My apologies in advance if I’m waxing nostalgic about 80s era bullshit that nobody cares about.
I started skating in the mid 80s and worked at a shop from 87-91 when I was in high school. All wheels were generally around 60 mm, ranging from 60-66 mm. 97s were for vert, 90-92 were marketed as street and 95s were a combo.
Similar to the adjustable noses, the industry was also six months to a year behind on street wheels. At best, you could get 57s or 58s but they were still pretty wide. We all wanted smaller wheels that were harder and with less contact patch. We’d figured out that this just worked better for tail slides, nose slides, lip slides etc. We also stopped using the massive half inch risers that were the norm—lower was better. So there is a chunk of time where almost all my friends were riding Powell freestyle wheels. They were way smaller (I wanna say 54mm but I could be wrong), 97a and had a much narrower contact patch. And it was kind of this underground thing. You’d travel to another city and all the kids in that city also were re-drilling their decks and skating freestyle wheels.
Redrilling truck baseplates started the same way. People were doing it DIY style for a year or so until Venture and New Deal took the industry plunge on the modern bolt pattern in the early 90s.
Topic: Wheelbase history (Read 1490 times)