35.5 Slider Earthwing Longboard Review

What more could there be to a short technical skate deck. Mirror a short board deck and there you go, right? Wrong, and this is where the Slider from Earthwing comes in. The combination of monofilament and a sick paint job gives the EW 35.5 the look of a carbon-fiber deck.

Combine this with the crest of the winged EarthWing logo, center set on the bottom of the deck. The top of the board sports the block EarthWing logo just in front of the rear truck. The overall combination of the graphic and texture of the deck, while still function over form, works great. The paint job does a good job standing up to general wear, such as spitting gravel, beach sand, being piled along with 6 other boards in the back of a car, etc… It’s a sick looking deck for sure but there is much more to it, it has ample concave and a smooth tail and kick. The pockets near the wheel wells concave look somewhat exaggerated compared to the rest of the concave. The board is a very unique combination of technology and style.

This deck is one of the first larger street decks to firmly make their own place in the longboard lineup. Instead of a larger more exaggerated street deck this board has contours all its own and was pressed in a very unique way, instead of using the classic laminate sizes the Slider uses micro think laminates this allows the press to give the deck a smoother press, the laminates are sandwiched inside a monofilament thermoplastic composite on both the top and bottom. Lighter than using comparable materials the deck still had the rigidity and solid contours that a technical deck needed. The thin laminates give the pockets on the nose and tail a very aggressive shape holding the feet in during manipulation. The deck is light but still maintains durability without the thin lam’s prematurely separating or the thermoplastic weave fraying prematurely.

So we got generations of longboards that are just long skateboards, finally along the way a company decides to do it different and all of a sudden you have longer shortboards made with a variety of composite of materials. The unique shape afforded by the materials allows this board to be among the best boards in the world not only for form or function, but also just because it is a serious technical slider. You can call it anything you want, an innovation, augmentation, origin; the fact remains none of that matters if the board feels like crap under foot but unlike so many other longer shortboards, or shorter longboards, this one performs, on the hills, in the bowls and on the streets. The EW Slider shreds.