tech deck

The 4-year-old and I are newly addicted to fingerboards.
He’s had Tech Deck “Dudes” in the past, but it never seemed to take hold and he would lose the riders and/or boards after a few days. He’s pretty spoiled and always manages to drag one of us to the toy section to buy him something or other. I was looking at the Tech Deck stuff they had in stock at our local big box retailer during my recent knee injury. Fingerboards by themselves seemed kind of boring, but they had these skatepark sets—the one in particular was a “Corner Bowl.” Blind, World Industries, Tony Hawk, Girl Skateboards, et al., have sets that you can put together and make your own huge finger board skatepark. You would need to buy two or four of the sets to make a proper bowl, but I just found it really intriguing nevertheless.
So the other day E and I were at the big box retailer, yet again, and instead of buying him his usual Superman/Spiderman/Spongebob/whatever action figure, I talked him into getting a skatepark set. I ended up going to four different stores before I found one—in the last week all the sets have disappeared from the shelves. I bought the very last one at Meijer’s—it wasn’t even a corner bowl, it was a quarter pipe/grind rail combo. By that point I was desperate.
The sets only cost about $10 and the boards by themselves are about $3. The Tech dudes are in the same range as the boards and they come on a plastic magnetized board. The fingerboards are more “realistic” and have plastic trucks and wheels on a little board with a grip-tape top. There are cool graphics on the bottom of the decks as well.
I found a few e-bay listings, a few of them expired--the Tony Hawk complete set was for sale and some other guy was selling a “250 piece” set. Prices were all over the place, as is common on e-bay, so I didn’t get a good sense of what demand is like. The corner bowl was selling for $7.50 and $40. Two different sellers, two totally different prices.
I’m left with a few questions at this point—do the “Tech Dudes” work on the ramps as well—I don’t see why not, but just wanted to be sure. The other thing is—where did all the sets go? Are they discontinued or did they just happen to run out of them?
E won’t leave the house without his fingerboard and skatepark set—he takes it everywhere with him. I have to wait my turn to play with the fingerboard, which doesn’t sit too well with me. I’m also dying to get my hands on a couple of the bowl sets, but in the meantime, I’m using a big wooden salad bowl that I swiped out of the kitchen. I was hoping to get my little E skating in the spring and hopefully the fingerboard helps stoke his interest. Until my knee is fully healed, I’ll have to satisfy my skate jones with some fingerboard action as well.