Skate Culture Article #15: Flat Spots...

What’s the best shape for wheels? A perfectly round circle!

Skateboard wheels are made of urethane, a strong hard rubber. It’s the perfect substance that gives general durability, grip and weight. They are however, not indestructible and given conditions, they can be affected by flat spotting.

Flat spots are exactly what they sound like. They are flat spots on the wheel compromising the ‘roundness’ of the wheel and essentially, causing them to be less efficient and most annoyingly making the skateboard sound like a plane taking off.

They’re caused by the wheel being stopped in someway and a tangent of their circumference being eroded to the flat spot. The biggest culprit is probably hitting small stone that stop the wheel while the skateboard and skater continue momentum unabated. There is also certain tricks that use parallel sliding on the wheels. Nose slide and tail slides can do this but I find a really good Nose Blunt slide (nose in the off the obstacle, front wheels on top of obstacle along with the rest of the board and sliding perpendicular to the wheel direction) is a sure fire way of causing a good flatspot..

My excuse is a lovely wee slide section of a skatepark in East Kilbride which you can ollie into and land sideways sliding a metre or so. It’s one of those skating moves that so reminds me of snowboard or surf movement. Alas it can be deadly for wheels. I was at a concrete skatepark at the weekend and you could probably have heard me in the next postcode they are that bad.

Canny whack and lovely set of perfectly round new wheels.

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Notes of Skate Culture Articles...
This is part of a series of Skate Culture Articles I've been writing as an insight into the sport of skateboarding for an outsider. You can find the rest of the articles by entering tagged skateculturearticle by tractorfactoryphotos into the BlipSearch.