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Hi again, Todd from skates.co.uk, here with another tutorial, this time on how to change your scooter. wheels.
So what we want to do is change our wheels from these plastic cores that came with our JD Bug
to a new set of fantastic metal cores, just like these Yaks right here. These are available from our website. Metal cores are amazing for freestyle riding.
Where plastic core wheels used to give way all the time, these new metal core wheels are solid aluminium on the inside and better quality rubber on the outside, so these aren't going to collapse under you. An all round great product.
Several different ones are available on our website, but these ones are called the Yak Scats, and are in Blue obviously...
I'm going to stick on a couple of those to colour code with our bars. Always nice to have a colour coordinated scooter.
So first things first we're going to take off our old wheels, we're going to need two 5mm allen keys. I'm just going to undo my rear axle here
I'm pulling out the small threaded end...make sure you keep hold of that, really important. Then there'll also be some spaces in there that you'll have to keep hold of.
Two little spacers that hold your wheel in the centre, keep hold of those. Then obviously, our wheel. Now, bearings.
New wheels don't come with bearings, but you can pick up some great quality ones such as the Bones bearings at the skates.co.uk website
if you want some faster bearings than the stock bearings. But, we're going to need to take these out because we also need the spacer in the middle.
For the plastic core wheels it's not too hard, you just need to get something like a screwdriver or an allen key, put it down inside, and pull or flick out the bearing.
Which I'm going to do now just like that. What you can see that's dropped down there is the piece that we actually need - the bearing spacer.
It's really important to keep that - people forget to put it in and then the bearings implode on themselves, so it's realy important to keep that.
Then we just pull the other one out from the other side as well. If you're using your bearings again you can keep them, but be more careful when taking them out as you don't want to bend or break them.
So now we must take off the front wheel. Obviously keep hold of your axle end as well, so take your two allen keys again, I've preloosened mine off.
Just undoing my front axle. Exactly the same as the rear axle just a bit narrower. You might need to poke the bolt out.
There we go, our front axle. Keep that together on one side as well.
Pretty much everything you take out when you're doing the wheels you need to keep. Take out your bearings again, either put them to one side or toss them depending what you're doing with them.
OK so we've removed our bearings and spacers from our old wheels, and installed them into our new wheels, or installed new bearings into our new wheels.
Now we can install the wheels onto our scooter. So we bring back our axles, we've got our front axle and our rear axle, which of course has those spacers.
So we're putting on this front wheel first. Now what I like to do is take my allen key and use it to line up the middle spacer.
Put it all the way through so your wheel is hanging there, and then you can use it to thread back through the axle bolt, makes it a little bit easier.
As you can see, it's all the way through there, and now we can take the threaded end of the bolt, and then carefully making sure we don't cross thread it, thread it back into the other end.
Then of course tighten them up, just tight enough so there's no play in the wheel at all, and it should spin absolutely fine.
So we take our wheel and I'm going to use my allen key trick again, put it through into the first spacer, thread it through the centre of the wheel, and then fit in the other spacer which can be a bit tricky, into the other side.
Then we push through our axle bolt all the way through, and line it up with the threaded end, tighten that up, use your allen keys after a while, and do it up all the way until there's absolutely no play on the wheel. It's not safe and doesn't sound good.
So there's no play there at all, can't move it left and right but it still spins fine. Bear in mind if you've put new bearings in they won't spin freely to start with until you've worn them in, when they'll be really nice.
So there we go, there is our scooter, with new bars, new clamp and new wheels all in blue and all matching.
Right, join us next time. If you need any of these parts, any advice or anything, just join us online at skates.co.uk - we're always online!