Kingpin Blues

It's been a cold, rainy week-and-a-half since I broke my kingpin, so I haven't much felt the urge to go out and skate. But toady was a warm, sunny, late fall day so I stopped by the local skateshop to pick up a new bolt.

The problem with Independent trucks is that the kingpins are murder to replace. They are always jammed in so tightly that removing them is next to impossible, and putting the new one in is next to next to impossible. I've broken a few baseplates in my day while trying to hammer out a busted kingpin, and I now know a few tricks about how to handle the darned things.

But the kingpin I received from the shop (the last one they had on hand) was not an official Independent truck pin; it was some kind of so-called "universal" replacement pin with a little picture of a demonic face on the bottom of the bolt. I pounded the crap out of that little face while trying to hammer the bolt into its recessed compartment on the bottom of the baseplate, and by the time I was done I had a bloody hand from a cut in my thumb where I had gripped too tightly on a drill bit I was using as a sort of chisel.

At the end of the whole process, the kingpin was still too short for me to fit the bolt over top of the bushing cover. All this shop talk probably sounds unintelligible to any non-skater, but the net effect is that I was unable to re-assemble my truck and render the thing skateable.

And so I am sitting here, eating some rice and vegetables, listening to the radio and nursing my wounded thumb. I think that maybe I didn't want to go skating so badly after all. It might be time to pack it in for the year, rest on my laurels and take a load off my aging knees. I've had a good run, but maybe the universe is trying to tell me something with all these maintenance problems. Maybe it's trying to say, "Eat more fibre".