Another wheel bites the dust

While skating on these Hyper wheels (which I HATE), one of them decided to shed large parts of itself onto the floor. It's hazardous for other skaters to have large bits of rubber lying about on the floor.

This failure was immediately apparent when skating. Think of the lub-lub-lub sound of an automobile tire going flat. I "pulled over" immediately, and called it a night.

Silver lining: These wheels are 72mm diameter. I replaced the bad wheel with an older 70mm Axel 6.0 wheel for the following week's skating session. The smaller diameter replacement effectively shortened the rocker of the wheels on the front part of my left skate, and I was actually able to spin in my PIC skates! If you look closely at figure skating blades, the curvy part is just behind the toe picks. The blade flattens out toward the rear. Replacing this wheel with a slightly smaller one made the PICs rocker more like a figure skate blade.

My scratch spin is up to about 7 revolutions on PIC skates. Did the smaller wheel up front contribute to this? Or did I just get better?

That's the stuff of further research, but for now I'm going to continue using 70mm wheels up front and larger 72mm wheels for the rest. I can't help but think that the change improved my chances for nice spins.

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Bill Schneider
July 31, 2008