Skateboarding is naturally a pretty creative form of expression.

Every skateboarder has their own style, their own trick selection, and their own preferences when it comes to skateboarding in general.

Now there’s a lot of different ways that skateboarders get creative, but one of the most common is by customizing their board.

Skateboards already come in a variety of unique shapes, sizes, and colors, but a lot of skaters like to take things a step further by making some adjustments of their own, and really personalizing their board to make it more unique.

In this post, we’re going to go over a few ways to customize your skateboard.

Realistically speaking, there’s countless ways to customize a board, so if you have any good suggestions of your own, go ahead and leave them in the comments so other people can see it.

Customize Your Skateboard Wheels

One of the best ways to customize a skateboard is to start with the wheels.

Skateboard wheel companies are already pretty creative when it comes to designs, but it’s not too hard to take things a step further.

If you want to be basic, the simplest thing you can do is to just flip your wheels so the graphic is on the inside and the outside is just white, but honestly, that’s almost become the standard nowadays, so you’re not really customizing your board by doing it.

If you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort, an easy way to personalize skateboard wheels is dye them a different color.

Overall the process is pretty straightforward.

All you need to do is clean off your wheels or get a new set, buy some rit dye, and leave your wheels in it for a few hours, and that’s basically all there is to it.

It’s kind of like dying easter eggs, but with skateboarding wheels instead.

You can set the wheels in the dye a few different ways to get different designs, and sometimes people will even leave stickers or glue on the wheels to peel off afterwards, which can also give the wheels a cool look.

The only downside to dying wheels is that the wheels have to be a lighter color to start with, otherwise the die won’t show.

If you happen to have darker wheels, or just don’t want to dye your wheels a different color, another way you can personalize them is with waterslide decals. This option is a bit more technical, but essentially there’s a paper you can buy that allows you to print out decals that can go on your wheels. It does take a more work than just dying wheels, and you’ll need a printer along with some special paper, but it can still be cool to try out.

Customize Your Skateboards Trucks

Next up we have trucks.

If you want to spice up your trucks a little, the most obvious thing you can do is paint them.

There’s a few types of paint that you can use, but the cheapest and most hassle free way is with some spray paint.

To paint your trucks, you just need to take them off of your board, remove the wheels and bushings, and find a good spot outside where you can spray them.

You might be tempted to be lazy and paint them without removing everything, but just know that the paint can really mess up your bushings and your bearings, so its worth spending a few minutes taking them off first.

Once you’re done painting your trucks, it can take a couple hours to dry, but after that you just have to put everything back together and you’re basically good to go. If you want to get weird with it, you can also paint your base plates and hangers different colors, or put some tape on the trucks before you paint them to give them a different design.

When it comes to painting trucks, you also have the option of hydro dipping them, which is definitely one of the cooler ways to get a custom pain job. The only problem with this is that sometimes it can take a bit of trial and error, so unless you’ve had some practice hydro dipping things before you might have some trouble with it.

The last thing to mention when it comes to trucks is bushings.

It’s worth mentioning that some people dye their bushings the same way people dye wheels, but keep in mind this only works with light colored bushings, and a lot of time bushings aren’t very visible so it might not be worth the effort. Instead, if you want different colored bushings, you’re probably better off buying a new set.

Customize Your Deck

One of the most customizable parts of a skateboard is of course the deck.

There’s a lot of things you can do to modify a deck, so it really just comes down to how much time and effort you want to put into it.

If you want to keep things simple adding a few stickers to the bottom is an easy way to mix things up without spending too much time, and a lot of skate products even come with stickers for this reason. Also, they’re pretty cheap to buy so it’s generally an inexpensive way to make you board look different. The key thing here is to really get creative with it, and try to find different ways to mix things up.

If you’re looking for a more hands on approach, another way you can customize your deck is by cutting out a custom shape. A lot of people do this with old decks to repurpose them as cruiser boards, and it can be a cool way to make your own personal shape.

When it comes to cutting out a custom shaped board, it does require a bit of skill, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, definitely don’t try it yourself. Boards with weird shapes have gotten pretty popular over the past few years, so if you don’t feel like making one yourself, you also have the option to just buy one new.

Keep in mind though, that if you’ve never skated a shaped board, it can take some getting used to, so it might feel weird the first few times you skate it.

Customize Your Hardware

For anyone who really wants to get nuanced with it, a great way customize your skateboard is to switch things up with all of the smaller parts that tend to go unnoticed.

Things like the nuts on the ends of your trucks, your bearings, and even your hardware can all be simple things that you use to make your board a little different.

A lot of people will do things like pop the sheilds off of their bearings, or paint their hardware a different color, or even get different colored nuts for their trucks.

Also, a lot of skaters will even use a their hardware as a way to tell their nose from their tail.

They’ll either have one or two pieces a different color, or just leave one bolt out altogether, which makes it way easier to tell which side is which.None of these things are exactly groundbreaking, they’re more so just smaller things that you can do to make your board a little bit more unique.

Customize Your Griptape

If you want to customize a skateboard, making a custom grip job is one of the best ways to do it.

People have been customizing their grip tape ever since skateboarding was a thing, and your grip tape is prime real estate on your board. It’s what you see every time you look down at your feet, and out of everything on a board that you can customize, your grip tape definitely gives you the most options.

Even though people have been messing around with their grip tape for years, recently, skateboarders have really stepped it up when it comes to grip jobs. It almost seems like for a while there was an unspoken competition on who can have the most outlandish grip tape.

As far as what you should do to make your grip tape stand out, it really just depends on how much work you want to put in, and how creative you want to get with it.

The classic, and probably most common approach, is to just draw on your grip tape with a sharpie or a paint pen, but there’s a ton of other things you can do.

You can buy grip with artwork already on it, use a few different sheets of grip to get a larger variety of colors, or even cut up the grip to make different patterns.

Another thing people do is buy clear grip, which you can use along with stickers or even printed out pictures on the top of your deck. Some people will even take things a step further, and make a stencil from scratch and spray paint a graphic on their grip.

How To Customize A Skateboard

Skateboarders are generally pretty artistic, and even though skateboarding by itself is already a creative outlet, a lot of skateboarders enjoy taking things a step further and adding their own creative touch to it.

Every skateboarder has their own style, their own selection of tricks, and their own preferences when it comes to basically everything in skateboarding, and the way you set up your board is just another one of those things.

It can be a lot fun to customize your board, and the cool thing is that unlike most art, you actually get some use out of it.

There’s a ton of different ways to customize a board, and I’m sure there’s a lot of things that I missed, so if you have any good tips, go ahead and leave them in the comments.