Welp, I finally took that beast for a test drive, and I had quite the experience. I would have not imagined having a bite-size journey on learning wtf a flowboard is.
The test drive in question is a trip to the local mall, which is easier said than done. Mostly downhill, with some heavy turns on the path, as well as a few uphill sections. The speed isn't blazing fast, though it might be from the hockey inline wheels and their questionable amount of greasing over the years. Carving was more than enough to manage speed by shifting to stationary wheels, and pushing off was a bit of a hassle to get used to. On a regular skateboard you would be used to having a mainly secure place for your main foot to anchor when pushing off. The flowboard is a bit scary when you first try to push off due to the shifting weight, but you start to ignore the wobble as your balance gets better.
Upon reaching the mall, this thing is noticably heavier. Shocker, a big deck with a ring of wheels is heavy? It's one of the other items that I do recommend either a carry strap or maybe a backpack carrier if you must. Walking around with this thing felt like performance art, because if anyone was staring at me (which was more than usual) it was because of the alien board I was towing. One of the older employees at the BC surf & sport actually pointed out how long it was since he last saw a flowboard. We did some chatting, and I asked how much it would be if I were to replace all the wheels on a whim. He gave a ballpark estimate of 120 to 200$ in 2026 money. That's about 2 mint skateshop boards just for the wheels! The awful part is that you need wheels that can fit on the trucks and not be too fat. Let me elaborate.
From my minute research of ebay listings and my own board, I assume my setup is more slower than it should, though reddit peeps (again) talk about how the flowboard is both slower and heavier than what would be expected of a board, no less from a longboard. From experience I can vouch that those qualities are apparent from my ride. From what I can tell, the flowboards use inline wheels from what Ebay shows, and not the traditional skate wheel that you would be accustomed to. The crusty X-Games video demo may have been a modified version more suitable for the skatepark set for that demo only, but I can't be sure. The youtube videos involving the flowboard all have wheels that look more rollerblade-like than of a regular skateboard wheel. I can only guess that they're proprietary wheels that didn't see a wheel pack release, because the ones I see have either inline wheels or a different kind of rollerblade wheel that I'm not well versed in. Theoretically, you can pop in some thin wheels with speed bearings for a faster (& presumably lighter) board, but you are going to break the bank with having to get 14 bearings and wheels for the thing that might not work. Additionally, you might piss off the skateshop employee with having to jam/remove the wheels from the rainbow truck to get a proper approximate size.
I ask to those with the esoteric flowboard knowledge, what the hell are these wheel specs? Anyways, back to the board.
After I called my brother to get lunch in a few minutes, I spent the rest of my all visit trying to trick in the parking lot. This is where I got the weird looks from both old and relatively same age people alike. It was proably because my doofy bumhead decided to trick in a parking lot with some cars nearby, and I guess the oldheads weren't used to a skater boy doing tricks at the mall in years, or from the crazy movement and visual of me doing pop-shuvs on a flowboard and actually getting some clean ones in. One strange package that warrants stares of confusion or puzzlement, but I call that an inprompteau audience, and I need all the peer pressure I can get to try and pop more tricks off confidently. My guess is that you'd never seen a board cradle rock after the rider bails off of it, and every trick shows the wheels off as some sort of 'gotcha' to a spectator.
Also, I intentionally didn't use the Braille videos on the flowboards. That's my personal choice, but if there's more flowboard info that's in those vids, I encourage you to make your own content talking about the flowboard. I seriously got like a dozen hits on google talking about it, and 3-4 of those results were from archived pages talking about the thing on release. The copyright expired in 2018 due to failure to pay renewal fees, which is taken from the only other source cited on wikipedia.
See you in the next entry, where it's probably going to be something smaller, like Xbox 360 video cables, or my plight at trying to repair a GH controller as failing so far.
