I actually just pre-order the qu4dro looking forward to it…hopefully. will make a review when i get it. its suppose to ship on early June :D… BTW if anyone is interested in buying any board from Acton you can use my referral link and get 150 dollar off. ( Yes, i will also get 150 per referral, not trying to scam anyone here.)
I doubt the BLINK QU4TRO will even go to market in the current form, looks like they have some patent infringement hurdles to overcome from stealing the suspension idea from another company…I wonder if Avenue trucks knows about this thing yet, looks like a local company to them too…wow
They seem to be partnered
Yeah no, they are not, talked to Avenue already, there’s an interesting backstory, but yeah, no, they are not working together on it…
Not after January the 1st. Longhaired dude pockets will be empty by then, he just warn me a few days ago. Little weasel is raising the price on them Witchblades. He want me to get one before Jesus Christ birthday.
Looks like solid and pure. Happy to get this one here. lol
Suspension
I suspect the suspension system will polarize a lot of people. The main problem here is physics.
Here’s the thing. Currently, the way a regular TKP (traditional kingpin) or RKP (reverse kingpin) truck is set up, there’s a pivot cup and a kingpin that forces the truck to only rotate in a sort of semi-circular fashion in one plane around the pivot point. In other words, the truck rotates around the axis determined by the pivot point and the kingpin keeps it in place. However, with Acton’s suspension trucks, in addition to the regular RKP single plane rotation, the suspension is further allowed to deform in infinite directions due to the nature of the design. See my beautifully drawn graphic for an example of what I mean:
Keep in mind that in a traditional suspension, you only want yourself to be suspended along one axis. If you need to be suspended along more than one axis, you add more distinct axis along which to be suspended. You almost never want yourself to be suspended in all possible axis, because then you’re really just jiggling around. That’s what’s happened with the suspension on the Qu4tro: You’re really just… jiggling, which prevents you from properly turning or carving with confidence at any reasonable speed. The suspension will deform and neutralize the majority of your turn. It’s honestly not great, and the default hard bushing Acton includes doesn’t make it any better.
Edit: Avenue, the makers of the original suspension trucks, have informed me that they have in no way licensed their suspension trucks for Acton, nor are they working with Acton on suspension trucks. Here is their statement:
“In my opinion Acton’s suspension has many flaws in its design, much so that I wouldn’t step on it for possibility of failure. We have warned them about the implications of their design as they skipped what we found to be ‘very necessary processes to ensure the integrity of the baseplate’ Yet they chose to ignore us and run with their design anyways as they obviously wanted to go around our patents as 'best they could’, or so they thought. Sounds like your Quatro 4 test confirmed many of my suspicions regarding their flaws to be true. Ultimately I’d hate to see someones Acton suspension system break and fail at top speed on a board in traffic resulting in injury or worse… simply because Acton didn’t want to license our design properly.”
I’d originally written a review on Avenue TKP suspension trucks modded onto my Carbon GT and quite enjoyed it, so please do not let this review scare you away from suspension trucks!
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Thank you for your thorough reply on the matter, really gathered some important info there so thanks on that, on another topic I would love to ask you if by any chance you think a Baseplate Swap would be possible for a direct drive set up using the Avenue RKP version. I know Avenue says clearly on their site that they do not recommend that and it will not work if you try it but I think I saw another post where someone used Hubs and managed something that works ok in my opinion. On the back, he used Evolve hanger with an Avenue gen1 (sk8) base plate and it seems that it works. My intention is to buy the RKP baseplates and put the hanger with my direct drive do you think that is doable? Thanks
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