Well, there have been rumours circulating around recently concerning about deck quality. It is said that some chinese manufacturers uses only two plys of Canadian maple in their boards although they claim they are 7-ply canadian maple.

There is a clear difference in the wood grains of the canadian maple and chinese maple.  The grains are more compact on the canadian maple compared to chinese ones. People who knows this usually chooses decks with compact wood grains because they know that it is canadian maple. Ah, but here is where the trick comes in.

Manufacturers uses only canadian maple wood plys on the top and bottom. Then, they use cheap and weak chinese maple. Sometimes, even the distributors get ripped off. They order for a full canadian maple deck from the manufacturers. They pay the manuf. the full price for full canadian maple decks but they only manufacture decks with two canadian maple plys. So the manufacturers reap the ‘extra’ cost paid to them by using cheap chinese maple.

This happens to most distributors that have their decks made in chin, thinking that they can save on labour cost. Not only the distributors is on the losing end, the skaters is the ones that also loses out. They are paying the full price for a full canadian maple deck but have a weak deck consisting mainly of chinese maple. Even worse, most skaters who does not know how to distinguish chinese and canadian maple can be tricked with a full Chinese Maple deck with a ‘100% Canadian Maple’ sticker on it.

But these are all rumours only. Either way, beware of who you are buying from or where the deck is made. If possible, STAY OUT OF CHINA. Although I may be a big fan of ‘Made in China’ products, but decks is not somewhere I am willing to get tricked on.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:54 am and is filed under News, Skateboard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.