Suspension – it’s a tough call. Like any other impact sport, it makes sense to consider it for skateboarding. But does it work in practice? Skateism put Avenue Suspension Trucks through their paces to find out.
Occasionally a company tries to kickstart a revolution in skateboarding, push us into the next era of hardware – Shark Wheels are trying it, Powell Peralta are trying it, and now Avenue Trucks are trying it with their next-gen suspension trucks. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” I hear you say. Well, the fact is that I’m 6.4″, size 12 shoes, and take heavy impact on a daily basis when I skate – so for me, breakages are an unfortunate reality.
So I approached Avenue Suspension Trucks hopefully, bolting down a pair of 149mm sized babies with the thought that perhaps they’d extend the life of my deck by, oh I don’t know, 30%? That brings me to the first pro of Avenue Suspension Trucks: I’m still skating the same board, and there’s not so much as a stress crack in sight. But let’s start from the beginning…
The Set Up
I’m not going to sugar coat it, the Avenue Suspension Trucks are a bit of a nuisance to bolt down with a standard T-tool. This is due to the fact that the inner pair of bolts are actually set below the curvature of the truck. It’s not the greatest first impression, and made for irritating slips of the hand and sore fingers after almost twice the time twisting everything tight, but whatever, it’s done now, like I give a shit. Just a heads up.
The rest of the hardware worked a dream, and I was shocked by how sturdy and strong the trucks felt considering they’ve lost about 70% of the mass of a regular truck.
Skateability
In terms of actually skating the Avenue Suspension Trucks, I was pleasantly surprised by the pop improvement. For all those kids out there wishfully Googling “Ways to Improve Ollie Pop”, this might be an easy shortcut or “avenue”… eugh. I found tricks popping easier, as if there was some sort of pre-loaded spring involved in the mechanism all of a sudden.
Avenue Suspension Trucks are also said to have a very unique turning system, like so many other trucks out there, and it makes me wonder how many ways there really are to go left and right. I didn’t notice any particularly negative about the way Avenue Suspension Trucks turned, and even quite enjoyed how if you really loosen them you can get out of some pretty hairy spots with a lot less effort than other brands I’d tried.
The Fall
Now, this is where Avenue Suspension Trucks fall down for me… or rather, I fell down, again and again. As far as I could work it out, there are two sides to the suspension coin. On the one side there’s the increased pop – somehow – and a cushioning for riding dodgy ground, which you can feel and is an improvement on regular trucks.
On the other side, there’s the fact that the trucks take impact, like a spring, and this means they transfer momentum downwards in order to cushion the impact on your body and the board. The problem I found was that if I was, say, taking a 4 ft high drop with speed the impact I put on the trucks was such that the suspension took so much of the impact that the board would stop, and I would fly forward off of it. It meant that in order to counteract this I had to bend my knees more than I would with normal trucks to take the recoil of the Avenue Suspension Trucks. This is surely counter productive since it necessitated I create suspension to deal with the suspension offered by the trucks.
The Verdict
So in conclusion I think Avenue Suspension Trucks offer great minor improvements like increased pop, smoother ride and good impact support on low impact tricks. However, for a tall skater like myself, they quite literally backfired in the heavy impact area.
I’d say that for young kids working their way up to bigger gaps, stairsets and what-have-you, these might be a good way to protect those developing knees, but I can’t really speak for them since even if you stuck two of them on each other’s shoulders and put on a big coat, I’d still be unable to make eye contact.
I like Avenue Suspension Trucks, and I really enjoyed the ride, but just purely for my own personal safety, I’ve had to go back to my regular, heavy, creaky Independents.
