#flatspots

Understanding how wheels wear:

To establish a couple concepts for this guide, here’s an image:

When you do a coleman slide as a regular-stanced rider, the right side of your board swings outwards, for goofy-stanced riders, the left.

Chances are, you don’t have flawless weight distribution with it perfectly even on all four wheels during the slide, meaning some wheels will wear faster than others. The first part of rotating is identifying which wheel is biggest and which wheel is smallest (with the other two falling in between):

The image above is a pretty extreme example, the likelihood of your wheels turning out like this without a lathe is unlikely.

As you can see, 1 is the biggest (least worn) and 4 is the smallest (most worn). What rotating does is changes the position of your wheels relative to your slide so that each wheel can wear more evenly.

With the direction of travel going to the right as established in the first image, we can see some numbers here that are only for this example, they don’t mean anything outside of this guide. So don’t go to your local hill and tell your friend to put that wheel on axle 4, he won’t know what you’re talking about.

If you’re regular; 1 (back toeside) will wear the fastest. The next fastest-wearing is 3 (front toeside), then 2 (back heelside) and then 4 (front heelside) being the slowest wearing. (assuming you primarily do heelside slides, such as 180s, checks, and colemans for example)

If you’re goofy;  2 (back toeside) will wear the fastest. The next fastest-wearing is 4 (front toeside), then 1 (back heelside) and then 3 (front heelside) being the slowest wearing.  (assuming you primarily do heelside slides, such as 180s, checks, and colemans for example)

How to Rotate

To rotate your wheels, you essentially want to put your smallest wheel on the axle that wears the least and the biggest wheel on the axle that wears the most.

So like I explained in the “if you’re [x];” above...

If you’re regular; Put your largest wheel on 1 (back toeside), your second largest on 3 (front toeside), your next largest on 2 (back heelside) and your smallest on 4 (front heelside), assuming you primarily do heelside slides, such as 180s, checks, and colemans for example.

If you’re goofy;  Put your largest wheel on 2 (back toeside), your second largest on 4 (front toeside), your next largest on 1 (back heelside) and your smallest on 3 (front heelside).  assuming you primarily do heelside slides, such as 180s, checks, and colemans for example.

Uneven wear is not the only thing that can happen to your wheels;

Coning

is when the contact patch of your wheel slants out of alignment with the core, effectively making your wheel a cone. This will happen to any kind of wheel on a directional setup. If you’re constantly switching stance and direction, this may not happen as frequently. 

To fix, for centerset wheels, just flip the wheel over. For offset or sideset wheels, rotate them to the other side of the hanger they’re on.

Most of the time, you do not need a lathe to remove purely coning. To prevent it from getting out of hand, I personally rotate coned wheels as soon as they’re visually noticeable. 

A good rule of thumb for coning is to face the larger side of the cone down the hill when your board is in slide position (toeside edge).

Flatspotting 

is when you hold your wheels at a 90 degree angle perpendicular to the direction of travel, causing your wheel to lock up and not rotate, thus only wearing one spot of your wheels making it flat.

Flatspots are tricky to remove. If you’re close to the core, you may be able to do a bunch of fast slides to even out the rest of the remaining urethane. If it’s still small, try doing heelside predrifts, the slide in and of itself cannot be held at 90 degrees (if done correctly) and will still wear your wheels. 

If you have a lathe at home or know a lathing service (*cough*me*cough*), you can just lathe it out. Doing so will however will wear the rest of the wheel down to the center of the flatspot so that the rest of the urethane matches.

Ovaling 

is when you may have held your wheel too close to 90 degrees for a moment, then went back to a lower angle for the rest of the slide. Most of the time, ovals lead to flatspots and getting them out can also be difficult. Refer to flatspotting for removal methods.

“Why should I care about flatspots/ovaling?”