On 8/29/2010 9:25 PM, Bob Schwartz wrote:
Stop me if you've heard this one before... This is not
about selling handbags or shoes.

Someone has a set of classical roller skis. Maybe they
skate on them, who knows. But at some point the wheels
start to wear unevenly. As the wear progresses things
get worse more quickly. Pretty soon they don't track
worth anything.

The person looks up the cost of new wheels. Then they
decide that their skate roller skis will do just fine,
and they gift the ones with the wheels that won't track
straight.

I've got roller skis like that. One is a pair of very
old Swenors. Very unevenly worn wheels, no hope of
tracking straight. Soft rubber, 60mm wide. Haven't been
sold for years, no way of getting new wheels for those.

So I took them to the bench grinder. Yes, you heard that
right. The bench grinder. I turned it on and spun up the
roller ski wheel on it. Then I rotated the shaft a
little. This caused the grinding wheel to begin shaving
rubber from an evenly rotating wheel.

I did this for a while, accumulating quite a mound of
rubber shavings. Eventually I had two sets of wheels,
both pretty much squared off. If you do this, pay
attention to the bearings. They are spinning pretty fast,
and they'll heat up on you if you are not careful.

I only have cheap-o spare bindings in the basement so I
haven't taken them out to verify anything yet. But the
pro of doing this is that I have a free pair of roller
skis that track like new.

But nothing is free. I've lost some wheel diameter and
the result is going to be roller skis that ride more
harshly and hang up easier on stones and sticks.

I've never heard of anyone sculpting worn roller ski
wheels like that. Maybe I'm the trend setter. Maybe some
of you have old roller skis with unevenly worn wheels
that you are willing to experiment on.

At least I haven't tried to sell you a watch.

Bob Schwartz

OK, I've had some time on these. Initially the tracking was
much improved, but still not stellar. The wheels were
symmetrical, but still more rounded than square. I guess I
was a little too tentative about removing rubber. Well, I
got over that. I went back to the grinder and flattened
things down quite a bit.

When I got them the wheels were very unevenly worn, so by
this time I've removed a fair amount of wheel diameter. And
I was concerned about that. But the rubber on these things
is very soft and pretty effective at dampening road buzz.

The remaining problem was that one of the skis has a tendency
to drift from the rear. I swapped them back and forth and
played around with weight distribution and eventually
discovered that I could minimize the drift by keeping my
weight forward and using a high tempo with less gliding.
Which are both things I ought to be doing anyway.

But it was limited to one ski and sure enough, the rear
wheel in that ski is canted just slightly in the mounting.
I should be able to fix that.

So I think the end result is I get an acceptable if not great
pair of classical roller skis at the cost of some time and
thought.

Bob Schwartz