The Wheel Deal Part 1: Wheel Size

Many extreme sports rely on wheels of one type or another, including skateboarding, mountain boarding, inline skating, street luge, BMX and FMX. Different situations require different types of wheels, depending on the terrain and the types of riding you're doing.

My favorite extreme sport is skateboarding, so this post focuses primarily on the options available in skate wheels. But the physics involved applies to any wheeled sport.

If you skate, you know that there are lots of wheels designs on the market from tiny, rock-hard wheels for street skating to giant, gummy wheels for old school cruising. Why are some wheels better for certain uses and not so good for others? As you probably guessed - it all comes down to physics.



Wheel Size

Among the many things you need to consider in choosing the best wheel for your riding is size. Most pro street skaters opt for small wheels. It's a good choice. Small wheels are fast on smooth surfaces such as skate park concrete, wood ramps, and most of the boxes, benches and banks you're likely to hit. But on asphalt or chewed up concrete, little wheels are much slower than big wheels. Just about every skater has at one time or another had the unpleasant experience of running across a pebble or crack that stops their board dead in it's path, sending the rider for a rough tumble. Those sorts of sudden stops are more likely if you ride tiny wheels.

So, what's size got to do with it? Well, here's a little sketch to show you what's going on. The small red cirle represents a wheel with a diameter of about 50 millimeters, typical of lots of street and park wheels. The big black circle is like a large (95 millimeter) cruising wheel. This sketch shows the wheels just as they hit the edge of a 20 millimeter step (in this picture, I'm imagining the wheels rolling to the right), which is the sort of thing you might run across as you ride over the joints between sections of a typical sidewalk.

The arrows show the direction of the force that results from the wheels hitting the obstacle. As you can see, the black arrow points up and to the left. That means some of the force pushes the wheel upward and some of it pushes back.

The red arrow is mostly pointed to the left and just a bit up, which means most of the force exerted by hitting the step goes into slowing the wheel, and the board it's attached to.

Of course, most of the bumps and cracks you'll run across in real life are a lot smaller than this. Even for smaller obstacles, though, more force will go into slowing a small wheel down than would go into slowing a larger wheel. You'll still get a force pushing the larger wheel upward, which makes for a rough ride, but at least it doesn't do as much to sap your speed (or stop you in your tracks).

If you race down a big hill made of asphalt, you end running over lots of little bumps that seriously slow small wheels, but aren't such a problem for big ones.

Are big wheels always better than small ones? Not at all. In fact, small wheels are usually MUCH faster than large wheels on smooth surfaces. Want to know why? Check out The Wheel Deal Part 2 in my next post to find out one reason that small wheels are better (sometimes).