Bushings explained: how a small piece of urethane changes everything about how your board turns

Most riders spend a lot of time thinking about wheels, motors and battery range. Bushings barely get a mention until something feels wrong. That is a mistake, because the two small urethane pucks sitting inside each of your trucks have more influence over how your board actually feels to ride than almost any other component you can swap without tools and a parts order.

Understanding bushings is not about chasing a marginal gain. It is about knowing why your board feels loose and squirrely on a fast run, or stiff and unresponsive when you want to carve. Once you understand what they do, you can tune your setup to match the way you actually ride, rather than accepting whatever the board shipped with.

What bushings actually do

Every Evolve board uses double kingpin trucks. Inside each truck pivot, there are two bushings stacked against a washer, one on the road side and one on the board side. When you lean into a turn, you are compressing those bushings. How much resistance they offer, and how quickly they return to center, determines the character of every single turn you make.

Softer bushings compress easily. That means the board responds quickly to small weight shifts, turns feel fluid and the carve has a kind of elasticity to it. Harder bushings push back more. They require deliberate input to initiate a turn, but once you are committed, they hold the line with more authority and feel planted at speed.

Neither is objectively better. They suit different riders, different riding styles and different surfaces. The same board with different bushings is, in a meaningful way, a different board.

The durometer numbers, and why they matter less than you think

Bushing hardness is measured in durometer, the same scale used for wheels. Evolve uses a straightforward three-tier breakdown: soft at 87A, medium in the 90A to 92A range, and hard at 95A and above. Those numbers give you a starting point, but they do not tell the whole story.

Rider weight changes the equation significantly. A 140-pound rider on 87A bushings will find them genuinely soft and carvy. A 200-pound rider on the same setup might find the board feels vague and difficult to hold steady on anything above 20 mph. The bushing rating that manufacturers publish as "soft" or "medium" is calibrated against a mid-range rider weight. If you are heavier or lighter than that, your baseline shifts.

Riding style matters just as much. Someone who commutes smoothly through Austin's downtown grid and wants a predictable, confidence-inspiring ride wants something different from someone carving hard down the hills in San Francisco or pushing speed on a long Miami coastal path. The bushing that feels perfect for one rider on one route may feel completely wrong for someone else on a different one.

How to tell when your bushings are wrong

The most obvious sign of bushings that are too soft is speed wobble. That unsettling oscillation that starts around 20 to 25 mph is almost always a stability problem caused by bushings that cannot hold the truck firmly enough at speed. Tightening your truck nuts helps temporarily, but it is a workaround. The real fix is moving to a harder durometer.

Bushings that are too hard have a different signature. The board feels reluctant to turn. You find yourself physically leaning further than the situation calls for to initiate a carve, and the ride feels mechanical rather than intuitive. Long rides become tiring because you are working against the setup rather than with it.

There is also a middle-ground problem that is easy to miss: bushings that have worn out. Urethane deforms permanently over time under repeated compression. If your board feels inconsistent, sometimes carvy and sometimes vague, and the truck nuts are not obviously loose, it may simply be that the bushings have given up their shape. They are a wear item. Replacing them periodically is basic maintenance, not an upgrade.

Where the Diablo Carbon fits into this

This is worth understanding before you start swapping urethane: the deck underneath you has a direct relationship with how bushing tuning feels in practice.

The Diablo Carbon Street runs a forged carbon fiber deck with zero flex. That rigidity is intentional. On a bamboo deck, natural flex absorbs some of the input you put through the trucks, which softens the ride and rounds off the feedback you get from your bushing setup. On carbon, that buffer is gone. Every bit of bushing response comes through directly and immediately.

What this means practically is that bushing tuning matters more on the Diablo Carbon than it does on a flex deck. The precision is higher, but so is the consequence of getting it wrong. Medium to hard bushings suit the Carbon well for most riders. The deck is already doing its job of providing stability and a planted feel at the board's 50 mph governed top speed. Soft bushings under a rigid carbon platform at that kind of speed is a setup that works against itself.

At 29 lbs, the Carbon is also lighter than the Bamboo equivalent, which affects handling in a way that compounds with bushing choice. A lighter board is more responsive to rider input, which makes the bushing selection feel even more pronounced. Riders coming from heavier setups often find they need to move one step harder on durometer to get the same stability they were used to.

Practical tuning for real riding conditions

A useful starting point for most riders on the Diablo Carbon: run medium bushings (90A to 92A) and ride the board for a few sessions before making any changes. Get a feel for how it responds on your usual terrain. If you are commuting across Los Angeles on flat ground and your main priority is a smooth, planted cruise, that medium setup will likely feel right. If you are pushing speed along the Hudson River Greenway in New York and the board starts to feel unsettled above 25 mph, move to harder bushings and reassess.

Heavier riders, anyone approaching or above 200 lbs, should start at the harder end. The Diablo Carbon and Renegade both carry a 265-pound max load rating, but the bushing spec you need to feel secure at speed is different from the spec that keeps the board structurally sound. Use harder durometers and tighten the kingpin nut to match.

One thing worth noting: changing only the road-side bushing (the lower one) gives you a more conservative feel change than swapping both. Some riders run mismatched durometers, a harder board-side and softer road-side, to find a feel between two standard options. It is worth experimenting if you find the standard steps too large a jump.

The installation is simpler than it sounds

Replacing bushings requires a skate tool and about ten minutes. Loosen the kingpin nut, remove the old bushings and washers, seat the new bushings in the correct orientation and tighten back down. The washers matter: concave washers cup the bushing and restrict movement more than flat washers do. Swapping washer shape alongside durometer gives you another tuning variable if you want to go deep.

If you are near the Oceanside store in California, the team there can walk you through the right setup for your weight and riding style in person. For everyone else, the Evolve help center covers this in detail, and the bushing selection itself is inexpensive enough that trial and error is a reasonable approach.

The honest takeaway is this: most riders who feel something is off with their board adjust the truck nut and leave it there. That fixes nothing and wears out the setup unevenly. Bushings are cheap, the difference they make is real, and tuning them correctly is the closest thing electric skateboarding has to dialing in suspension. If you have not thought about them since you bought your board, it is probably time you did.