I’d like to start out by saying that AZPX has the best, most patient customers and we really appreciate you! Since the latest run of the Don Ho Tiki Model is taking considerably longer to complete than expected, we at AZPX always want to be up-front and transparent to our customers. What’s going on you ask? Let us tell you…
Back in January AZPX was poised to make another run of the Don Ho Tiki Model with master shaper Dale at DB Skate Designs. Since Dale is a one-man operation, he employed the local board fabricator AD Skateboards to handle our entire order under Dale’s supervision which was fine with us. About 3 days after we inked the new deal with AD and sent a fat deposit, Dale called me up and told me AD was going out of business and liquidating all their equipment. The boss promptly put a reversal on the deposit and Dale recovered enough un-cuts from AD to fulfill our order except….we were out a heat-transfer source and place to apply them. Getting screwed by skateboard factories is nothing new to us. In March 2020, I had 300 decks paid for and on order with my factory of 16 years. They shut down during the pandemic and never re-opened. I lost my deposit and had to pay back over $3K in pre-sales out of my pocket.
Dale then went to work on shaping our decks while we figured out some sort of graphic application. Screen printing was an option, but honestly we did not want to invest the time and money to do a one-time run of decks ourselves. Since Tom Cooper and my son are both Graffiti artists, we decided to spray bomb our decks using laser-cut Mylar stencils. Unlike our last run, these decks all had natural bottoms instead of dyed veneer. This created another challenge since Don wanted some rad color backgrounds. As skateboarders do, we got resourceful, built a sketchy board paint rack and made a real ‘professional’ spray booth in my backyard.
Here is a gallery of our progress so far. Dale got us the decks at the beginning of May, they look AMAZING. Things are going slower than expected but your board is on the way…We will push out the first batch of pre-sales after the clear coat dries. Thank you again to all our super rad, patient customers!
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