Skateboard Truck Grind Clearance

Skateboard Truck Grind Clearance

In skateboard trucks, grind, or kingpin clearance, refers to the clearance between the hanger of the truck and the kingpin. The resulting angle determines how your trucks behave during certain grinds. Especially with Smith, Feeble, or Willie Grinds, the truck is not flat on the respective ledge, curb, or rail, but rather inclined inwards. The kingpin or its nut can get in the way and the higher it is on the respective truck, the more it can be in the way.

Many skaters think that the more the kingpin and its nut grind down over time, the better the grind clearance will become. This is one of the reasons why many skateboarders are afraid to swap their old trucks for new ones. However, this is unfortunately not the case in practice because the hanger usually wears out faster than the kingpin and therefore the kingpin becomes higher and higher in relation to the hanger and is therefore even more annoying. In the following image you can see a heavily used Thunder truck. Here the angle has decreased from 10.8 to 1.3.

In addition to the geometry of the truck itself, the height also has an influence on the position of the kingpin. Accordingly, lower trucks, especially lows and mids, have worse grind clearance.

Some manufacturers, such as Krux, Slappy, Film and Independent, have addressed the problem and offer special models with inverted kingpins. With these trucks the nut sits at the bottom of the baseplate instead of at the top. This allows a flattened end to be attached to the top. The axle hardness is usually adjusted using an Allen key. The disadvantage of this system is that the kingpin can come loose if you don't tighten it tight enough, or the kingpin can dig into the deck if you set the trucks too hard.

In the following we want to give you an overview of the Kingpin clearance of the most common skateboard trucks. For this we use a digital protractor. The larger the angle, the more clearance.

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