Skatesky Skateboard Manufacturers VERT-LAM: ENGINEERING GENIUS OR JUST A REALLY WEIRD SKATEBOARD?

Five layers. Two pieces of maple. A giant vertical-grain centre slab. And apparently, we're supposed to be impressed.

Skateboarding has survived a lot of stupid ideas: plastic boards, motorised boards, ridiculous gimmick shapes, and boards designed by people who apparently haven't ridden one since the Clinton administration.

But every now and then something comes along that makes you stop and ask: “Seriously?”

Enter the new 5-Layer Vert-Lam skateboard. Apparently, traditional 7-ply construction wasn't complicated enough.

So somebody decided to take the humble skateboard, throw some fiberglass at it, insert a 5.5 mm vertically laminated centre core, sandwich the whole mess between two maple veneers and then give it a name that sounds like an industrial flooring product.

Welcome to the future. Apparently.

Because seven ply was just too simple

The traditional skateboard is an annoyingly effective piece of engineering. Seven thin maple veneers, alternating grain directions, resin, pressure, heat, concave. Done.

Decades of professional skating have demonstrated that this basic construction can survive an absolutely ridiculous amount of abuse. But apparently that's not good enough anymore.

The new construction consists of:

• Maple
• Fiberglass
• 5.5 mm vertical-lam core
• Fiberglass
• Maple

That's it. Two actual maple veneers. Everything else is there to convince you that this isn't basically a giant structural experiment with trucks attached to it.

And then we get to the centre ply

Oh, that centre ply. 5.5 millimetres of vertically laminated material sitting right through the heart of the board.

Look at a conventional skateboard and you see a laminated structure made from multiple relatively thin veneers. Look at this and you have a giant chunk of vertical-grain core doing a huge amount of the structural work.

And we're apparently supposed to believe this is obviously an improvement. Why? Because somebody called it a “structural backbone.”

Fantastic. Can we get a chiropractor for the skateboard while we're at it?

Vertical grain: because why not?

There's nothing inherently wrong with experimenting with grain orientation. But grain direction matters enormously in wood engineering.

That's why conventional skateboard construction doesn't simply consist of gluing a few massive pieces of wood together and hoping for the best. The entire concept of laminated veneer construction is about controlling strength, stiffness, flex and dimensional behaviour through multiple thin layers.

Here we've got a 5.5 mm central vertical-lam component. That's not a subtle change. That's basically taking one of the fundamental principles of traditional skateboard construction and throwing it out the window.

And if this is genuinely superior, fantastic. Prove it.

“Lightweight”

Ah yes. Lightweight. One of those wonderful product descriptions that means absolutely nothing without numbers.

How much does it weigh? Compared with what? A conventional 7-ply? A 5-ply? Another composite deck? A wet towel?

If you're going to replace a traditional laminated construction with a completely different architecture, don't just tell us it's lightweight. Put the number on the fucking scale. Skaters can handle numbers.

“Pop retention”

There's another one. Pop retention. Sounds fantastic. Almost scientific. But what does it actually mean?

Does the board maintain its original stiffness for 20% longer? 30%? Twice as long? Or does “pop retention” mean somebody rode it for a week and decided it still felt good? Because those are two very different things.

If fiberglass genuinely gives this construction substantially better long-term performance, test it:

1. Take ten conventional decks.
2. Take ten Vert-Lam decks.
3. Beat the living shit out of them.
4. Measure them before and after.
5. Publish the results.

Now that's interesting. Until then, “pop retention” is just another shiny phrase sitting on the packaging.

Strong does not mean good

This is something the engineering crowd occasionally forgets. A skateboard isn't supposed to be an indestructible structural beam.

If maximum strength was the goal, we'd all be skating aluminium. Or titanium. Or a fucking bridge girder.

The skateboard needs a balance of weight, flex, stiffness, response, rebound, feel and durability. And, most importantly: does it actually feel good under your feet?

Because nobody lands a kickflip and thinks, “Excellent. I really enjoyed the composite fatigue characteristics of that landing.” They think: “That felt good.” That's skateboarding.

The fiberglass blanket

Then there are the two fiberglass layers. Again, fiberglass isn't inherently bad. Far from it.

But there's a slightly annoying habit in modern product marketing where adding exotic materials automatically makes something “high performance.” Fiberglass! Carbon! Composite! Engineered! Aerospace!

Next thing you know somebody will be selling a skateboard with NASA-approved bushings.

Materials don't make a product better simply because they're more technologically impressive. The entire system has to work.

Two maple veneers

Here's another interesting detail. The outside layers are Canadian maple. Great. Nobody is going to complain about Canadian maple.

But conventional skateboards get much of their characteristics from the interaction between multiple maple veneers. This construction reduces that conventional maple structure dramatically.

So the obvious question becomes: what exactly are we gaining in exchange? Because we're definitely giving something up. The question is whether the replacement is worth it.

The most important test isn't on paper

Here's where all the fancy diagrams and technical descriptions eventually run into a brick wall. Concrete.

A skateboard doesn't care about your product brochure. It doesn't care about your engineering terminology. It doesn't care how impressive the cross-section looks.

Eventually someone is going to:

• Throw it down a set.
• Slam the tail.
• Land badly.
• Hit a curb.
• Twist it sideways.
• Skate it in the rain.
• Leave it in a hot car.
• Repeat the process approximately 9,000 times.

That's when we'll find out what this thing is actually made of.

And that's the problem with “innovation”

Innovation isn't automatically good. Different isn't automatically better. Complicated isn't automatically better. Expensive isn't automatically better. And putting a fancy name on something definitely doesn't make it better.

Skateboarding has spent decades refining the humble maple deck. If somebody wants to replace that architecture with a giant vertically laminated centre core and fiberglass sandwich construction, that's perfectly legitimate. But then the burden of proof is pretty damn high.

• Don't tell us it's revolutionary. Show us.
• Don't tell us it retains pop. Measure it.
• Don't tell us it's lightweight. Weigh it.
• Don't tell us it's stronger. Break it.

The verdict?

This isn't a verdict on whether the deck will actually skate well. It might. That's the frustrating part. There could genuinely be some clever engineering buried underneath all this.

But from the construction description alone, the 5.5 mm vertical-grain centre core is the part that deserves the most scrutiny. Because it isn't a minor tweak. It's the bloody centre of the skateboard.

And when your biggest departure from conventional construction looks like someone decided, “You know what this skateboard needs? A massive piece of vertical wood in the middle,” people are entitled to ask questions. Especially when the alternative is a construction method that has already spent decades proving itself.

Maybe Vert-Lam is the future. Maybe it's brilliant. Maybe it's revolutionary. Or maybe we've spent seventy years figuring out how to make a skateboard and someone just decided to make it unnecessarily complicated.

Either way, the centre ply has some serious explaining to do.

Less engineering theatre. More skateboard.

That's the test. Not the diagrams. Not the buzzwords. Not “structural backbone.” Not “pop retention.” Not “engineered construction.”

Give it to a skater. Let them skate the absolute shit out of it. Then we'll talk.