#riedell skates
Text
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
Everyone is posting the "skates that got you started" to their insta and I'm like it must be nice to have people want to take your photo to preserve your memory. I am still enjoying the vintage skate pics tho
#murder they wrote#i went thru so many pieces of shit skates#even in the early oughts of playing derby#so many riedell r3s lmao
1 note
·
View note
Text
Going to work tonight so I can print my rollerskate measurements on break
#no other reason#getting through it#anyone have riedell skates i am so glad i researched the impalas
0 notes
Text
...so people here who skate (roller skates)
i spent about 3 hours drafting and mocking a pattern for fabric sewn toe guards
i had to take apart both my rec skates and derby skates so i could measure stuff but i have a basic mock up thats mostly tailored to my riedell darts
it fits my rec skates so i think it should be versatile for other styles of quad skates
if anyone needs a pattern for diy toe guards, let me knwo
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
I’m getting new skates for free from riedell 😬 I’ve worn Jacksons my entire life but hey. They’re free
3 notes
·
View notes
Photo
From Riedell Roller and African-American Roller-Skate Museum
Happy Black History Month! This year, we invite you to learn more about some of the historical figures and organizations whose courage and creativity paved the way for roller skating to exist in its current form.
We’ve partnered with the African-American Roller Skate Museum to give a deeper look into some of the pivotal moments in Black Roller Skating history and how they fit into the larger context of the civil rights movement.
Research by Jocelyn Marie Goode, @supergoode_
Founding Director of the African-American Roller-Skate Museum @afamrollerskatemuseum
19 notes
·
View notes
Text
it's a cold winter day, blistering wind shaking the roots of my house, and the tv is crackling from the intensity of the olympics -- february 13, 2014.
i fell in love with figure skating over a decade ago when I first laced up my pair of Riedell boots, pretending to be Sasha Cohen circa her 2004 “Swan Lake” program. I would wake up at 5:30 a.m, practice my footwork before school, and change in the car on the way to school. on the weekends I would once again wake up at the crack of dawn to head to the arena, grinding out spins and jumps. in the fall of 2013, i had just transferred to a new school. i was in second grade and the only new kid; needless to say, i didn't have much going for me... not socially anyways. i found solace in the foot cramps, the shivers, and the frost that dusted my clothes after every practice. it was a place that i could just be. since quitting the sport a couple years ago, my love for the sport has somehow continued to grow. i remember the 2014 sochi olympics almost too vividly. yulia lipnitskaia as in the girl in the red coat, mao asada landing her triple axel to rachmaninoff, the kim yuna/adelina sotnikova drama, and most of all-- parisienne walkways.
that's where it all started for him, for me, and for the world. amidst the tears of what has become of the womens' figure skating world, i started to discover unimaginable joy in watching the mens' event. jason brown's endless split jumps, and even now yumi kagiyama's talent, continue to bring me smiles whenever i need one. the confidence, the aura, the little smirk and flick of the hand. i can't even begin to describe how those little flairs are etched into my mind, little film strips ready to replay at any moment.
so i woke up to a barrage of messages: 'I'M IN TEARS....' , 'KING' and others. at first i felt nothing. i couldn't allow myself to feel anything. does it somehow feel selfish to mourn someone that you have never even spoken to, heard, or otherwise known? and yet i mourn for the potential he still holds and the pain that has cut that short. the truth that your youth is fleeting is one that is painful to grasp. yuzu's body has become a battleground between beautiful dreams and broken bones.
we may never see another figure skater like yuzuru hanyu. he is history. he is exceedingly brave in everything he does. he is brave in understanding when to stop. and that stopping doesn't necessarily mean goodbye. his retirement is a necessary change for him to continue growing away from the pressures of the competitive arena. this marks the end of an era. but also the beginning of a new one. congratulations yuzuru hanyu. and thank you.
8 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Last year I spent so long customizing my skates I ran out of time to even use them, but now that they’re “done” I feel like it really comes together to make the smoothest possible skating on almost any outdoor surface!
