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If you look at a lot of pros who ride Indys a lot of them crank their kingpins more than you'd think, so I stand to reason they could just as well use harder bushings and its not super weird to need to tighten Indys a bit. I saw a recent photo of Tom Knox's board with 3 threads showing on his rear truck and 2 on his front. From my experience going orange to blues was a difference of 1.5-2 threads for same tightness. He could likely go to blacks and have the nut still not flush.
Pros don't give a shit about this stuff. They are just going to run whatever shows up in the box hah
I definitely get this impression as well. I love watching the pro setup vids where they barely know anything about what they're riding... "Yeah, these are uhhh... 54's I think?"... "I run three bolts because I uh, lost one"... "I switched to 169's because they sent me the wrong size"... "This is an 8.25 I think?... Wheelbase? No idea"...
And then you look closely at their trucks and the bushings are absolutely destroyed, cut to shit, cracking, oozing over the mangled washers...
I wish I could be more like that... But no, back to shopping for wheels I don't need.
Andrew Reynolds definitely gives a shit. If you watch setup videos a lot of pros swap bushings, crank their shit, and tweak their trucks. Lots don't too, but over generalizing isn't super accurate. They're not Slap level madness but they can get into stuff more than you'd assume.
Oh for sure, wasn't meaning to bulk all pro's in there, just genuinely entertaining to see how unimportant it is to so many of them. Which is cool, very zen that it's about the act, not the gear for a them. Also speaks to how skilled they are that they can jump on whatever and kill it, when I can barely Ollie for the first ten minutes if I drop ¾" in wheelbase...
I have no doubt that pros run the gamut from slapping together whatever their spono sends them, right up to Ben Degros/Slap level madness.
My main hobbies over the years have been cycling, skiing and audio, where we obsess over the tiniest most insignificant differences: grams, millimeters, degrees, tire pressures, waxes and edge angles etc. and audio... my god, you want to talk minutiae... whole nother order of magnitude...
You know what is rampant in those hobbies? Gear snobbery, elitism and gatekeeping. Sucks the fun out big time.
Compared to those worlds, it's actually pretty jarring how little most skaters (Slap excluded) know/care to know about skateboard setup, but no judgement, it's about the act and that's awesome. I've never participated in a sport with less gear snobbery or elitism. Nobody gives a flying fuck what you're riding and it's fantastic.
Skating is cool in that you can not give a shit, ride a clapped out setup and still rip, or obsess over the details, tune and tweak and both are fine, both work, both are accepted.
Dang, that was some ted talks bullshit, back to trucks!