Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Owner's Guide to Replacing Your Cushions

So if you keep lefty-looseying your truck nut, you can actually take your whole truck off the plate and also take apart the cushion assembly. I have never done this before!

disassembled truck and cushions

Eek!

I've had these skates for about two and a half years? So I've never replaced the cushions. Possibly it was overdue, the pale alabaster cushion on the left obviously is the new cushion and the manky dirty yellow cushion on the right is the old cushion. If you look closely, the old cushion is actually compressed a millimeter or two shorter than the new cushion. So it's probably lost its spring a little bit. Besides loosening your trucks until they bottom out, the softness of your cushions is how you get action out of your trucks. Remember, trucks give when you put weight on them? The looser your trucks or the softer your cushions, the more responsive they are to how you move your weight around. And you don't have to have your trucks so loose with softer cushions, which is probably actually a better way to make them work.

new and old cushion

I did actually feel bouncier with new cushions, like I could pick up my feet better. That was just replacing the old Powerdyne white/black cushions with new ones. There's more, though. Two and a half years, I've never given my cushions a second look and I left Uproar with four sets of new cushions: the new set of the old Powerdyne cushions, and three sets of the new Powerdyne Magic Cushions. Whaaaat. They were in candy jars! They looked like gummy candies! Supposedly they're made of a different urethane than the old cushions, springier even at the same durometer. The white/blacks are 88A, then I got 85A firm yellows, 82A medium oranges, and 78A soft reds. The guy said that oranges would probably work best for me, based on my body weight. But I'm basically going to work my way all the way down, because my motto is how do you know that you've gone far enough unless you go too far.