Skates: Moxi Lolly
Before I got these, I spent years using low top/flat derby skates. The change took some getting used to, but it seems high tops make outdoor skating easier (in my opinion).
They don’t have more ankle support than low tops (actually they have no ankle support at all), but the high boot helps create more momentum when pumping for speed. You can still go fast in low tops, but I think it requires more effort. Having an easier time of getting/keeping momentum without the physical effort means I have more stamina to skate for a longer time.
Toe Guards: Riedell Leather Toe Guards
I originally wanted a full toe cap, but they cost a lot more - At least the real leather ones do, which is the only toe guard material strong enough to actually withstand all the wear & tear that they’re guarding the toes from.
After using them for a little bit, I don’t think a full toe cap is necessary anyway. The sides stick out a bit from the skate, which seems to be enough to fully protect any area of the toes that might make connection with the ground.
Toe Stops: Atom Bionic Super Stoppers
These are a hold over from my derby skates. I’ve been using them since 2017, and though I can only skate like 3 months out of the year I still think that’s a testament to their staying power. I wouldn’t recommend every single skater get these toe stops though, since not every skating style uses toe stops the same way (or at all).
I got these because the easiest way for me to stop is turn 180 and go onto my toe stops, and it’s nice to have such a huge flat surface when I want to use them to “walk” for a quicker take-off or to get over an area I don’t want my wheels to be on. It’s just a bonus that having such huge fat toe stops means I won’t need to buy them again for, idk, like 10 years at this rate.
Wheels: Atom Road Hogs 78A
As far as I can tell, these are the tallest/biggest/widest wheels that will fit on a roller skate without hitting the boot. I had some 78A wheels before these that were smaller with round edges, and once I got these there was a pretty immediate difference in how much less I tripped up over cracks in the road.
Which leads me to think that hardness isn’t the most important aspect of a wheel, it’s the size and whether the edges are round or sharp. Road Hogs aren’t totally impervious to rough roads, but for me it meant going from being thrown left & right by cracks/bumps every few seconds to being able to skate one-footed on almost any road I go on.
Bearings: BankRoll Ceramic ABEC-9
If you went from ABEC-5 to ABEC-9 but were still using just regular bearings, I don’t think the difference would be noticeable. The difference that I notice with these comes from being made of ceramic (it’s called ceramic but the material is actually Silicon Nitride, which can withstand up to 1,472° F and 116,030 PSI).
My wheels literally never stop spinning, and although I add lubricant every so often it’s not required for them to continue spinning just as well. Aside from the Road Hogs, these bearings are probably the largest contributor to how smoothly I can skate outside with this setup.
It’s also a bonus that the resilience of ceramic bearings means getting my skates dirty & roughed up outside won’t have as much as an effect on their performance. My old bearings, I had to clean basically every single time I skated just to keep them from getting so gunked up they’d stop spinning.
Axle Nuts: Sure-Grip Zero Nutz
These are made of cheap plastic, so I wouldn’t exactly attest to their quality, but it’s one of very few external bearing protectors out there. I probably wouldn’t use them if I didn’t have ceramic bearings, because the cheap plastic means every time you screw them on/off the threading gets more messed up.
At least with being cheap it wouldn’t hurt too much just to buy a new set, but like I said not having to routinely clean my ceramic bearings is the main reason I even bothered with them. And they give me peace of mind to not have such spendy bearings just sticking out in the open for dirt/debris/grime to come into.
Cushions: Powerdyne Universal Magic 78A
At this point, I was just looking for things that I could make a change to lol so I can’t say for certain it’d ever be that important to get new cushions - But cushions do have different hardness ratings the same as wheels.
