The poster for the next Richter City Roller Derby bout is out in the open. Only 2 weeks plus change until the girls get together to knock your socks off. I won’t be in town to ref the event, but I’m sure my partners-in-crime will handle the job just as well.

If you are in Wellington, you should be there.

Just in time for summer, I’ve run into another skating setback. I believe that the fault lie with the baggage handlers on a recent flight to Auckland. Upon my return, I found that my left cuff rivet had vanished. I was able to get a replacement part from a friend at a hire shop and moving again. Two weeks ago, towards the end of class, I found another cuff rivet on the rink. After checking out everyone’s skates, I realised that it was mine. Bummy.

The damage to the post is obvious. The only way that I can imaging something like that happening is for a heavy weight to be applied from the top of the cuff or, if the back of the rivet was strong enough, compressing from the side. In either case, irreparable.

I’ve not been as lucky this time finding a replacement. My original supplier has run out of spare bits and the next order isn’t expected quickly. I have a guy at our machine shop who’s working on a possible hack to get me going, but that’s been slow going. I may need to think with the credit card. As if I’ve not been doing that enough lately.

A lot of the motions that I go through when skating are not conscious. Things happen because I tell my body what I want to have happen and it does it for me. In this particular case, I was wearing unfamiliar¹ skates – and things went badly from there.

When I teach someone to skate backward, I give a warning about allowing the heels of the skates to come together while moving. It’s a quick trip to the ground. The same was true for me when the heel brake, which I don’t normally wear, got in the way of the other skate. As a result of my lack of attention to my forward-reverse transition, I earned a painful landing and a reminder to wear wrist-guards.

Where’s my magic skate repair Fairy God Mother when I need her?

¹ These were K2 Exo skates. They’ve got a much longer wheelbase than my Soul 7 pair, a heel brake and much grippier wheels.

That is the sound of weight being applied to a broken wheel as it turns around its bearing. I was making that sound until early last week, when I swapped out a #3 for an old wheel of roughly the same size. That was the sound that the very same wheel was making this morning, and also the sound that my #2 on the other foot was making by this afternoon.

Apparently, I am hard on my wheels. I don’t know what exactly is happening, but I am starting to suspect my rocker. At a guess, if I drop off a curb, the bulk of my weight is spread across two wheels instead of four. Trying to decide how to deal with this, I see two options: going with a flat rocker, which will kill my turning radius, and finding a wheel that handles stress better.

I would assume that a solid hub would be a good approach, assuming it can evenly distribute any sort of force across the whole of the hub, rather than cracking at a weak point. Alternatively, a softer wheel may spread the impact through the urethane before the shock hits the hub. Of course, the softer wheel would wear down faster. While I was down at Cheapskates, I noticed that the bulk of the aggressive wheels were solid pieces. There might be good reasons for that. Looking at the on-line retailers, I noticed that several race wheels are also solid core, citing lower drag. Sure, but I am not going to worry about that. Just give me something that I am not going to break.

It might be a good idea to contact some of the companies that make these wheels. I would like to know if there is anything I can do to stop the problem outright. I cannot guarantee that I will never drop off a curb again, so another solution needs to be found.

I’ve been a bit slack on my skate maintenance. The bearings have been noisy and I know they need to be cleaned, wheels rotated. While I was in town today, I picked up some new laces, since one of mine is on the edge of breaking already, figuring that I could use the excuse to get into gear on the rest of the stuff.

I may have been slightly overzealous. I pulled the frames from the boots after I stripped the laces and the insoles. I wanted to check for any damage while stripping them. The frames are a bit scuffed, but nothing worrying. However, I did notice something after a few minutes.

There’s a rivet missing. It allows the cuff of the boot to pivot at the ankle. I don’t know how long it’s been gone. I may have been skating that way for ages. It’s on the left foot, which tends not to get stressed the same as the right, but I’d hope that I would notice something like that. There’s no evidence lying around to indicate where I lost it; it’s not in the house. If I knew where, I may be able to piece together why, but that’ll likely remain a mystery.

Now for the next problem: what do I do now? Can I get the rivet replaced? I have no idea who to get in touch with to find out. I’ll have to start with K2 directly and see what they say. I’ve had factory work done in Christchurch on some K2s, so I may be able to get this dealt with. If all else fails, I may have to beg the machine shop at work to fashion something for me. I don’t want to buy a new set of skates at the moment. I like my Soul 7s and I’d like to use them for a while longer. Having said that, I probably wouldn’t complain if someone gave me a pair of Frontmans.

