Sometimes soft is good

Being a sad old twat in my forties, I’m of the generation that is used to skateboard wheels being soft. Now, for those of you born later than 1985, you will have no concept of what a soft skateboard wheel is all about.

Well, as you may recall from history classes at school, the first skateboard wheels were clay, which meant they were rock hard and tended to freeze if you hit a stone. This kept skateboarding from developing further until Frank Nasworthy decided to apply then-new urethane technology to the skateboard wheel. He created a wheel that was smooth and grippy, and this led to the skateboard explosion of the 1970s.

A big part of skating in the 70s was just cruising: no flip tricks or ledge nonsense, just the sheer fun of cruisng down a hill or along a pavement. The soft wheels meant that the skateboard could actually be a mode of transport – you could ride through town quickly and without fear of bumps. But as skateparks developed, the need for soft wheels became less and wheels became harder, until we have arrived at today’s rock hard formulations.

Riding hard wheels is fine as long as you are in a skatepark, but if you are not, they render the skateboard completely useless, hence the sight of kids walking around town with their board under their arms. In my day, they would have been skating the pavement getting on everybody’s nerves.

Now, I always thought the pay-off was as follows: on skatepark surfaces, soft wheels are slow, hard wheels are fast So to test this, I went to my local concrete park in Corsham Wiltshire with two set-ups: one with 78A soft wheels and one with 99A hard wheels. In terms of speed, I was amazed that I was able to reach coping just as easily with the soft wheels as the hard., and the soft wheels enabled me to pump harder as they were more grippy so less likely to slip out from under me. So I guess the real issue with hard wheels is that they slide, thus enabling you to perform a wider range of “tricks”. But here is some advice from an old fart: sometimes the best trick of all is to just cruise along, enjoying the stoke of the wind in your hair. So next time you’re looking for a set of new wheels, why not throw on some ABEC 11 Retro wheels and see how much fun they can be? Why should the skateboard cameraman be the only one who enjoys wheels as they should be?