Do you intend to suggest that riding without spacers is ok as long as you don’t over tightent the axle nuts? I suspect that was not your intention. But someone, expecially a novice, could read you post and arrive at the conclusion that spaces are optional.
I think the point you are trying to make is that without spacers, the bearings are going to dig into the core, stop working like a bearing and generate the heat that will melt the core. That’s all true. Its also going to happen faster with an over tightened axle nut. But even with a loose fitting axle nut, a wheel with a missing spacer is going to fail eventually.
Also it’s pretty hard not to overtighten the axles nut if the spacer is missing. We rely on the spacer to stop the axle nut, then we back off the nut. So anyone who is novice enough to leave out the spacer is almost certainly going to tighten the axle nut enough to bind the bearing sidewall into the core.
Motors make it easier to overlook an improperly functioning wheel. However it also happens without motors.
Here is a guy that melted his core on a conventional skateboard on gentle slope. Of course he was not wearing a helmet.
The video is a great illustration of how painful it can be to have a wheel melt down. Its not clear if he was missing spacers or if his errors was using skateboard wheels for downhill riding. Longboard wheels have a hard core. Skateboard wheels are solid urethane and are less resistant to bearing heat.
Hey @xsynatic
Did you ever circle back to the guy on Redit to tell him to invest in proper spacers? After acknowledging that he was running without spacers, he went on to say that he had replaced the spacers with a bunch of washers. That seems like a bad idea. Perhaps he should watch the above video.
I’m not at all suggesting to not use spacers. The issue there is not the bearing digging into the core, but the inner race getting out of whack with the rest of the bearing, which leads to extra friction and heating. Once hot enough, it will dig the shit out of the core, for sure!
Lots of street skaters don’t use spacers, and I believe this is OK as long as the bearings are seated properly, not overtightened, and the nut isn’t lose enough to allow any kind of lateral movement along the axle.
Of course this set of requirements makes tightening the nut a subtle art, whereas a spacer and speed rings would let you tighten the nut as hard as you can without any damage to the core or the bearing, and you don’t need to back off anything. Provided the spacer is the right size of course, which is not always the case if the manufacturers tolerances are sloppy. So in any case, being sensible when tightening a nut doesn’t hurts. And as a rule, do use spacers.
Gravity, wind power, towing, and motors, all make it much harder to detect a damaged bearing than plain pushing, where it becomes painfully obvious that something isn’t right.
He’s useless in this thread if he’s not part of cloudwheel. If he’s here attempting to promote a new product then he can start a new thread. But since it’s no longer esk8 related he should go to an ebike forum.
Geeze @Mikenopolis what happened to you? Did you join Cobra Kai or something? I know you to have be one of the good guy’s. Whats up now?
@Hide is a good soul. He stepped up to take the heat for the cracked cores and he sent out some free pairs for testing and sent out a bunch of replacements to people in this thread who had cracks in thier old version i-wonders. Lots of people change jobs. Just because he’s no longer in a position to help you is no reason to disparage him.
A number of us including myself reached out to @hide to see how he was doing. All he did was answer.