Most pre-built skates come with harder cushions as those provide more stability, but I wanted soft cushions to help with doing agile/quick movements. I also keep my trucks pretty loose, so that combined with the soft cushions makes for lots of flexibility.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Skating DIY: Changing my plates from bolt-on to adjustable toe stops, part 1: tools of the trade
I've been putting this post off for a while because of just how long it's going to be, but I think it's time to get into it.
This post details the tools I used. For the actual process, see part 2.
My roller skates are Riedell Zones, which come on a PowerDyne Thrust plate. It's not a super high-quality plate, but it works well enough for a beginner like me.
The only problem I had with my plates were the toe stops. The PowerDyne Thrust plate can have either a bolt-on toe stop or an adjustable toe stop. The bolt-on toe stop that my skates came with was problematic for a few reasons:
It wasn't cute. As you can see from my after photo, I wanted toe stops that matched my skates' color palette. My standard black bolt-on toe stops didn't do that.
It made toe guards hard to work with. Toe guards are anchored in place by toe stops and laces. Any time I wanted to futz with my toe guards, I had to take my toe stops off my skates, which involved getting an allen wrench. Additionally, the holes on most toe guards aren't made to go around bolt-on toe stops, which made them frustrating to work with.
Most importantly, they were difficult to skate with. As you can see, I skate on pretty big wheels - 65mm Atom Pulses. These made my short little toe stops almost useless. A good metric for toe stop height is that if you rest your skate on the front wheels and toe stop, you should be able to fit three fingers under the back wheels. With these, I could fit my whole hand under the back wheels. I know some people prefer very short toe stops, but for someone like me who's still learning to use skates at all, longer stops were necessary.
I had thought that this was just something I had to live with, but I found out recently that that wasn't the case! On nylon plates like mine, toe stops are screwed into a metal insert in the front of the plate. The PowerDyne Thrust has inserts for both types of toe stops, which means I could swap out one for the other. I looked for tutorials on how to do this, but I couldn't find anything for this specific procedure - so I decided to give it a go, and make my own tutorial while I was at it!
I'm splitting this tutorial into 2 parts, because of how long it ended up being. In part 1, I'll go over the parts & tools that I needed for the job, and in part 2, I'll explain what I actually did.
Here are the tools and parts I expected to need for this:
Y3 Skate tool: This is a tool made specifically for dealing with roller skates. It's made with three tooltips: one that's the right size to screw and unscrew axle nuts; one that's the right size to screw and unscrew trucks; and one that's the right size to screw and unscrew adjustable toe-stop nuts. You can get a Y3 tool at most skate shops, but I got mine from Derby City Skates.
Adjustable spanner: A pretty basic tool found in most tool kits. Since my Y3 tool doesn't have a tip that fits correctly over the bolts that hold my plates on my skates, I figured this would be handy for that purpose.
Adjustable toe stop inserts: These are the pieces that go inside the plates, which the toe stops screw into. I bought these (and the rest of the parts here) from Derby Warehouse.
Toe stop nuts: These hold adjustable toe stops in place inside your plates.
Toe stop washers: Assist the nuts in holding toe stops in place. I bought both regular washers and locking washers, because I wasn't sure if I'd need both. It turns out I only needed one or the other, so I used the locking washers.
Adjustable toe stops: The actual things I was putting on my skates! I bought long stem Gumball toe stops for my purposes, but there are lots of options out there to choose from.
Now, I ended up needing a few extra things...
Screwdriver: This was helpful in unscrewing the bolts, as they were on tight enough that they needed to be unscrewed from both sides.
Needlenose pliers: For pushing/pulling bolts out once they were unscrewed.
Ratchet: The full tool isn't in this photo, but some of the ends are. This proved much more useful than the spanner for unscrewing the bolts that held my plates on.
Dremel tool and safety goggles: I'll get into why I needed these later. My hope is that most people won't.
As a brief note, all of my tools have tips that can be swapped out really easily. For instance, I can swap out phillips head, flat head, and square tips on my screwdriver, and I can swap out various sizes of hex nut bits on my ratchet. This was super useful to me as I was working with several different types & sizes of bolt. All of my tools come from a Kobalt 267-piece household tool set.
