Wheel rotation is an important part of inline skating and I want to show you the method I use. There are other techniques that, apparently, keep the wear of your wheels even, but it all comes down to a personal choice.
What exactly is "wheel rotation"? It's not about wheels going round! When you skate the friction between the ground and the urethane of your wheels causes them to wear and wheel rotation is about changing their position within the frames of your skates, on a fairly regular basis, in order to keep this damage as even as possible.
More than this, when you rotate your wheels you can gain insights into how your technique is working. For instance, if I skate a flat setup (where all the wheels are the same size and touch the ground together) the front wheels on my skates tend to wear slightly more than the rear. This tells me that I have a tendency to push through the toes, which is bad. When I skate a rockered setup (the middle two wheels are slightly larger than the toe and heel wheels) I find that the wear moves towards the heel wheels; that's why I choose this setup for my day-to-day skating. No matter which setup I use the wheels on my right skate wear more than those on the left, which comes because I prefer to drag my right foot when doing T-stops.
So, before rotating your wheels you should take note of how they are worn. It's likely that you will want to swap the very worn wheels with those that are wearing slower. But again, personal choice and it also depends on your setup.
One question that you're probably asking is how do you know when to rotate your wheels?
If you look (end on rather than side on) at new wheels they have an elliptical profile, unless they're aggressive wheels which are more tubular, with the central line of the wheel in the middle of the profile. As you skate the friction between the wheel and the ground causes wear, typically on the interior side of the wheel; the longer you leave a wheel before rotating it the more an edge is worn into the profile and the more that central line moves to one side.
The wheel on the right is relatively new, the others are extremely worn.
If you leave them long enough the profile can become conical and you've pretty much gone past the point where rotation will help you. So you need to rotate them before this happens. Typically I leave wheel rotation until that central line has moved a noticeable amount on any single wheel. The time between those rotations varies depending on how much I'm skating and what I'm doing: if I'm practicing slides I may have to rotate my wheels at the end of the day; just teaching means it can be several weeks between rotations. But wheel hardness also plays a part: 84A wheels are harder than 80A, so they'll wear slightly slower.
So use wheel wear, rather than time, to determine when you should rotate your wheels.
Anyway, my technique for wheel rotation when you have a flat setup is this:
- Take out all of the wheels
- Line all of the wheels up in order of size: smallest one end, biggest the other
- Split the wheels into two groups
- Put them back onto the skates
Ok, so steps 3 and 4 are a little vague! It's these steps that where you have several choices:
You could choose to maintain as close to a flat setup as possible. In this case you would make one group the 4 smallest wheels, and the other wheels become the second group. Then, when you put each group back onto the skates, you can put the wheels into the frame in ascending size, so that the larger wheels of the group are towards the heel. In my case I would put the smaller wheels on the left skate.
Or, you might create a rockered setup by putting two small wheels with two larger wheels. If you imagine the wheels in that line are numbered 1 to 8, then you might pair 1 & 2 with 5 & 6 to make one group, and the others form the second group. Then when you put these wheels into the skates the two larger wheels go in the middle and the smaller ones at the toe and heel. Once you start doing this you're pretty much going to have to keep doing it.
I'm sure there are other combinations but these are the two I use the most. I also ensure that, whichever I choose, I make sure that the worn edges are facing the outside of the skates: like most skaters I tend to wear the interior sides of the wheels more. There's a minor change I make to this, which is down to how I skate: the heel wheel on the left side has the worn side turned in, because of the way I wear it through certain maneuvers.
Clearly a properly rockered setup (where the wheel sizes started different, for example 76mm and 80mm) is slightly different: the decision of which wheels to group together has been taken for you already, it's just about putting the most worn wheels in the locations where they will wear slower.
Hopefully this has helped you understand why, when and how to rotate your wheels. The next How To will be on cleaning your bearings, something that will keep you skates running smoothly but lots of inline skaters don't actually bother with.
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