these are PowerDyne Reactor plates. they’re made from extruded aluminum and are generally the kind of thing i would look at and think “those would be so fucking awesome to own, but i don’t have $350 to spend on them.”

but.

and this is an all around super fucking awesome but.

whilst going through the process of ordering my new skates the super cool folks at rollergirl made me an offer. normally if this came up i’d have said sure, but now i say sure with a story.

in march when i was in Vancity for birthday fun i dragged Danielle to the Rollergirl store cause they were having a massive sale. you know one of those ONE TIME DEALIO SALES that everyone goes nuts about. no seriously, their site crashed because of the amount of online orders from that. so anywho, on facebook they posted the in store sale times and some highlights. one of those highlights was a pair of blue 911s mounted on Reactors with (if i remember correctly) blue Radar Speed Rays.  these were in a size 7.5. i told danielle that at no point was she to allow me to buy these. which, at the time didn’t seem likely anyway simply because of the sizing and the fact that i wanted red skates. they only let a few people into the store at a time, and while we were waiting at the cusp of the entrance i asked if they’d sold the 911s, to which the guy standing there (turns out he was the photog at Bootcamp) said no. I asked if I could take a look and he handed me one. you know, in case i wanted to steal a whole pair that were blue and a half size too small.

in any case, i ended up picking up a full set of eight Speed Rays loaded with Kwik 7 bearings. they are radtastic. i’d actually picked out a pair of Sure-Grip Rebel skates and would have walked away with them but they said they had to mount them because the pair they had was for demo and i had to wait for them to set a pair up. i didn’t want to wait so i left with my wheels and we went for lunch at Memphis Blues because it’s fucking fantastic and we could walk there.

so now fast forward to today. actually the last two days cause i put the order in yesterday but the emails have been going back and forth since then working out the order details. so i hammer out the specs i want with size and all. good. done. waiting for them now.

today i get an email from them saying two things. well three things. the key here was the one thing that mentioned “these boots fit a half size different than your Diablos.”

first thing… we can order your skates and mount them on the XK-4 steel plates.

or.

second thing… we have a pair of 911s in stock mounted on $350 reactor plates that we’ve been trying to sell for a year. they’re blue. they fit a half size different and since they’re 7.5 they’ll fit you. and since we’ve been trying to sell them for a year we’ll match the price on your custom mount specs saving you several hundred dollars on the plates alone.

i can live with blue. i got this email at lunch. we were out for vietnamese. i’m glad i’d finished eating when i checked it cause i probably would have dropped my chopsticks into my pho.

bonus, i can pick them up while in Vancity on vacation in June. not only do i get to go camping with everyone, followed by some random adventures on the Island, and Cambie time, I get to fly home with what is pretty much what I think is the ultimate skate set up. and that’s not a stretch. being able to bring these skates home is like someone handing me the keys to a 2010 Tacoma in speedway blue with the TRD package. or a Nissan Altima 3.5 SR coupe. (fyi, the altima has about 40 more horsepower than the Tacoma. still a toss up in my head on those two…) actually, you know what, fuck it, these skates set up on these plates with the bearings and wheels i asked for (which they’ll put on for me) are like someone handing me the key (or Emotion Control Unit… no joke) to an Aston Martin DBS Carbon Black (510 horsepower, or over 600 if you tune it to the DBR9 specs).

so now i will have super fucking amazing plates, super fucking amazing wheels and bearings and super fucking amazing skate boots. like so:

i can’t remember the exact hue of blue, but they’re not like, neon or anything shitty and eye hurting like that.

and now i will go sleep in.