ANTIKS! EEEEEEeeeeeee!

 ...in which I build my skates. WITH MY HANDS.

Yesterday, I got a very exciting phone call. The peeps down at Cruz Skate Shop called to let me know that my Antiks had come in. EEEEEEEE INDEED! Today I went down there to get my Antiks. How excitement. I kind of wanted to wait until Motley was around, but she's not working until Monday, so yeah. I guess I could always go there and show her what I got (even though I bet she's seen like 3865926352962 pairs of the damn things).

So I went there and got this box:

You could tell it was mine because it was the one with the ridiculously small size:

Size 3 is the smallest Antik ever made. Yay.

And inside were my boots!! YAY!! I don't have a picture of the actual inside of the box, because I got excited and forgot to take a picture of the skates then. I just got the boots and plates, and I was going to put my wheels, toe stop, bushings etc. on it instead of getting new ones. After all, I just got new toe stops and bushings, and I like my wheels. So I tried on the boot in the store, except obviously without wheels I couldn't stand up in my boots on just the plate or I'd bend the axles. But yeah, my boots were there in the box and I got to lace them up and whatever. One thing that I noticed with the Antiks is that they have ridiculously long laces. Like, the ones I have are just the standard 100" ones. Now, 100 inches is a LOT. That's like 2.5 metres of lace per boot, for you metric people out there. That's like 1.5 times my height. Some people do the old school wraparound thing around their ankle, but I didn't want to. It reduces agility in your ankle movement, and makes it like fiddlier to do up anyway, and doing up Antiks already takes some getting used to. I'll write more about that when I skate on them this weekend and do a product review.


But yeah. I can't roll around on just boots and plates; we need to make some goddamn skates! Basically I had to take out the kingpins and switch my bushings, put the wheels on the new axles and put the toe stop in. Eric (who was in the store today) was with another customer (or two, and then like ten people came into the store) so he set me up with some skate tools while he helped them out. I only vaguely remembered my skate anatomy lesson from Steffin, but it seemed easy enough, and all the bits seemed to come out and go into the right places easily, so phew. I diassembled my Diablos, and moved the parts over, but I had to also reassemble their parts since I might be selling or giving my skates away to some newbie. So yeah, doing everything one way in taking the parts out and then doing it back the other way was kind of tricky.

It was really fun, fiddling around with the tools and whatnot and moving parts from my Diablos onto my Antiks. I got DynaPro plates, because it was either that or the Powerdyne Reactor plates, which would have been nice but would have made my skates close to $800. No other plates came small enough to put on a size 3 boot. (Also, it's a size 2 plate and SO cute. The curved bit is pretty much like an inch long.) One thing that I thought was pretty cool is that the DynaPro plates that I have don't require those giant nuts and washers for toe stops, like they do on the Ridells--you know, the ones that require the 3-way Powerdyne Skate Tool to take off, and then you have to adjust the height and hope that 1) you've screwed it in tight enough and 2) the nut that is adjusting the height doesn't move around. Instead, the plates come with an allen key, kind of like the ones you get with Ikea furniture. The plate has the hole for the toe stop to screw in, and then a little thing that looks like a line machined to the side of the hole, and then a gap for the allen key next to that. Basically, you screw the toe stop in, and then hold it in place by tightening the plate around the toe stop with the allen key. That was kind of new for me, and I was a bit worried that tightening the toe stop so much would pretty much break the allen key. Haha. 

My skate has arguably the tinest plate in the world.

The powerdyne bushings that came with the skates were pretty hard (they're stock bushings, meh). I guess that means some newbie gets to skate on brand new bushing though, for whatever that might be worth. I'm not sure how tight to put the trucks on the Diablos now, but whatevs. Anyway, I moved my orange bushings over from my Diablos, but I've got those conical ones, so OF COURSE I put the damned things on backward first. Ugh. And it's not like I haven't looked at how they went on my skates; I knew that the pointy bit was on the bottom; I think the kingpins threw me off for some reason. I don't know. But yeah, it all eventually got done, even if I had to do it twice because I fucked it up the first time. (I wonder what skating on that would have been like...?)

Anyway, construction time was over. My hands were all grubby, but whatever. Time to go home and wear my skates! I coughed up my money (with discount and deposit, $425) and took my skates home. Well, my Antiks now with wheels and everything are skates, yes? And then I also took my Diablos (or what's left of them). Yay. I was so excited to get them home and roll them around on the floor. And then I got a parking ticket outside Cruz. Lame.

I've just worn my Antiks around the house for a bit today, which was really fun. I relaced them with my yellow laces (also I forgot to put the toe covers on so I'd have had to undo the giant laces if I wanted to stick with those anyway). I still need to check the truck tightness, the toe stop length and how tight I want to tie the skates around the ankle but they seem to be pretty good. They're really padded on the inside, and there's the option of heat molding parts of the skate (like the sides and toe and around the heel). I haven't really done that yet but I might try that out or something for shiggles. Product review to come when I've actually used them properly.

 I can't wait to take them to training! Weekend skating with BAD, here I come. WHOO.