User:Scooterhistorian/sandbox

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. The biggest issue in the early years of freestyle scootering was the 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. While these tricks 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

One-piece bars

Wee, Proto (SR), RAD

Metal core wheels

Micro metal cores, Eagle, Yak, Proto.

At last: 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, grips by scooter brands, deck ends,