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Evolution of the professional freestyle scooter

A modern freestyle scooter is a lot different to the foldable scooter invented in 1999, both when it comes to looks and performance. For over two decades trick scooters have been evolving to what they are today. The biggest issue in the earlier years of freestyle scootering was the weak construction of the scooters that were available, causing them to break under the stress of freestyle riding. After all, the foldable scooters were created for simpler transportation and not intended for freestyle use, which meant they were light weight and not very heavy duty. The need for more reliable scooter parts eventually lead to the scooter community creating own 'hacks' to make the scooters more durable, such as bolting the folding mechanism, hot glueing the plastic core wheels and inserting an extra metal tube into the fork of the scooter to make it stronger. While these hacks extended the lifetime of the scooters, it was clear that the community was in need of aftermarket parts made specifically for trick scootering.

The introduction of the threadless fork

The most critical flaw in the construction of the early scooters, strength-wise, was the fork. To make production and assembly cheap, the forks included on the Micro and Razor scooters had threads, allowing for the use of a threadless headset. However, this also meant that (due to the threads) the thickness of the fork-tube was thinner than necessary compared to a threadless bicycle fork. This lead scooter rider and owner of Scooter Resource, Andrew Broussard to create the first threadless fork, named the Scooter Resource fork or just SR fork for short. The SR fork was made from steel and had a much bulkier design than the stock threaded aluminium forks from Razor, making it a huge upgrade.

One-piece bars

The bars included with the first Razor and Micro scooters were created with the intent of being adjustable and portable. This however, also made them quite shaky and unstable when riding. Eventually this problem was solved by welding so-called T-bars that only consisted of a down-tube and a crossbar welded together. While anyone with access to a welder and steel tubes had the option to make these, the first mass production of one-piece bars were by the companies Wee Scooters, RAD and Scooter Resource.

Metal core wheels

Micro metal cores, Eagle, Yak, Proto.

One-piece decks

Also featuring a spring-less brake, named the 'Flex Fender'.

Compression systems

ICS, SCS, HIC, IHC

Later additions/improvements

Fenders, wheel sizes, bearing sizes, deck sizes, griptape, grips by scooter brands, deck ends,