How to Do a Custom Grip Tape Job on Your Skateboard

Video Transcript

"My name is Shawn Connolly. I live in San Francisco California. I'm sponsored skateboarder and I also run a skateboarding program called The FS Skate Club. Now what I'm here to show you today is how to custom a grip tape job. So the first way I'll show you real quick is the most classic way to put your grip tape together and that is using paint pens. Now paint pens work very well. You can buy these at almost any arts and craft store or even at a hardware store. Right here I've designed a small graphic here that I've put on my grip tape and it was pretty easy to do. All you do is you just kind of add to it and you can change things. This is a pretty fun way to design your grip because it also doesn't effect the ride ability of the board since this is just ink on top the regular grip tape. It doesn't make your grip tape slide to much and you can always add different colors to it. What you might want to do is put a graphic like this and draw it with one color, let it dry and then come back, and maybe add a color on top of that so that's one way you can do that. Another form of grip tape art is to cut into the grip tape itself. So what I've created here is, I've etched out the pieces of the grip tape after it is already been put on the skateboard. Now this is a pretty exact way to do this. What you want to do is. What you want to do is always make sure that you cut away from yourself with any knife so that in case you loose your traction with it and it sends away you're not coming towards yourself and able to hit yourself. You going to want to grab the board and just start to cut each line that you're going to want to make and you got to push down pretty hard so that you can penetrate the grip tape. You don't want to go too hard because you don't want to actually cut into the plies of the skateboard. So I'm going to to poke it into the corner here and just kind of start the peeling process. Now you can also keep the little letters if you're able to successfully able to peel the letters off and you can use these for something else. You can put them on a surface like that and then you can get yourself the opposite or the negative of your peel out. And this is one way that you can customize your grip tape. My name is Shawn Connolly. I live in San Francisco California. I'm a sponsored skateboarder and I run a skateboarding program for youth called The FS Skate Club. You can learn more about it at FSSkateClub.Com"