My chiropractor asked me an off-topic question last night: Is there a good place nearby to get wheels for inline skates? Her boyfriend had asked around at a couple skateboard/snowboard/surf shops around Wellington with no luck. She knew to ask me.

Unfortunately, the in-store selection is limited and expensive, but I have used them for emergencies. Alternatively, there is sk8 who supplies hockey gear, based in Christchurch. The don’t supply the harder wheels, but for general skating, it wouldn’t be a problem. She seemed happy with that answer.

Normally, I’ll order wheels from the US mail-order companies. If I talk to a few friends and see who needs what, we can even buddy up to save on shipping. It’s far from ideal, but it works. Maybe I should consider setting up an import business. It’s scary to think that I may be serious.

I just came back from an evening skate with some of the more adventurous skaters I know. It was a good time, but I had to bail out early, due to hunger and fatigue. On the way back to the house, after grabbing some food from Deluxe, I came back up Taranaki. I’ve made this mistake before, but I haven’t yet learned my lesson: I can’t cross onto Webb Street. There is no pedestrian crossing, which means that I can’t take the shallower incline of Hopper St. By the time I killed my lungs getting to the top of the hill, I wasn’t ready to sprint out the downhill home-stretch.

The last couple hundred meters is a lot of fun. The break in the traffic is enough to jump ahead and keep to the road – there should be about 10 seconds of no cars. It’s a fun skate when you’re not busy blowing up your lungs trying to stay in front of traffic.

It’s dangerously tempting to think that spring might be edging its way into the southern hemisphere. The days are certainly getting longer again, which could never come too soon, in my opinion, and it’s warming up enough on the weekends to be out in shorts and t-shirts1. We’d taken a couple hours on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend to lead some people on slightly longer outdoor skate routes, which gave me a bit of a chance to add to my skating photos.

It’s far from a summer-time panacea, however. Mornings are still bitterly cold when there has been a clear night. There are still southerlies that’ll bring cold wind and rain our way, as well. But there is certainly more hope this year to get outside compared to last year. Just ask the ice cream shops how much they’re selling…

¹ For short periods of time and when you’re keeping active enough to not notice the wind.

A couple friends and I are collecting a series of routes through Wellington that can be put onto a brochure for people interested in skating around the region. Naturally, we have our normal standby paths – around the waterfront, through town – but we want to present more variety and something outside of the downtown core. We’ve discussed some possibilities and are in the process of doing some hands-on research.

It’s impossible to just look at a map and mark out routes. Road and footpath condition, hills, traffic and accessibility all play a part, which requires a visit to evaluate. With a short supply of available time during the week and iffy weather patterns, I’ll more easily get through the list by running instead of skating. It can still be hard to judge incline and decline, but it’s still possible to judge surface conditions. At a running pace, I’ve even got some time to enjoy the scenery.

I’d started this morning¹, looping through Newtown to Kilbirnie. My plan is to aim for two more trips through Miramar and Seatoun by the weekend.

¹ I was fantastically lucky. Not only did the rain abate to a gentle trickle, but the traffic through the Mt. Victoria tunnel had been blocked off for cleaning and was just reopening as I was going through. A total of 3 vehicles went through the tunnel while I was in there, so it was neither noxious nor deafening – a very pleasant change from the norm.

I’m messing around with my skates again. I just received another order from Inline Warehouse, this time with wheels, bearings and axles for the Soul 7’s that I ordered from them before. I’ve been riding them stock for the last few months, which was a change on its own: a much shorter frame changed the balance points substantially. Now, it’s a whole new game.

The first change is to get rid of the brake pad. I’ve always had it there, even if I don’t always need it. I can stop a few different ways, but when I need to stop fast, I rely on my brake. The next couple weeks are going to have to be a bit slower, at least when outdoors. I’d been meaning to remove the brake pad for quite a while, but hindered by the lack of a proper axle to replace the brake mount with. K2 uses a flush-mount axle design that seems to change with generations of skates, which has made it impossible to find a spare at the local skate shops. As a result, I had to order a set of 8 in order to get the one that I needed. So, I’ve got 7 spares.

The second change is a bit of a rocker. I put two different sizes of wheels on the skate: 76–80-80–76. The distance isn’t huge, but the difference is going to take some getting used to. It almost feels slushy as weight shifts forwards and backwards, and I have no idea how it’s going to feel when I try to stride out in a straight line. Now if only the world would send me some good weekend weather, I’ll do my best to spend the day not falling on my ass.

As an aside, when one buys a set of wheels and bearings, it’s a good idea to also buy spacers. I was lucky enough to have a year-old set of wheels that were lying around that I could cannibalise for the spacers within. The bearings were already partially frozen, but there’s no problem in recycling the spacers.