I don't mean like "bought a tech deck" because most people will have done that, I mean like does anyone have any funny stories about when they first got there's ? Or who inspired them ?

One day I seen an advert so I went out and bought a tech deck but played with it for like 10 mins and then started customising it haha, I threw it aside that week as I got bored, then a year later I saw an advert for one and was bored so I searched youtube and found some sick videos of guys recreating skate tricks, so I hurried out that day and got one(after throwing my other one out) learned to Ollie etc. then ,over onto wooden decks and it has grown on me from there

Well, I have had tech decks when I was five. Then, my friends at school last year ( I was in sixth grade, now in seventh) brought their tech decks to school so I brought mine and we would play games of skate. I would go home and search tech deck tricks on youtube, and then I discovered FSS. ( I don't watch it anymore) I would watch trick tips and got good. I got a tech deck expert sk8 for christmas, and then got a berlinwood for my bday. It took off and here I am now learning switch tres and new variations.

friend bought a bw om off youtube, he quit, i started. he never received the deck btw

I searched up "Pro Tech Decking" and found a bunch of videos of fingerboarders, which eventually lead me to Mike Schneider and that lead me into the fingerboard world. Bought a Prowood complete, and Jim sent me 2 completes because I won a contest a never knew about. lol

All my friends had fingerboards at school when I was like 12-13 and i was broke so my friend directed me to fingerdecks and he gave me a techdeck, I messed around with my td till my fingerdecks deck arrived. used it from October till Christmas then got bored haha. Found it in a box I hadn't unboxed from moving over a year ago so i started messing around with it learnt to ollie kickflip and other tricks then my girlfriend brought all my Christmas presents (the one we just had) and i was looking at close-up completes and some cheap china extras so she went and got them for me

FBHQ was really the way that I finally found FBing,but I do have a shit load of TD's which has been an ongoing interest.FBHQ has piloted my whole FB life.    for FBHQ.

http://www.fingerboardhq.net/t17407-what-got-you-into-fingerboarding-keeps-you-fingerboarding


My story : 

Well, for me, My cousin had a TechDeck. This was right around when they first came out. 
He used to ride the trucks super loose and they'd always fall off cause of the nuts. 

Fast forward an unknown amount of time, around 1997 I think , I got my first TechDeck. 
Totally thought it was awesome, I used to take it to school and we had this huge concrete full pipes with polished insides for people to sit and chill in. So I used to ride it just about every morning before school, at lunch, after school, whatever. 

Wasn't long after that they started appearing everywhere, Chinese copy's and things started emerging and it made it a lot easier for me to get different wheels etc. Lots of finger bikes and stuff started coming out too, I used to have tons of them cause I used to BMX quite a bit. I remember some of them used to come with "sticky fingers wax" which did exactly that, I remember thinking it was dumb but it used to be kinda cool to use on the big Fingerbike half pipes and stuff to do air tricks. 

So continue on to around 2000 and I was still messing with them, I know I could Ollie at this point, but flip tricks were all random crazy flips. 

Then, around 2002/2003 I hadn't touched my TechDecks for a couple months, I always had them around and stuff though. 
My friend came to stay and had a TechDeck, to his surprise I had a large amount of ramps and obstacles and tons of bikes and TechDecks etc. He was stoked. 

So it was that night that I stumbled upon TechDeck forums, and everything changed. 
I registered with some horrific name, I think it was techsk8ta or something like that. 
Despite actually fingerboarding for somewhere around 6 years, I quickly found out I was a total noob.

Things just went on from there really, I remember getting "sponsored" by this company once, the guy sent me a sponsor pack of 2 TechDecks, I thought that was pretty funny, cause like most companies back then people would always start a company without any products and then hold a massive tryout and then pick people and shut down shortly after. But this guy actually sent me something, so I was still stoked. 

TechDeck forum was like a warzone back then, it was bursting at the seems with hormone fuelled pubescent youngsters, much like myself, claiming to be the king of tech decking or the best company etc etc. 

Before I left the TechDeck forums, I met a guy called Weakfingers (Gary Chin)  People were bitching at him as usual procedure on the TechDeck forums, he wanted to know how to kickflip I think. So I added him on MSN messenger and taught him to kickflip. I couldn't really kickflip very well myself to tell the truth, but I'd seen enough trick tips to be able to recite them. 


I can't remember exactly how I found FFI, but I did manage to get registered first try. 
I was still living back in the UK at this point, and when I found FFI I met some people from the UK online, because up until this point I think everyone I spoke to was American, or just about. 

This is when I got talking to people like Eddie Sharples, Thom Mcinally, Simon Cartledge etc, these guys were always way better than me, I used to talk to Simon all the time, he taught me to heelflip I think. 

It wasn't long before I moved to New Zealand, in early 2004, I now had nobody in my country who fingerboarded at all, but that didn't stop me. I carried on fingerboarding until around late 2007 when I learnt I could get served alcohol in the local pub despite the age being 18. I still had all my stuff and fingerboarded occasionally but I moved out of home in 2008 and didn't really pick up fingerboarding again for a while, kinda moved in and out of it over the last few years leading up to the present day where I'm embracing it as much as ever. 

