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Rotating the wheels on your inline skates
Structured way:
Here's a simple no-brainer way of rotating your skate wheels.
Rotation Station have suggested using the following wheel rotation strategies
on their website, together with some tips on how to do more advanced wheel
rotation once you start to be concerned about how individual wheels are wearing.
These are extracted (with permission) directly from the Rotation Station
website.
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Four
Wheel Rotation
(Follow These Four Simple Steps) |
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- Remove the
wheels from the left skate.
- Place them in
the right side of the wheel tray.
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- Remove the
wheels from the right skate.
- Place them in
the left side of the wheel tray.
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- Move the
wheels from the tray to the skates.
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- Replace and
tighten all bolts.
- Follow your
skate manufacturer's specifications.
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Five
Wheel Rotation
(Follow These Five Simple Steps) |
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- Place center
wheels in the front slots of the wheel tray opposite the skates.
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- Remove the
wheels from the left skate.
- Place them in
the right side of the wheel tray.
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- Remove the
wheels from the right skate.
- Place them in
the left side of the wheel tray.
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- Move the
wheels from the tray to the skates.
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- Replace and
tighten all bolts.
- Follow your
skate manufacturer's specifications.
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Unstructured rotation:
Many advanced skaters no longer use any formal strategies for rotating the wheels on their skates. Needs a little more thought but works a little more precisely. Instead they might apply some of the following strategies, depending on their goals:
- Pretty much all skaters will look at the wear pattern on their skate wheels and decide how to rotate based on that together with the skate setup they like. This is a good time to think about your wheel wear pattern, relate it to the type of skating you do and decide if your technique needs work. For example I recently saw a skater who completely wore out the front wheels on his skates during a marathon. This shows that he was using a powerful toe flick (which is inefficient and slow) instead of pushing through the heel, and the results were reflected in his race time.
- Most skaters will swap the wheels from one skate to another since most of us have at least a slightly uneven push, which normally results in more wear on the wheels on either the left or right skate.
- Change the wheels so the most worn edge swaps sides (normally the inside edge).
- Have some change between front, middle and rear wheels since these all wear differently.
- Some special attention may be required for skates that have rockered axles, such as hockey skates and the Salomon FSK series. Here you'll have to pay even more attention to the relative sizes of your wheels.
- Some skaters like skates with a rocker, and will purposefully leave slightly smaller wheels at the front and back of their skates. Others want a flat setup so will aim for that by moving any slightly smaller wheels to the middle.
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