LOYAL DEAN
GOOD WOOD
“The graceful, fluid lines flow seamlessly from tip to tail, with no two decks being quite the same.”
You couldn't find two more qualified chaps to design, craft, and sell you something made of wood than Greg "Loyal" Perry and Dino "Dean" Pierone. But making longboards – the extended version of skateboards? That happened by accident. Yet the beautiful, pavement-cruising creations that emerge from the Los Angeles studio where Perry and Pierone run a six-year-old custom door and window business are garnering a great deal of attention these days.
Both men gvew up in Spokane, Washington, where Peny, almost a decade older, was a drummer in bands with Pier-one's brother. Years later after both had moved to L.A., they ended up reuniting to stag a woodworking business. The workshop they founded did so well that they were soon wasting a lot of materials, leaving the pair with piles of cut lumber. "A couple of years back, I thought I'd use some of it to make a skateboard as a present for my daughter," Picrone says. "That sparked it." But what do a former contractor and an artist know about designing stable Fides that get SoCal rollers from point A to point B?
The biggest thing we've had to tweak has been the performance aspects," Pierone explains. "We relied a lot on our employees who surf and skate to test the boards." ALI the decks — there are four models in total — are made from two layers of laminated plywood, with all the grain running in the same direction. "This gives the board a very springy effect," says Pierone. "When you step on it, the deck compresses. You can actually get moving without putting your foot on the ground to push off at all."
Along with superior performace, the laminating process also produces a remarkably organic, striated surface pattern, “like the movement of water down a river or a wave on the ocean,” Pierone says.
The graceful, fluid lines flow seamlessly from tip to tail, with no two decks being quite the same. We ordered a few of the blunt-nosed Bomber model, which has the look and fed of a surfboard — perfect, as the company says, "for those nutty downhill grades." Maybe it is slightly loony to mount a plank of timber and let gravity do its damnedest, but it sure helps to know you're standing on some very good wood. With Loyal Dean, that part is guaranteed.