Congratulations if you read all that. 

That's pretty much my story. 

I really enjoyed reading that Joe,thanks for taking the time dude.  

One of my good friends in highschool who skated introduced me. After we each moved away he picked up fingerboarding at some point and would always be clacking away in skype whenever we were gaming. Eventually he decided to get a real wooden deck and since I was always bitching about him making so much noise he invited me to try it. Took me forever to learn how to ollie and much longer to learn other tricks after that, not sure if It was a lot more difficult because I had 0 skate knowledge prior but I stuck with it and here I am. I still get shit about never having used a tech deck lol.

i started with a tech deck and always put my hand under the board , then i entered on google fingerskateboard and saw blackriver and then i saw flatface on youtube and so on
the funny thing is maybe that i was like very the first and only one in my school and like very first one i knew who did or does it in my town which has like 20.000 people as population and this is like very bad but i met or made all my friends on contests and something like that .

Hmm... My complete story:

When I was like 6 or 7 (1995-1996) I remember seeing a short part of the first professional fingerboarder on TV, at some kids channel. I found it really cool and I really wanted to have one. Probably that same year I got a pack of chinese replica techdecks. I played with them for only a short period of time and then abandoned them.

It took a long while before I picked them up again. I was around 11 or 12 when my cousin started skateboarding. He kind of introduced me to skateboarding and the THPS games. I got really into skateboarding and one day I found my old fake tech decks somewhere in a drawer. Now that I actually had interest in skateboarding, I wanted to try those tricks on a fingerboard. First thing I noticed was that it was MUCH harder then I initially expected

I first started trying to do ollie's on my bed. The matress gave me the pop I needed to actually get into the air. From there on I started doing grinds and slides on the side of the bed.

Later, when I went to high school (about 12 or 13 years old), I often didn't feel like doing my homework. Instead, I used the books, pens, the case of my compasses and rulers to build 'skateparks' :PSince I had to make homework every day, I basically fingerboarded every day. Soon I learned to ollie from kickers I build with my books and after that I could ollie from flat ground.

I kept doing that for years to come, until I was around 17. I felt that I kind of got good at fingerboarding. I can almost say that I accidently got good at it :PIn those years I also learned a bunch of flip tricks, starting from just pressing the side of the tail to do kickflips to actually ollieing and flicking my front finger to do proper kickflips. On some occasions I could even combine my flips with some grinds or slides or sometimes manuals Furthermore, I also liked printing images of the bottoms of actual skateboard decks and glueing them to my fingerboards I also often had to maintain my fingerboards. The plastic bushings would break and fall off, so I replaced them with a small piece of rubber band.
When I was around that age, I got curious. I wondered if there weren't any wooden finger skateboards. I initially thought that wood would simply be far to weak to build a fingerboard with. I though that any wooden fingerboards would just be for decorational purposes. However, doing a google search I quickly came to results like Berlinwood, which was only just getting popular and Close-Up. When I saw that there were actual, quality fingerboards on the market, I really wanted to have one. Not only to improve my skills, but also because my cheap-ass fingerboards just kept falling apart and breaking down up to the point where I just super-glued the trucks to the deck. I ordered a first generation Close-Up complete so that I would have a complete, quality set up. I really liked that fingerboard. It was such an enormous improvement coming from el-cheapo chinese plastic fingerboards. If I pick up my Close-Up now though, I seriously don't know how I was ever capable of even getting that thing into the air onto a rail

When I had my Close-Up, I got more serious at fingerboarding. I could combine my flips with manuals and grinds more and more consistend. I also built my own metal rail and wooden box with metal edge at that time :)Meanwhile, I also kept looking at what kind of stuff was on the fingerboard market. I saw wooden decks like Berlinwood, Flatface, LowPro, Yellowood getting more and more popular. There weren't really any good fingerboard trucks back then though. After about another 2 years I thought it was time to upgrade my setup. I ordered a Flatface G12 Complete. This was again a major improvement from my old Close-Up. The bearing wheels rolled so smooth and I really had so much control over the deck. At that point I kept improving my skills more and more :)I used that setup for about two years when my desire for a deck with a more defined shape and professional trucks grew. I decided to buy a Berlinwood deck (they only had the classic shape back then) and I also bought a pair of ytrucks x3's. I used the Flatface G6's cause they still rolled very smooth.

That is the setup I am still using up until today, for about 2,5 years now. I did however order a Berlinwood Wide which should be coming in the mail any day now



For me, fingerboarding started as something I did out of boredom while doing my homework. It has now evolved into a real hobby. I hobby for which I am somehow still a little emberassed... not sure why, even though I really like it. Furthermore I also see it as an extension of my skateboarding skills. I really liked skateboarding, I still skate now and then, but I never got as good at it as I got at fingerboarding. Fingerboarding kind of allows me to do tricks that I really liked but could never do on a real skateboard :)It has kind of become a way of expressing the tricks in my mind to an actual board, only one which is a little bit smaller

I started in middle school with the first tech deck I have ever owned which was a world industries wet willy graphic board. Before that I had a black label tech deck I was borrowing from a friend but I didn't really own it. I learned how to shuvit and ollie at this point but couldn't really do anything else.

