Words and photos by Alex Fishburn
Finally! The Bear Kodiak Forged trucks are here. Those of you that have been around for awhile know that the Bear Forged trucks have always been a whisper in the wind, a truck that everyone has heard about but nobody has seen, a truck that has had so many revisions and changes, it’s like looking at the evolutionary line connecting birds to dinosaurs. But enough that history mumbo jumbo, the important thing is that the Kodiaks are out, and we’ve finally been able to take them out of the box and check out what all of that hype and prototyping went into creating.
So let’s talk about what you get in the box; obviously you get a pair of trucks, they come with the 94a extra tall bushings installed and ready to go. In addition to the four 94a bushings that come in the trucks, you’ll receive four 92a bushings and four 90a bushings. All of these durometers sound like they’re on the harder end of things, but it’s important to remember that these trucks utilize extra tall bushings! Regular bushings are .550″ or .600″ tall, but these Bear Kodiak trucks use the same height bushings that were popularized by Ronin and Rogue, which is a bushing that is .750″ tall. Having almost 30% more bushing height means you’ll have more bushing to compress (duh!) and that effectively means you’ll have more leverage, a deeper lean, and a deeper turn. To handle all of that crazy leverage and turn you’ll be getting, you end up having to run bushings that are slightly harder than you’re used to. So that’s why you get 90a, 92a, and 94a bushings in the box! But hey, Bear knows that everyone isn’t about the tall bushing life, so they include two 99a bushing shims. If you like your regular sized bushings and don’t want to mess with tall bushings, remove your boardside bushings, put the shim on each baseplate first, then put your regular sized bushing on, then put the hangar on, and bam! You’ve got regular sized bushings in your trucks. That sort of versatility is new, no other notable truck company has provided bushing shims with their trucks, so we’re excited at the heightened level of tunability that Bear Kodiaks are offering.
I already talked (probably too much) about the bushing options and what they mean for you, but lets get into the trucks themselves. The most notable feature of Kodiaks is the fact that they’re forged. So what is forging and why is it better than cast truck technology? Well when a truck is cast, the metal is heated to the point where it is a liquid, then the molten metal is poured into a mold where it is allowed to cool down and re-harden. The main downside to this method is that the act of liquifying the metal randomizes and breaks down the grain structure of the metal. Forging, on the other hand, takes a block of solid metal and uses massive amounts of pressure to force the metal into the desired shape. This doesn’t change the state of the metal, so the grain structure is preserved instead of being broken down, there is less surface porosity since the metal isn’t ever introduced to air in a molten state, and they’ll last longer and be stronger (which is another upside to maintaining the grain structure since the truck will be elastic instead of brittle). So because the truck is so much stronger, a smaller amount of material can be used which makes for a noticeably lighter truck than a cast or even a precision cut truck. It turns out there have been some pretty in depth studies on cast vs. forged products, this specific study by Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Department at the University of Toledo did a pretty extensive research paper on the subject. The findings of the paper are as follows; Forged parts have 26% greater tensile strength than cast, 37% greater fatigue resistance, cast has 66% of the yield strength that the forged counterpart has, and the forged part has a 58% reduction in area, where cast only has 6% (reduction in area is essentially a measurement of how much the part deforms before it fails. So that’s a load of information, and all of this information was gathered based on shackles not trucks, but you get the idea… forging produces a product that is stronger, resists fatigue more, has a greater tensile strength, and is more elastic before it fails. So how does this directly apply to trucks then? Well, suppose you spend the extra dough ($129.99 from us) on a pair of Bear Kodiaks. That’s $70 more than the cast counterparts, the Bear Grizzly Trucks. But for that $70, you’re getting a truck that is significantly stronger in every way! If you skate hard, you’ll eventually break or bend a set of cast trucks, and you’d probably go through a couple of sets of cast trucks in the time it would take to ruin a single set of Kodiaks, so they pay for themselves over time! Not to mention the gains you’ll get from a greater level of precision functioning, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.
So enough about forge vs. cast, let’s get into the geometry. Bear Kodiaks sit on a 45 degree baseplate and have rakeless (appear to be rakeless… they could have a very small amount of rake, but not more than 2mm if any. We still need confirmation, but from every angle I look, they look rakeless), but asymmetrical hangars. So they’re flippable and the ride height won’t change (ride height is 65mm to the center of the axle), but if you do end up flipping them, you’ll have a different bushing seat on top and bottom. The bottom bushing seat is shaped more traditionally, like that of a Caliber or Gunmetal truck, or a shallower version of the Bear Grizzly cast truck seat. This gives the rider the option to run stepped bushings, like Venom Eliminators or Riptide Chubbies. The top bushing seat is very similar to Ronin bushings seats if you’re familiar with theirs, it has a flat seat where the bushing sits and then instead of a sharp wall like a traditional bushing seat, the wall goes up at a slope, so the entire bushing seat is more of a big bowl than a seat. This allows for a very deep and unrestricted lean and when matched with tall barrels, you’ll have more lean available than you’ve ever experienced before!
The attention to detail is impressive on the Kodiaks, the tolerances are extremely tight, the bushing seat and the pivot both look like they were machined, and the axles are ultra strong and perfectly straight. Everything about this truck screams “PRECISION” but it was achieved at a fraction of the cost, so you, the rider, benefits from a really high quality truck at a really low price point. What more could you ask for? Bear knocked out of the park, and out of the damn city with the Kodiaks!
