I bought a new pair of rollerblades last week. My old ones are 17 years old and from another generation of rollerblade technology, and though they are well-nigh indestructible, they’re at the point where they need new wheels and bearings, and the boots are pretty worn anyway, having been repaired once already with duct tape.
I generally hate shopping (apart from our local grocery store, which is nice and small and easy to get around). I don’t really understand how some people really enjoy it as a form or recreation; it’s usually a big pain. I do as much shopping as I can over the internet, or just leave it others. But some things you have to actually go to the store for. I did some research online first, but rollerblade.com is one of the worst web sites I’ve ever seen. No useful information, and hard to navigate and slow respond to boot. Ah well, off I went to the gigantic mall one day on my lunch hour to the giant sports store. The store was dead, no customers, but somehow the people who worked there were slow and unresponsive. They had a whole wall of skates, so I asked a rep to explain to me why one is $50 and the other $300. He has some vague ideas, but no real detailed technical knowledge. His beeper went off, an he excused himself, saying he had to go help some other customer, and complaining he can’t get any time to himself. “Well you are at work.” I reminded him as he shambled off.
So looked thru the selection and tried on a few pairs and picked one that had a comfortable boot, no obvious design flaws, and cost $150, marked down to $100. I got them home and tried them out on the street, and they worked nowhere as good as my old skates. Much less maneuverability, much more friction. The skates didn’t seem to roll and pick up speed on a gentle slope, which is a problem.
One big reason was the skates weren’t rockered. Rockering is when you raise up your front and back wheels so that only two wheels touch the ground at once. I originally rockered my skates up about 7 years back when I was playing alot of hockey. At the time I also put on new high-performance axles and bearings, spacers and mounts. Well, apparently rollerblade doesn’t make skates anymore that you can rocker, and the chassis on my new skates use a totally different system of parts that are not interchangeable. What people do nowadays when they want to rocker their skates is put on different sized wheels. So I ordered some smaller wheels and the other night I put them on the font and back, and while I was at it, I took out the middle wheels and oiled up all the bearings, and removed the brake. There doesn’t seem to be any analogue in the new setup for the bearing spacers, which seems like a potential weakness down the road for stress and wear and tear, but there’s nothing to be done about it for now. I supposed I could look into replacement axles in the future.
Yesterday I went out after work and the good news the performance is much better. So on we go into a new season of skating. I doubt we’ll get 17 years but we’ll see how these new skates hold up.