Starr remembered that those never sold well, so he knew whatever he came up with had to have a better design. It looked like a pair of curb feelers that hung off the kingpin and dragged on the ground. There had been an earlier sparking attachment made by G&S trucks in the ‘70s, called the Speed Spark. “I had envisioned making a toy that would go down like the hula hoop or the frisbee, a generic toy that every kid gets on his third birthday from his uncle.” “Everybody thought it would be a quick, million dollar money-maker,” Starr said. That was Starr’s first hint that a well-made, easy to use sparking attachment could be a hit. Starr said they ran up asking to buy their own sparking devices on the spot.
However, kids who saw them experimenting didn’t care about the longevity.
“We glued it to the back axle and sparks flew,” Starr said, “but it would break off after the second or third time because the metal snapped.” Rather than use the old flint method, Starr got a hold of mischmetal, a mixture of rare-earth elements that easily breaks into shards, creating bigger sparks in the process. The problem with the DIY flint sticks though, aside from them falling out, was that they could never make sparks big enough to show up in photos.ĭecades later, around 2000 or 2001, Jim O’Mahoney, a Skateboard Hall of Fame inductee, asked Starr to help him recreate the sparking trucks for a photoshoot. “It didn’t show up very bright on a sunny day, but it was like, wow, I got a spark.” “You’d get a little bing,” Starr told me. When they grinded cement pool coping, the ends of the flint would emit little sparks. Tail Devils took inspiration from an apparent ‘70s trend where skateboarders would drill skinny holes into their truck axles and stuff flint rods into them, which they took from butane lighters. So, I did a little more searching and got in touch with the creator, a skater named Scott Starr, who told me the story. I never knew where Tail Devils came from or where they went, as you won’t find them in stores today and they’re barely available online. Dragging your tail down the street, the most basic and frowned upon maneuver, suddenly became the most rewarding thing to do. They only lasted for an afternoon, but in that short time they could transform a skateboard into something even more fun and accessible. If you don’t remember them, Tail Devils were little plates you stuck to the bottom of your tail and scraped against the ground to shoot out sparks. You find all sorts of weird gems there, like the original kicktail (which looks nothing like kicktails today) or the inline skateboard (which is somehow dumber than it sounds), and while I was browsing I came across the patent design for the Tail Devil. A while back I was scrolling through skateboard-related patent filings on Google.
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