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Availability: In Stock
CARVER C4 5" HI SKATEBOARD TRUCKS
CARVER
Our Price: $79.99 $71.99
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Product Description
Reviews
Sturdy and quick turning, this standard truck is classically proportioned and designed for traditional shortboarding and street skating. From the generous slider plate and beefy hanger to the low kingpin, this is a grinding good truck.
The pivot pin is a little steeper for more turn, but overall this truck will feel like the no-nonsense performer you expect.
About the C4
The Carver C4 is a classically proportioned lower profile truck for traditional street skating. Like all Carver products, it is the result of extensive research and testing. They took their favorite standard trucks and reverse-engineered them to understand what determined their performance characteristics. Isolating each angle and dimension, and using prototypes to prove their theories, they combined all of their favorite characteristics into one truck. The result is a truck that turns smoothly but snaps back to center, so landing a trick feels solid. They also dropped the kingpin so it won’t hang up on grinds, and they added a generous amount of metal above the axle for extra long grind wear. They cast the bottom cup washer into the baseplate so it won’t get bent or hang up on rails. They steepened the angle on the slider plate so you feel locked in on nose and tail slides. And in the end, they sculpted the cast parts so they are strong where they need to be and light where they can be, a perfect balance between function and classic form.
Risers
Riser pad thickness to control wheelbite is roughly a factor of wheel diameter, so the larger the wheel, the taller the risers. There is no set formula, as everyone rides differently, so find out what works best for you.
Board Length
Board length and shape plays an important part of the overall performance of the completed skateboard. Shorter boards are more maneuverable and pump easier, while longer boards are more stable and handle speed better. Wider boards generally provide better turn leverage than narrow boards. Trying out a few different lengths will give you a real sense of the feel between wheelbases.
Break-In
Break-in time for the bushings is usually about an hour of riding, where the slippery new bushings have a chance to wear a little and stick to the metal surfaces, reducing the range of turning travel at the extremities, controlling wheelbite and increasing spring-back and rebound. Turning the board on the flats is a good way to break in the bushings and get a feel for the board's handling.
About Carver:
It all started one quiet summer in Venice, California USA. Greg and Neil had been surfing all winter, and were pumped to surf the warm waters of the Breakwater in the long days of summertime, but it was flat as a puddle. Not even a longboard ripple to justify getting wet. So, like many generations before them, they took to the streets with skateboards in search of hills to surf. The historic neighborhoods of Venice and Santa Monica are a veritable skate park of steep alleys and banks, and as they dropped in on these asphalt waves they were struck with how unlike surfing it was. Sure, they sort of got a surf-like experience, as much as standing on a board and banking turns can provide, but they really missed the snap that a surfboard has, that crisp pivot you get at the tail that lets you really pump a wave for speed. Their skateboards felt stiff by comparison. But as they loosened the trucks, all they got was speed wobble, and the steepest hills became virtually un-skateable. Even with loose trucks, the dynamic of the turn was still all rail-to-rail, and picking up the nose in a tic-tac at high speed down a steep incline wasn't ideal.
It became clear that at the very least, the front truck would have to turn more than the back one in order to approach the turn dynamic of a Thruster surfboard. Using angled risers and different combinations trucks and bushings, they returned to the hills to test their ideas. But just adding a little more turn to the front was only part of the equation. There needed to be some lateral sway, sort of like dragging the nose sideways while still in full contact with the pavement. In order to achieve this, there needed to be some kind of flexible arm that allowed for this lateral movement, and after numerous sketches, they welded up the first Carver prototype truck in the derelict garage behind Neil's house. It was all just pure fun, "We just wanted a street surfer to ride, so we had to make one. Had there been anything available we would have gladly bought it and spent our time riding the hills instead," Greg reminisced.
But while many companies promised a surf-like skate experience, it was all just marketing and board graphics on the same trucks everyone had been riding since the '70s.
After the welds cooled on the first prototype, they assembled their sway arm truck onto a board using thrust bearings for smooth rotation. But even on a moderate incline it was nearly impossible to ride. When making a turn, the board banked in the wrong direction. It turned out that they had reversed the angle of the bearings, but in spite of the awkward handling, there was a hint of the movement they wanted. Back at the drawing board, they welded up a new truck with the correct angle for the thrust bearings, and returned to the hill. Now they felt the snap they had been looking for. All that month they went back to that little hill and skated those driveway banks like they were waist-high peelers. Many sessions ended prematurely, though, when one of them either bent a part, broke a weld, or something rattled loose. Even so, they wore down many sets of wheels testing those early trucks.
As they progressed and moved on to steeper inclines, they soon came up against the limitations of their prototypes, and made many improvements over the years. After much development and several years of producing the original Carver C1, they had heard a lot of feedback from all kinds of skaters about the things they wanted to improve. Many said it was just too loose for them when they first tried it, so Neil went back to the welding table and re-engineered the truck to allow for a tighter arm adjustment, as well as numerous other improvements. Several generations of revisions resulted in the Carver trucks you buy today.
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