Risers/Shock Pads On Skateboards.

Recently I have seen a lot of skating posers say that riser pads do nothing. Some call them shock pads, and in the name it can already tell you that it has some benefits. A riser or shock pad is a flat pad that can be mounted between the truck and the deck. Risers come in all kinds of shapes, colours and thickness's, as well as varying degrees of stiffness. Usually, a riser is plastic and a shock pad is more rubbery,  but the names get swapped around a lot, not in my friendship group though as we usually use 'Riser pads' or 'risers' or 'raisers'. They do 

very similar things. Riser and shock pads do two things:

first, they help prevent wheel-bite. This is where, when turning, your wheel touches the bottom of your board and gets stopped suddenly. As you can imagine, having a wheel on your skateboard stop suddenly is a bad thing to have happen, no matter what type of skateboarding you do this is so annoying, like you know when you're doing that nice nose manual? With your trucks to loose you will just stop.

Secondly, Shock pads and riser pads also prolong the life of the skateboard deck by reducing the strain that the deck gets from the abuse, therefore not getting pressure cracks as easily.

put only the trucks on and Skateboards without riser pads usually get small pressure cracks where the trucks meet the skateboard deck. Riser pads reduce this problem greatly.

Many skateboarders do not like to use risers, because they make the skateboard taller. A taller skateboard is harder to do technical street tricks on, and even the fraction of an inch that a riser pad adds can make a difference. But in the end I would still get riser pads/Shock Pads.

Ben Keppie