{"id":184,"date":"2009-04-03T15:03:05","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T20:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=184"},"modified":"2009-04-03T15:03:05","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T20:03:05","slug":"new-skates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/03\/new-skates\/","title":{"rendered":"New Skates"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought a new pair of rollerblades last week.\u00a0 <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n

I generally hate shopping (apart from our local grocery store, which is nice and small and easy to get around).\u00a0 <\/span>I don’t really understand how some people really enjoy it as a form or recreation; it’s usually a big pain.\u00a0 <\/span>I do as much shopping as I can over the internet, or just leave it others.\u00a0 <\/span>But some things you have to actually go to the store for.\u00a0 <\/span>I did some research online first, but rollerblade.com is one of the worst web sites I’ve ever seen.\u00a0 <\/span>No useful information, and hard to navigate and slow respond to boot.\u00a0 <\/span>Ah well, off I went to the gigantic mall one day on my lunch hour to the giant sports store.\u00a0 <\/span>The store was dead, no customers, but somehow the people who worked there were slow and unresponsive.\u00a0 <\/span>They had a whole wall of skates, so I asked a rep to explain to me why one is $50 and the other $300.\u00a0 <\/span>He has some vague ideas, but no real detailed technical knowledge.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>“Well you are at work.”\u00a0 <\/span>I reminded him as he shambled off.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/span>I got them home and tried them out on the street, and they worked nowhere as good as my old skates.\u00a0 <\/span>Much less maneuverability, much more friction.\u00a0 <\/span>The skates didn’t seem to roll and pick up speed on a gentle slope, which is a problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

One big reason was the skates weren’t rockered.\u00a0 <\/span>Rockering is when you raise up your front and back wheels so that only two wheels touch the ground at once.\u00a0 <\/span>I originally rockered my skates up about 7 years back when I was playing alot of hockey.\u00a0 <\/span>At the time I also put on new high-performance axles and bearings, spacers and mounts.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>What people do nowadays when they want to rocker their skates is put on different sized wheels.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 I supposed I could look into replacement axles in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yesterday I went out after work and the good news the performance is much better.\u00a0 <\/span>So on we go into a new season of skating.\u00a0 <\/span>I doubt we’ll get 17 years but we’ll see how these new skates hold up.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought a new pair of rollerblades last week.\u00a0 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. … Continue reading “New Skates”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}