Now that I've more or less introduced you to the pieces I ended up working with, it'll be on to part 2 for the actual process!
Continue to part 2!
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
it's rotten but...........
I'm so tempted to buy the jack boot estro package.......... I just don't need them!!!! but everyone raves about the jack boot and u can get a complete set up for almost the same amount as *just* the boot in a custom color and u can pay in chunks.....
I'm not gonna do it!!!!! but I want to lol
I've also been looking at the riedell 220s bc its also a stiff, high quality boot but it's a leather upper instead of suede and I just feel like they'll get shredded
one thing I didn't consider when I got the golden horse skates is that...the resell value is...hm. questionable bc they measure *your* foot to make them. and idk maybe I just need more skate time with them but heel...like the actual contact point of the heel with the plate is small!! (and the heel is also tall!) so I literally feel like I'm on stilts when i wear them lol
and I mean I love my boardwalks!!! but I now have injury anxiety lol I really want a stiff pair of skates
3 notes
·
View notes
Link
Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Riedell R3 Speed Skates Size M 8 W9.
0 notes
Text
Usher and the Baby Spine
In the summer of 2017, I spent hours at lots of local skate parks. I lucked out because my brother-from-another-mother was in town for the whole summer and we hit up as many parks as we could while he was here. At the time, I was working on whatever park trick seemed to fit the park (rather than just focus on one skill at a time), so when we found ourselves at Cornerstone in Lakewood, the baby spine called my name.
Spines are harder than just regular coping. It's two bars, rather than one, and you can't stall on the coping. You've got to straddle both bars at the same time. It's totally doable, but it's a mind-freak. Your brain says, "Nope."
It took a few tries, but I managed to not only land on the spine, but I also managed to come off it to the transition on the other side without biffing it.
Yeah. That's that moment. I'm keeping this picture of my success as my desktop these days. Seeing it reminds me of the baby steps it took to get over the spine. It also reminds me of the joy of succeeding.
Who knew that in seven more years I'd be working on a roller skate invention? And that other roller skaters would find it useful?
This past weekend the world watched as Usher introduced the glory that is Black roller skating. His dancers and skaters took what the rest of us in the community knows and loves and showed the world what is possible on eight wheels. And he did it while transitioning from the field to the stage, going from sneakers to skates in a matter of seconds.
As the inventor of a wheel locker, I was immensely curious to find out how was he going to go from walking to rolling. The internet exploded the following day, with the makers and designers of the Flippers skate boots, Riedell skate manufacturers and Sk8Fanatics skate shop all celebrated the collaboration that created the skates for Usher and his skaters.
Those blue and black high top babies are glorious. Sleek, clean design, beautiful suede leather, and lots of Velcro straps for easy on-easy off.
If you're willing to spend a grand on the boots (just the boots), you can have a pair too!.
As someone who balks whenever I need to spend $$$ on new wheel bearings or toestops, that definitely ain't happening for me. And it probably won't happen for a lot of other skaters.
The last two days got me thinking about the Skooties skate locker: it gives a skater the same ability to go from walking to skating in the same amount of time. It's as easy to take on and off, just like a Velcro strap on a skate boot. But the one thing that separates Skooties from Usher's skates is that they are AFFORDABLE.
There's nothing wrong with having a pricey product (Apple Vision Pro, anyone?). And some entrepreneurs swear by creating high-ticket items and only selling to an elite few. Meh. I'm happy that Skooties are something that everyone in the roller skate community can easily access. Now's the time for the work of getting it out there and into skate shops.
Is it easy launching a new product? Nope. It's a lot of work. It's baby steps. It's just like learning to skate over a baby spine.
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
lefthandklance
hey man
solilakoi
You Can Walk The Path Among The Lines
kwanshabit
MIN
katiecreatives
@katiecreatives
themonsterajungle
The Monstera Jungle