are they good or are they a pain?
From my instagram post, sums it up best I think:
Randoms Hardware, otherwise known as "hammer ins"
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Cleaning up and sorting out some things and a few people had been talking about them, so I decided to get out the ones I still had floating around, some with Black Label heads, some from Hardcore Dist and others from who knows where.
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Look like these guys went out of business a few years ago now, last Instagram post early 2019, but had been around since about 2000 or earlier. I know these were pretty hot in the early 00s and people loved to swap and mix them with heads from certain brands or pro riders like Heddings with the pentagrams or the alien or skull, etc.
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The way they worked was you put them in the board, sat the trucks on and just did up the nuts, not needing to hold the deck bolts from the top, but as the nickname suggested, often a hammer was needed to get them into the board to get far enough through so you could get the nuts on.
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I can recall a few people having issues not being able to get them far enough through or hammering them in on angles so the trucks didn't go on and all sorts of stupid things, but when installed correctly they worked well and never had loose bolt issues.
30ramp
Looking back I’ve wondered if randoms contributed to pressure cracks at the base plate area when I always used them as a kid.
mbrimson88
@30ramp There was actually a post on their Instagram account showing no difference in stress between hammer ins and regular bolts and I remember seeing something like that in a video once too. Funny though, cause the way some people were beating the things in, I could easily see them doing damage to the board. I always found it interesting too when looking at old boards, to see the star pattern the bolts left in the decks. @randomshardware