Public Service Announcement DO NOT RIDE 62mm WHEELS ON LOOSE 149mm TRUCKS! . . #thankyouskateboarding #wheelbite #badidea #loosetruckssavelives #toooldtoskate #toofattoskate (at Chateau Ruff-N-Baker)
So you flew off your deck because your wheels bit? Or maybe you don't know the terrors of wheelbite and want to prevent it before it even happens? I can help with that.
Wheelbite is when your wheel (usually your front two) touches your deck while turning, causing you to abruptly stop and fly off your board. Every skater has experienced it, and nobody likes it. I'm here today to help you avoid wheelbite.
So chances are, you've heard that tightening your trucks prevents wheelbite. In a way, it does, but not in a necessarily good way.
Tightening your truck's kingpin deters wheelbite by compressing your bushings so that your truck can't turn enough to get wheelbite. For skateboarders with TKP trucks and light popsicle decks, this is a viable way to prevent wheelbite, as you can just pivot or tictac instead of carving around. Another reason why this works for TKP trucks is that the roadside washer when tightened enough will touch the edge of the bushing seat, physically preventing the truck from turning any further. This might bend the washer, but is guaranteed to prevent wheelbite, provided the wheel doesn't touch the deck when maxed out.
For longboarders with RKP trucks on the other hand, tightening your kingpin nut only does two things: It adds pre-load to your bushings, giving them even less material to compress, giving you a shallower, more twitchy lean, and compressing your bushings for an extended duration of time will eventually deform them. Also, having all that unnecessary tension in your trucks even without you standing on them isn't good.
To go a little more in-depth into bushings, each bushing has a maximum amount it can compress. By leaning from side-to-side on your deck, you compress one side of the bushing at a time. Bushings are also partially responsible for suspension and absorbing shock (in tandem with your pivot cups), so already, any extra compression should be avoided.
By tightening your kingpin nut, you're adding compression to the entire bushing setup, meaning when you lean, you're adding to the compression already existing from your tightening, which means you won't turn as much or have as deep of a lean as you could have.
Additionally, you maybe have heard somewhere that "tightening your trucks adds stability". It doesn't, add actually makes the whole system unstable. By having a higher-tension system, speed wobbles that happen will fly out of control much faster than a looser setup.
"So what can I do to correctly prevent wheelbite?"
There are a few things you can do, like:
Using harder bushings,
Adding risers/shock pads under your trucks,
Using cupped washers in your trucks,
Using smaller wheels,
Sanding out wheel wells in your deck.
Using harder bushings is by far the best way to prevent wheelbite. Check out my guide on bushings to see which ones are right for you. If you're getting wheelbite with bushings reccommended for your weight, try going up a couple duros and see how it feels. Using bushings adds more resistance to your turn without additional preload like tightening would do.
If you're going to add risers, don't go over 1/2" risers and remember that you need longer hardware to accomodate risers.
If you're going to add cupped washers, try them boardside first, and if it's not enough, try adding them roadside as well (assuming you aren't using cupped washer at all to begin with)
Using smaller wheels is pretty obvious. 70mm is the standard most decks with conventional truck setups should be able to fit. 65mm is a safer bet.
Sanding away a part of your deck isn't ideal, especially if the bottom sheet is made of fiberglass or some other material besides wood. An easy way to sand out wheel wells is to wrap your wheels in sandpaper and roll slowly in a circle.
There are other factors that come into play with wheelbite, such as baseplate angles (higher angle = less wheelbite, lower angle = opposite), but those aren't as flexible as some of the other options I've listed.
So after you're done tweaking your setup according to everything I've said in this guide, you need to safely test for wheelbite. To do this, you can lean to one side of your deck and roll slowly back and forth, preferably while holding onto something for support. Another way is to crouch down right on top of one of your front wheel flares with both of your feet, and see if your wheel bites.
If you get a tiny bit of wheelbite in your testing (like when you have to really try to get it while stationary), you might be able to get away with just letting it be, because unless you're pumping or really carving hard, it shouldn't happen. As you go faster, you lean less making wheelbite less of an issue.
That’s all for this week’s issue of How to Longboard Extra, come back next week for another! Remember to wear your helmets and skate well ❖
