A lot of cast trucks feel like they were made by guesswork.
That’s the central problem for me. Cast truck design and manufacturing carries a kind of institutional arbitrariness — seat designs and specification choices that make trucks feel neither fully committed nor fully capable. One-size-fits-all solutions to a supply chain problem. Products engineered to satisfy the bottom-line requirements of a business rather than products made to genuinely serve the skater.
“This is good enough for the average skate consumer,” said skate executive 1 to skate executive 2 in skate company boardroom #4. “It’s not like they can tell the difference.”
Luckily for us, Valkyrie Truck Company doesn’t have a boardroom.
The Design
The Valkyrie design warrants some background.
In 2016, Valkyrie was producing variable-degree third-party baseplates for existing trucks under the Hildr product line. They rolled that cash flow into the first original Valkyrie Voxters — and in doing so, introduced something the skate community hadn’t seen before.
Rather than stacking bushings on a single kingpin on either side of the hanger, Voxters stagger them along the lateral plane and align each bushing to share the same plane. The bushings, though offset from one another, touch the same invisible plane on both sides of the hanger. Conventional trucks carry a thickness between the bushings — typically 4 to 8mm.
To understand the functional effect of this, picture an RKP truck as a modified playground seesaw. The hanger is the seesaw; it rocks on a central point. The modification: there are springs positioned near that center point, dampening the motion as it rocks. Stay with me.
In a conventional RKP, the springs sit some distance from the center — that distance being the thickness of the bushing seat. In a Voxter-geometry truck like the cast Valkyries, the springs are right next to one another, touching, with the pivot axis sitting exactly between them.
The Voxter seesaw compresses those springs with near-perfect efficiency. In a conventional RKP, the bushings are offset from the effective pivot axis by the bushing seat thickness. That offset creates a small but meaningful inefficiency: some of the rider’s input is lost to deforming urethane asymmetrically and overcoming the leverage created by that spacing — a built-in longer lever arm baked into the geometry.
Valkyrie eliminates that spacing entirely.
The Feel
By collapsing the distance between the bushings to effectively zero, the system becomes mechanically direct. Both bushings engage simultaneously, proportionally, and efficiently as the hanger leans. No effort is wasted against mechanical leverage.
The result is a truck with a notably linear response — consistent from the very center of the lean range all the way to its outer edge, where it remains stable rather than vague or squirrely.
My impression is that the bushings in these trucks are very, very well supported without being overbearing. Cast Valkyries don’t have the soft, sloppy dead zone at center that plagues so many cast alternatives, nor the sudden spike in resistance that conventional bushing geometry tends to produce mid-lean.
A side effect worth noting: this geometry makes any given bushing durometer feel some 1-2A softer than you’d expect from the same durometer in a more conventional truck. Plan accordingly when choosing your setup. I found the 92a stock barrels to be too hard, and quickly went to 87A Venom HPF plug barrels. I’m quite happy with those.
At a casual cruise, these trucks can feel slightly muted — not unresponsive, but contained. I think that would be an apt enough description, except that the bonus feature of these trucks is that because of their rake, they are extremely lively at the end of their lean range. 6mm of rake is a lot of rake for a truck. If you carve a lot and are bouncing between heelside and toeside a lot, you’re going to feel the way these trucks hook you left and right.
They’re very satisfying. They’re somewhat similar to the Zealous V1 slalom trucks I was skating all through 2024 in that way. They definitely turn, but you have to work a little bit for it, but not in a way that is harmful.
As one would expect from a 50mm/50mm set of trucks, they do skate quite flat in a downhill context; they don’t lean as actively as a Rogue. They are very stable in the slide. I can tell why these would be great for large slides.
Cast Valkyries are also curiously stable for a set of symmetrical 50/50 cast trucks. I think because the bushings are offset, you end up getting a sort of trailing-axle effect in the rear, and I just haven’t experienced the squirrel-like, twitchy experience of Paris casts or Randal casts at 50 degrees that I would normally be wary of. They seem solid.
The Finishing
These are packed with finishing goodness.
The cast is clean. No seam lines, no grind lines. Clean, thin, matte black e-coat with supremely uniform thickness and finish. The bushing seats are clean and smooth. The bearing seats and pivots are machine-finished and precise! There’s no slop in the pivot cup.
I’m not sure I can think of a cast truck that has ever been finished so nicely. I think Rogue casts are close, but even those sometimes had a splotchy paintjob.
It is worthy to note that as with all cast trucks, these do exhibit a small bend in the axle from cooling.
Who These Are For
Cast Valkyries occupy a well-earned generalist role in the truck space. They are the right choice if you want the mechanical advantages of the Voxter geometry without the price premium of a machined set (if you wanted those), and generally if you’re skating anything in the mid-range of downhill, freeride, longer-distance carving, pushing, or high-energy cruising.
I think these are the best cast trucks on the market today. They are responsive and as precise as a cast truck would ever need to be. They’re certainly the most available, best priced, most value truck with enthusiast, milled truck DNA made by a North American brand.
Further, with 130mm + 170mm hangers, and 40° + 20° plates coming within the season, I think they’re likely to compete overwhelmingly with Bear Gen 6 casts. These are the better truck in every single way.
You can buy Cast Valkyrie trucks from the original designer/manufacturer today below. You may find stock at your local skate shop.
Two Months In
Some impressions have shifted. Here’s where I’m sitting two months in.
The single biggest standout feature of these trucks — the one I underweighted in the original review — is how far they lean. These trucks lean and lean and lean. For a 50-degree truck, that’s surprising. The conventional expectation is that a truck with a bushing seat as significant as a Cast Valkyrie wouldn’t lean all that far before reaching full bushing squish and hitting oversteer behavior. But, Cast Valkyries do, particularly with flat washers both roadside and boardside. They are extremely leany, and that property makes them excellent candidates for LDP and high-mileage cruising — disciplines where sustained, low-effort lean engagement matters more than crisp slide initiation.
On that note: slides. I want to revise my initial impression slightly. These trucks are not particularly easy to kick out into a slide. They are not a Caliber II. Cast Valkyries sit at the opposite end of that spectrum. The articulation that makes them so satisfying to carve also means that initiating a slide requires real technique: locking your knees, using your body to generate oversteer, trusting the progression of your turn enough to know when to commit a hip tweak. Skaters who have that intuition can wrangle them just fine. Skaters who don’t will find them a little harder to manage than they expect.
One setup note that could help here: cup washers. Either roadside on both trucks, or going full quadruple cup — roadside and boardside — would constrain the bushings harder earlier in the lean, giving slides a cleaner initiation point for riders who want it.
On bushings: I want to correct myself. I said the 92a stock barrels were too hard and moved to 87A Venoms. That was, I think, the wrong call. These trucks lean so much, and have so much articulation, that a harder bushing actually suits them well. Other skaters I trust in my local scene have been running the stock 92a just fine. I was setting them up like I would a Paris truck, and that context didn’t transfer. If you’re buying your first set of cast Valkyries, try the stock bushings before swapping. They may be more appropriate than I initially gave them credit for.