Jesse Garza: Deck Restorer

Ever seen a badass fully restored ‘57 Chevy, all cherry’d out looking like it just rolled off the showroom floor? Well my buddy Jesse Garza does similar work but with skate decks. He can take your dusted, crusted old plank and time machine that bad boy straight back to the ‘80s. I hit him up to see what goes into restoring a skate deck and why it’s such a rare discipline.

- Michael Sieben

How’d you get into deck restoration and what was the first board you worked on? 

I worked on a Mark Gonzales for a buddy here locally in San Antonio, Texas. After doing his board I realized there was an actual market for this and little by little started doing more boards after that.

So did you post it to social media and people saw it and were, like, “Whoa, I want my old deck fixed up!” 

Yeah, that was basically it. I didn’t realize that there was somewhat of a deck restoration community already out there, so I just figured let me see what I can do with this. And nobody was actually restoring decks with screen printing, so it just became a really cool and unique thing because screen printing is such a dying art form.

So the other deck restorers that you found, were they hand painting the graphics on the boards? 

Yeah, most of these guys are painting them by hand with a brush or they’ll mask off the design and they’ll airbrush the different color separations color by color and then will paint at the very end. And those are really cool and that’s been the accepted way of doing things. But the preferred way of doing it is to do it the original way that it was initially done, screen printing it the same way using the same inks, same type of art separations that were done in the ‘80s and there’s just nothing that beats that. That’s the ultimate.

How do you find the original art?