runs, drifted corners. Full leathers and full face helmet required for all downhill competitions. At the downhill speeds, soft wheels can be slid to stop in an emergency.Video!

Engineering of Longboards

1. Decks: laminated wood, normally maple, bi rch, bamboo or any mix of these.
2. Wheels: polyurethane of different hardnesses(durometers) with a much harder plastic core to hold the bearings.
3. Bearings: 608 steel bearings; 22mm outer diameter, 8mm bore, 7mm thickness. Abec 7 is rated to 30,000rpm, because these bearings were first specified for grinders and circular saws. 2 bearings per wheel
4. Trucks: here's some pics; Skate style (used for any discipline), carving/downhill, slalom/carving, downhill. The plasticy bits are polyurethane bushings, and these are what give the truck resistance to turning.
   
   
   

Thats the basic tech stuff!
Seeya soon for another post.

Oyster cards and their impracticalities

So, you've bought an oyster card when you last went through London. Good! Where is it? No? Don't remember? Well I intend to break this cycle so you will never need to cash in more than one pile of £3 TFL shares. The first stage goes like so:

1) As Skeptobot's blog (may he be respected for scientific endeavour) shows here an oyster card can be gutted to leave the small chip and antenna intact.
2) As I will elucidate once I have completed the process, I intend to embed this into a wristband or watch strap to allow you to not forget your oyster. If the Oyster is the only form of proximity RFID card you have (others include the barclays one card, that uses a similar tech to allow you to pay for oystering, and Southampton uni-link pre-paid student cards) then it could be stitched into the body of your wallet (or taped in in the case of duct-tape wallets). Other RFID cards tend to interfere with each other and the garbled mass of signals means you pay penalty fares.

Edit: Here's some more info about antenna arrangement!

The ultimate advance of this concept is the touch to pay visa card stripped apart and then implanted in, say, your forearm on the back of your wrist. You would sacrifice standard card payment as the chip'n'pin chip would not work (your hand wouldn't fit in the bloody reader), but the average londoner could go a whole day without even carrying a plastic card around.

If anyone knows whether mobile phones would be a liability in terms of disrupting or hacking/reading the oyster data, let me know as one of the other tests will be to place the circuit on the back of my nokia 6230i (10 mins searching: nokia have released roughly 200 diferent phones up to the curen gen: Proof here!)

Catch you guys later for another longboarding post.