See the guy in the photos? His name is Jim Ford, in the mid 1970s when he was in his twenties he was working at Kryptonics. He was a skater, he wanted Kryptonics (a urethane molding company that made industrial parts) to make skateboard wheels, the big wigs were not that interested, so he enlisted a friends help to...well Ill let him take it from here. The very first wheels were prototypes that were developed clandestinely by me without the knowledge of Krypto’s management. I designed a wheel and got a friend who worked in the machine shop to make a steel master. Then we rigged it so the doors wouldn’t lock after work, snuck back in at night, made a mold from the master and started pouring different formulas we found in the lab into the mold. Nobody knew about it but us. We made a lot of bad ones, but eventually we came across this really soft and bouncy material. They came out white, and I almost threw them in the trash because they seemed way too soft to work or even hold the bearings in place. Just for fun, I put them on one of my boards just to try them out. It was unbelievable. At the time I had a few boards; one had Road Riders, one had Power Paws and I think one had Bennett Alligators. They all performed about the same. In the flat parking lot at Kryptonics, any of those wheels would glide about 20 feet before you had to push again. I got on the wheels we made in the lab and went all the way across the parking lot and out onto the street. That’s not an exaggeration. They were so fast and quiet it didnt seem possible. At the time there were some local slalom and downhill races in Boulder on Columbine Avenue. There was no way I was going to ride those wheels standing up in the downhill because there was no runout at the bottom of the course. So I gave them to this kid who rode lying down on his board. He could stop by dragging his feet. There were a lot of spectators at that race, including the VP of Kryptonics. The downhill race was about two blocks long. The guy riding those white wheels won the race by about a block. Nobody could believe it. The VP went up to the kid and asked him about the wheels. I forgot to tell him they were unauthorized. He told the VP he got them from me and I was busted. I got in some trouble initially, but soon after I told them how much I paid for a set of wheels at a local retailer, Kryptonics decided they would get into the business. They even gave me a title, something like Consumer Product Manager, because all they produced was industrial parts for mining and computers. I got to move up from the factory to an office and started marketing and selling wheels. It was a big step up for me. I was selling wheels to shops and distributors, designing all the wheels, producing ads and skating almost every day either at the local park or on mountain roads.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 05:21:13 +0000
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