Martin Winkler, the Munich maker who built a fingerboard press out of LEGO

Daniels is not a newcomer to this kind of digging. He wrote a history of fingerboarding for Fingerboard411 and made a 2022 video history of Fast Fingers, the contest Blackriver founded in 2000. For the Winkler film, his description says he went through the fingerskating.de archives from 2001 to 2003 via the Wayback Machine, along with old contest reports, interviews and product pages. He also cites a 2015 Jenkem piece, "An Interview with a Professional Fingerboarder", with Blackriver founder Martin Ehrenberger.

That date range matters. It places the material Daniels leans on in the years when German fingerboarding was building its institutions. Blackriver had been making ramps and obstacles since 1999. Berlinwood, Timo Lieben's Berlin deck brand, dates from 2002.

What the magazine's own records hold on Winkler himself is narrow. Winkler Wheels is the German wheel brand of Martin Winkler. He is also the rider who, according to Boardmag's report on the first Weisswurst-Iss-Jam, started Munich's WeisswurstIssJam street jam in 2006.

A founding year for the wheel brand circulates in community sources, but it has not appeared in anything first-party. It is left out here until it does.

The film also gives Winkler room to speak for himself. One chapter, "In his own words", is built on Pissing Fingers from 2003. The magazine has not seen that 2003 material directly. Anything Winkler says in it reaches this piece only through Daniels' film.

The film's description lists three things Winkler made himself: boards, axles and wheels.

The LEGO press belongs to the first of those. It is the image Daniels chose to lead with, and it sits in a chapter titled "The secret laboratory". The description does not say what the press produced: how many plies, which veneer, what width or concave. Nor does it say when Winkler built it. Those are questions for the full film and for the archive pages behind it.

The wheels are the part of the work that became a brand. A chapter called "Winkler Wheels, pins and the book" covers that side of his output. The magazine has not confirmed from a first-party source what the wheels were made of, or whether they ran bearings. A buyer looking at one of those unopened boxes should ask the seller rather than assume.

Two other products carry his name, and in both cases someone else made them:

• The Winkler Mini. The description says Winkler got Blackriver's first signature ramp, and the film gives "The Winkler Mini" its own chapter. The listing Daniels cites is for a "Winkler Mini Dos". The supplied material doesn't establish how the two relate, or when either was released.
• A Berlinwood pro model. Berlinwood presses 5-ply maple decks by hand in 29, 32, 33.3 and 36 mm widths, and it makes pro models for riders. These are documented through Berlinwood's page on the Blackriver shop. The "Martin Winkler pro model" in the description fits that pattern. Its year, width and shape are not stated, and that pro model does not appear on the current shop page.

The film also covers Winkler as a rider, in chapters titled "He could ride, too" and "What good style looked like". It covers him as a personality in "The entertainer" and "The evangelist". The description doesn't summarize those chapters, and this piece won't guess at them.

Read the figures in the description carefully, because they are not all the same kind of number.

The wheels and the ramp are described as listed: $200 to $400 and more for unopened Winkler Wheels, and $125 for the Mini Dos. A listing is what a seller hopes for. It is not evidence that anyone has paid it.

The Berlinwood deck is the one figure described as a sale: $400 for an unused board. The magazine has not checked that completed sale, so treat it as Daniels' report rather than a confirmed record.

Even so, the pattern says something. A ramp, a wheel and a deck from three different makers' catalogs all carry one rider's name, and all three are being offered as collectibles. That points to a name the market has already decided is worth paying for. What the market hasn't done is write down why, and that is the work Daniels set himself.

Fingerboarding keeps much of its history in places that disappear: forum threads, early-2000s German websites, product pages for things no longer made. Daniels had to reach part of his record through the Wayback Machine. That is a reminder of how much of this era survives only because somebody archived a page before it went dark.

A collector market is an odd keeper of memory. It remembers that a name is valuable long after it has forgotten what the person did. Winkler's case shows the gap clearly. The prices are easy to find, but the story behind them takes a 22-minute film and a stack of archived contest reports to rebuild.

The film also points at a kind of rider the scene has always depended on. Winkler built his own boards, axles and wheels, and he used a LEGO press because that was what he could make work. He had a signature ramp with Blackriver and a pro model with Berlinwood. He started a street jam in his own city. And he still tells people to skate for fun.

Whether he was the first at any of this is a claim the supplied material doesn't settle, and this piece doesn't make it. The more useful point is that the record is still recoverable, and that someone has started recovering it.

The full film is the best place to start: He Built a Fingerboard Press Out of LEGO on cdplaya's YouTube channel. The chapter list in its description lets you jump straight to "The secret laboratory" for the press, or to "The Winkler Mini" for the ramp.