Although it may be tempting to spend all your hard-earned cash on your fancy downhill setup, you have to make sure you also have enough of it left over to get yourself some solid protective equipment. We recommend that you have — at the very minimum — a helmet and gloves before you start riding hills. A set of knee and elbow pads are also a good idea, but whether or not you choose to purchase them is up to you. (We’ve all got them around here and when we’re checking out new terrain we throw them on until we’re comfortable with the hill.)

Bushings will serve as the next step in fine-tuning your downhill setup. If you’re just starting out, the stock bushings will work just fine to get you acquainted with your board, but may not be so good for higher speeds. The world of bushings can be a very complicated thing since there are a large number of factors to consider. Truck design, board flex, personal preference and rider weight all play a part in selecting the right bushings for your downhill setup.

If you do decide that you want to upgrade the bushings, here’s a quick and easy way to start off. Keep it simple and buy some Venom DH bushings in a durometer that corresponds to your weight. (It’s always a good idea to have extra bushings lying around, so don’t be afraid to collect!)

Here’s a little durometer chart that we think is acceptable for the type of downhill setup we recommended (a low, stiff deck with reverse kingpin trucks):

    50-100 lbs: 78-80a
    75-125 lbs: 80-85a
    100-145 lbs: 85-88a
    125-175 lbs: 88-93a
    145-195 lbs: 90-94a
    175-220 lbs: 91-97a
    220 lbs and up: 94-97a

This will get your started, but be prepared to play around with the setup until you find out what will work best for you. In the end it comes down to preference, so what we suggest may not be your “ideal” setup. It just takes time.

Risers (or shock pads more specifically) will help protect your deck from unwanted wear-and-tear due to the trucks rubbing directly on the deck. We recommend using a set of ⅛” Khiro Shock Pad for top mount decks and a set of ⅛” Khiro Drop Through Shock Absorbing Strips for drop-through decks. In both cases, these shock absorbing pads will go between the truck’s baseplate and the deck, although in a different style. For the top mount deck, the shock pads sit between the bottom of the longboard deck and the top side (when mounted properly) of the truck. For the drop-through deck, the shock strip will rest between the top of the longboard deck and the bottom side (when mounted properly) of the truck’s baseplate. If it sounds complicated, there’s no need to worry. When you’re buying a complete from our site, we’ll do all the installation for you. If you’re doing it yourself, you can find a video for assembling a drop through deck on our YouTube channel.

Choosing the “right” kind of grip tape to adhere to the top of your downhill deck is one of the choices that comes down to personal preference. Some riders prefer to have their feet stuck to the board with Vicious Grip Tape, while others may want to have the ability to move their feet with ease so they may choose to go with standard Jessup Grip Tape. The “stock” grip on most longboards will be just fine to begin with. (For most of the boards we carry, this happens to be Jessup.) We do, however, recommend a slightly more coarse grip for the times when you want to start riding larger hills. Vicious, Edger and Jessup Super Coarse are doing the trick for us at this time.