A Focus on Mindless Longboards
Mindless are one of the very few longboard brands that are designed and developed in the UK. The boards are designed and tested by skaters with decades of experience of UK spots giving you a board tailored for the tricky terrain we have in the UK. Not only that, Mindless also offer boards at really good prices, often costing lower for like-for-like spec setups when compared to Loaded, Lush and other big brands.
Mindless have a crew of riders around Europe including downhill speed demon Thib Le Guen, who can regularly be seen competing at downhill contests in France, like Peyragudes Never Dies, James Allen, a regular on the UK scene who is always at Hogtober Fest and can be seen in Thrill Mag, and Johanna Rolland, a cruiser and pintail rider from France with incredible balance skills. With these guys backing Mindless you know they are a brand to be considered seriously.
The Mindless range is vast, covering various shapes and sizes of cruisers, long kicktails, pintails and drop through boards. Here at Slicks we carefully handpick a selection of the best of the range, making sure you get the best spec at the best price. Here we will take you through the range, across the four styles of board highlighting our favourites and why.
Cruisers
Mindless Cruiser skateboards are ideal for bombing around town, along the beach front, down hills and through the streets. They are typically 22” – 26” long and 6” – 8” wide decks with 3-4” trucks. The short and narrow deck, with narrow trucks, gives a super responsive and tight turning circle, making them extremely reactive to your moves. They are based around the original 70s and 80s skateboards that were designed to cruise pre-ollie. They typically have massive wheels with a coned outer. The coning means the wheels react and ‘bounce back’ when pushed in turns. This means you can turn faster. The big wheels also mean you can skate over surfaces that standard skateboard wheels can’t cope with. Check out some Mindless Cruiser Skateboards here
Long Kicktails
Long Kicktails are much more stable than their short and nippier cruiser brothers. They are far more stable but less reactive. They are ideal for riders with less experience or who want a slower and steadier cruiser ride. The kicktail means that you can still manual and maneuver around, similarly to how you would on a shortboard cruiser.
Pintails
Pintails are ideal for those who want a very relaxed longboards ride or those who want to ‘dance’ across the board. The flat surface and big wheels mean pintails ride smooth and fast over most surfaces, ideal for those who want to cruise along beach-fronts. The flat surface is also suitable for skilled longboards who do lots of step-over tricks on the board, which becomes longboard dancing. At the higher end the boards have concave decks to add responsiveness in turning and through pressure as well as reversible trucks and lower profiles on trick based boards.
Drop Throughs
DT boards are defined by the big gap you see at the front and rear of the board, where the truck area sticks through the deck. The main reason for this is to give the rider a lower profile to the ground, meaning they have much better balance thanks to their lower center of gravity.
DT boards also come with cut outs above the wheels, to stop the wheels from catching the deck, which would happen with such a low profile on a pintail board. DT boards tend to come concave as standard with reversible trucks. Reversible trucks are useful as you can switch them around to have a tighter, or wider, turning circle, depending on the type of ride you want.
They also come with slide-able wheels, ideal for hand-planted slides around turns while going down hill. DT boards are typically high end and designed for riders who will be riding seriously and fast, typically downhill.