Vertical Rollerskating > How to build a vertical roller skate

The making of a Vertical Rollerskate

So you want to build your own vertical rollerskates. You have to, because you can't buy them off the shelf. You are determined, because there aren't very many vertical rollerskaters. You have to invest quite some time (and probably money, depending on how much of the material you can get second hand) to achieve your goal. There isn't a universal solution. Instead, I describe my own views and experiences. You have been warned.

Requirements

A vertical rollerskate is substantially different from an ordinary rollerskate. One way to put the difference is: everything is harder, another one: everything is more robust. When doing ramp skating, you probably need much more control. You also need more protection. These properties can be seen as a reason for the above requirements: Hardness gives you control (the hardness of the wheels gives you speed in the ramp) and robustness gives you protection (you don't want to hurt your feet when you slam in the ramp).

Materials

Here is a concise list of the necessary materials. I will describe each item in more detail later. Optionally you can attach stoppers and other things to your skates. But they are not really necessary.

Boots

These are very important. They have a big influence on how much control you have and they protect your valuable feet. You shouldn't use anything which doesn't give you a comfortable fit, control and stability. You can try and look for some used ones (I did this one time) or you can buy some new ones. Be prepared to pay the equivalent sum of a very usable inline skate for a new one. I recommend a leather boot like the ones used by serious ice hockey players. They are made of very thick leather and fulfil our requirements.

Base

The Base acts as the chassis where the trucks and the boot are mounted together. It could be called the "soul" of the skate. It has to be very stable so it won't break when you do your liptricks or slam on you feet (which hopefully won't happen too often!). I currently use an aluminium base which is approximately 5 mm thick. The thinner one I used before broke. You can also use something other very durable. Sawed off skies have been used successfully by other skaters. In the stone age of vertical rollerskating Tracker offerd a base specially made for vertical rollerskating. It was made of a 4 mm thick wooden core coated on both sides with 1 mm thick aluminium. In addition to its high stability it also was very light. You probably won't find one of those gems any more.

Trucks

I use some freestyle skateboard trucks from Gullwing. Probably any decent freestyle skateboard truck will do. Freestyle truck are scarce but you can buy them from freestyle skater Yoyo Schulz at yoyoskate.com. Alternatively you have to settle down for some other skateboard trucks and shorten them to your needs (I have also seen one rollerskater from Prague skating parallel style with wide skateboard trucks. Crazy!).

Wheels

You can use rollerskate wheels or skateboard wheels. There are two things to consider: hardness and size. Harder wheels are faster but also more slippery. In my experience they should be harder than 97 A. The bigger the wheels, the faster they are. 66 mm is nice, but you can also use smaller ones.

Bearings

Use high quality ones!

Sliders

You will want to use some hard, durable plastic for sliding. Skateboard rails are quite useable. I have good experience with crow bars. I use some wood to put them in the right distance from the base.

Nuts and Bolts

To bring all of the parts together, you need quite some bolts of different length. I use two nuts per bolt: one ordinary nut and additionally one self-locking nut. All bolts are countersunk screws.

Tools

Preparation of the Parts

Washers

washer

It's important to countersink the washers. They hold the bolts in the boot and you don't want the heads of the bolts to stick into your feet, or do you? Maybe you can get readily countersunk washers somewhere; I really don't know.


Boots

boot boot interior

You need to drill four holes through the soles of your boots. Don't forget to take out the padding. You don't want to put holes through it! The distance of the holes from left to right corresponds to the distance of the holes in the trucks. The position of the front holes results from where you put the front truck which depends on whether you want to have stopper blocks. If you don't want to have stopper blocks, you can move your front trucks more in front, which results in a bigger distance between the axles. A bigger distance gives you more stability (which I believe to be more important for vert skating) and a smaller distance gives you a greater maneuverability. You have to push four bolts from the inside of the boot through the holes you drilled into the sole. The bolts are held in the boot using the countersunk washers.

Base

baseplate

You have saw a base plate the size of your shoes. It's better not to keep its shape rectangular but to take off the edges in front so that they don't stick out from under the shoe. Then you have to drill 10 holes for the trucks into the base plate. Six holes are for the back truck, four holes for the front truck. The base plate shown in the image has an additional four holes for the stopper block which are only neccessary if you want to mount a stopper block. There are only two holes through which the front truck is screwed directly to the base plate. These holes have to be countersunk, so that the boots fits snugly to the base plate.

Rear truck

truck

The rear truck will be screwed through the base to a small heel block (you can use wood for the heel block). Therefore you don't have to countersink the holes in the base plate for the rear truck. You rather have to countersink the holes in the heel block. There are two important extra holes in the base plate and in the heel block through which the shoe is mounted to the base. You can't use the holes which are already in the truck but have to drill extra holes. The truck has to be aligned with the heel so that the rear holes are too far arear to be useably for the boot.

Sliders

rails

If you use skateboard rails for the sliders like me, you can countersink some self-locking nuts into them. There is a detailed page about how to attach sliders to a roller skate.

Assembly

chassis

First you have to assemble the chassis. You have to screw the trucks to the base plate using bolts of suitable lengths. Don't forget to mount the heel block together with the rear truck. The two front holes of the front truck aren't screwed to the base plate, they are used for mounting the boot (as are the extra holes in the rear truck). If you want to have a stopper block, you have to mount this, too. The whole assemly should look something like the picture.

assembled skate assembled skate from below

Now you can put the boot on the chassis and secure the bolts with some nuts. I use additionally some self-locking nuts because I don't want the whole assembly to come apart when I'm skating in the ramp.

Credits

This page was written by Bernhard Scheffold. Thanks go to: Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Send Mail to: roller@adinfinitum.de

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