Cheap and Custom Penny Board Grip Tape

Hi everyone!

In this quick ible I'll show you how to make a cheap grip tape with a custom design for your skateboard, longboard, penny board, or any other kind of boards!

I decided to add a grip tape because, even if my penny board deck has a lot of "zig-zag lines" (photo#4), when the floor is a little wet or when it starts to rain, the deck becomes really slippy and it results dangerous to skate.

It will cost you just 2$ and you can make it in less that 10 minutes.
Let's see the few materials and tools needed.

MATERIALS:

- your skateboard of course

- a roll of sandpaper (2$)

TOOLS:

- black spray paint (I didn't like the colour of the sand paper I bought)

- transparent protective spray paint

- double sided tape

- pencil

- scissors

Online you can find a lot of sticky grip tape which have the perfect size of your board, but all I found was too expensive for me.. My penny board is quite old and ruined so I didn't want to spend 15/20$ plus the shipping cost. (I didn't bought it also because my penny board is not brand original, so the dimensions may have been different, and I could have find myself with a useless grip tape that I should have cut if too big, or I should have thrown away if too small)

I solved the problem buying a 2$ sandpaper roll. It measures 11cm x 250cm.

Since I'm building also a longboard (future ible maybe) whose deck measures 22cm x 100cm, I cut the sandpaper roll in 3 pieces respectively long 100cm x 11cm, 100cm x 11cm, and 50cm x 11cm.
Then I painted them with black mate spray paint and I let them dry. I put the longer ones aside, and I worked on the smaller one.

My penny board deck measures 13,5cm (in the largest part) x 55,5cm. So I cut a sheet of paper 50cm x 11cm and I tried to move it on the deck and mark with a pencil some ideal lines.
At the end I found a cool solution (photo#3) of 5 pieces spaced 1cm apart (photo#5).

In order to cut the 11cm x 50cm grip tape, I put all the 5 templates sheets on the back of it, paying attention to reverse all of them before to mark all the lines.

Then I cut all the parts and I attached to their back the double sided tape. (you can glue them to the deck also with normal glue or however you want! I decided to use the double sided tape because it's strong enough and it will be also easy to detach if I should need it)

As you can see in photo#4,5 you can put some pieces of paper scotch to help you placing them more precisely.

At this point we have finished the project! I tested it and it's very grippy, strong, and it doesn't move from its place.

Since I wanted to reinforce the grip tape and the black paint, I decided to give other hands of paint.

So I covered the penny board with newspaper and scotch leaving uncovered just the deck (please note that I also put scotch pieces in the 1cm gaps between all the 5 parts). I gave another hand of black paint, and finally, after removing the scotch lines (photo#3), I gave 2 hands of transparent protective spray paint.

WARNING. Don't overdo! Or the paint will fill every gap and irregularity of the grip tape, and you will obtain a flat and slippery surface :P

Once dried, I removed all the remaining pieces of scotch and all the newspaper sheets.

As promised you can make your own custom and super-cheap griptape in just ten minutes.

Now it's time to grab your skate, and go out to free your mind!

Thank you for reading my Instructable. ;)
Feel free to comment and ask if you need to know something!

manuelmasc