Then last year, sophomore year second semester, I picked up the hobby again when I saw a sorta-friend from band playing with a tech deck during our engineering class. I joined in on this and started playing with them during the class. I was a lot better than him even though I hadn't fingerboarded in more than a year. There was another kid who saw that we had tech decks and he started bringing in his too. He was pretty good. He could kickflip which impressed me because I still couldn't do any flip tricks besides a very slow back finger impossible.

At this point I asked my mom if she would be really nice and do me the favor of buying me a china wooden complete. It kept me very entertained. I made a bunch of paper graphics over the next couple months on it and rode the heck out of this board. I still was having huge issues with kickflip which I wouldn't resolve until I put down the hobby again and then picked it back up another while later.

But anyway, the kid who sort of copied me and my friend bought a china complete as well a couple weeks after I did. I don't really know what happened to him at the end of last year though. I think he moved. So yeah, I never really continued to fingerboard after the end of that school year.

Now this last summer I decided to try to learn how to skate. I ended up buying a cliche deck and some pretty cheap wheels and trucks and figured out some fairly basic stuff on it like the ollie and frontside 180. But as skateboarding goes, winter came and I'm kind of on a break from skating as my basement is too small to skate in.

I then came back to fbhq and got back into this scene because I thought well, I'm already actually skating, why not try fingerboarding again. Thus, I got a berlinwood, Flatface wheels, a tech deck longboard, and some Flatface hardware for Christmas and I am back into the scene.

Not only that, but in less than a week I have done some amazing stuff with this berlinwood setup and I have managed to get very clean at kickflips, variable kickflips, tre flips, impossibles, and front finger impossibles. I am having more fun fingerboarding than I have had any time in the past and I plan to be a fingerboarded for a while now.

I also plan to annoy the hell out of my roommates in college in a year and a half too with all my fingerboarding clatter.

Hmmm....

I picked up a techdeck from the local skate store when I was 10 or 11, I also picked up this plastic and graphite grind rail (never seen anything else like it, but graphite is amazing to grind, soooo smooth) so naturally learnt to Ollie and 50-50 fairly quickly. I lost interest shortly after that and I have no idea what happened to that stuff...

Fast forward 18 years and I start working with autistic children. One of whom has and is really into techdecks. I was blown away that they were still around, and as a way of working with him, I got my own cheap Chinese knock off and started to learn to Ollie again. Eventually after getting sick of having to keep replacing the Chinese knock offs, wondered if anyone made wooden fingerboards. Turns out that they do and after some deliberation (paying 20 quid for what I had previously paid £1 for was a bit off a turn off), but my wife convinced me it would be worth it and I got my first decent kit, a 4 corners complete which in comparison was amazing, though looking back, it's not great. After a bunch of tuning mods (shaping the trucks, pivot cups, new kingpins, witchcraft bushing etc.) I realised I still wasn't happy so I splurged and got a blosom and some ywheels, kept the hand shaped trucks as pro trucks really are stupidly expensive, and that's my current ride, which I really, really love!

I've got a pretty decent park at the perfect height setup in our front room and I'm in the process of replacing all the cardboard ramps with wood ones. So I guess I'm well and truly hooked

My story began around mid-2010 in eighth grade. I was at lunch with my friend Hunter and he had a tech deck. Middle school always had that "lets finger skate vibe to it" all the kids were doing it. I was jealous at how he first learned a hardflip. He let me use his for the first time and I was terrible, but who isnt when they first start?   
Later that day, I asked my mother if we could go to Target to pick up a tech deck and I got one of the old Black Label Orange/Black Graphics. That night, I was up for hours on end trying to ollie. Took me a good week to learn. I was so excited! Later on during the school year, Hunter introduced me to Flatface. He brought his g12 with turquoise G6 Wheels to a school club and I loved it! I tossed away the Monoploy Game we were playing at the moment and I used his g12. It ROLLED SO SMOOTH! The foam tape(rip) was so soft. He told me that these are ones you can buy online for a decent price. 30$ for a deck att was not decent at all xD
Later on, I continued to practice and learn grinds and basic flip tricks. I searched on youtube for fingerboarding and watched the first fb video I seen: Tech Deck Dorks xD
Later on, I found out Mike by watching King Philip Middle School Fb Club which was amazing! I thought atm that Mike was a 30yr old man but he wasnt. Idk why I thought of such a silly thing.
Many goofy things I look back on now, I did to my decks like sharpie-ing the grip to look like foam tape and riding with no wheels at times. Riding rough on concrete and making legit cereal box ramps. <3
First wooden board was a Prowood with bearing wheels. I loved it.
Now im learning new tricks most of the time, I carry great professional setups, and meeting new friends around the community who do what I still love~
All there is left, is for me to actually attend a Rendezvous for the first time with Hunter maybe this year after high school graduation. I wont look back on it~
Continue on Being Creative With Your Fingers People!
  

Im glad alot of people replied to this forum. You all have interesting stories to share~