How To Adjust Your Roller Skates - Trucks, Wheels & Toe Stops

Not sure how to adjust your roller skate? Or perhaps you're brand new to skating and you don't know if you need to adjust your skates? Stick around and I'm going to show you how. I'm Katie and you're watching Skatee. How do you know if you need to adjust your skates? Things can work loose over time or you might have just taken your skates out of the box for the very first time. So let's check your wheels first, make sure they're rolling. So this one, that's great, that's rolling, no problem. But this one, this is really tight. You can see it's not free rolling. So let's loosen this lock nut. It's the same as anything lefty, loosey, righty, tighty. So I'm going to loosen it about half a turn. There we go, look, we've got some roll. Now you can loosen it but make sure you don't get play up and down. But that's fine, I'm going to leave that. So this one, can you hear that? We've got a lot of play. Now you don't want to skate on that, that's really dangerous. So let's see if we can tighten it up. Now this lock nut is now fully tightened but listen, we've still got the same problem. So what we can do in this case is to use a washer. So let's take this off. We'll take the lock nut all the way off and we'll put the washer on on top. Now let's tighten it and see if we lose that little bit of play. This is a really good spanner as well by the way. Look, see how it's bent which means you can get in past the wheel. Just tighten that back up, make sure that we've lost the play on that. So it's nice and free rolling and yeah, nice and tight. So we can skate on that now without being dangerous. So that's a really quick way just to make sure that your wheels are rolling safely and freely. So how do you know if your toe stops need adjusting? So I've mentioned this in a previous video that when you put your toe stop down you want your foot to be at about a 45 degree angle. So that's kind of okay. Now some cheaper skates have like this one but you have a bolt so you cannot adjust this toe stop which as it wears down over time it will get too high. So you could get replacements for these quite easily. If it's too high from the very beginning it's kind of difficult because there's not a great deal that you can do to give you a lot of depth on this because it is a bolt. These ones are adjustable and lots of skates do have adjustable toe stops so you can make them lower as they wear down. So this one it's about a 45 degree angle, that's pretty good. You may want it lower if you're using these to stop on ramps, that kind of thing. You might want them higher if you're skating outside so you don't catch stones. This is a really easy one to adjust because you've just got your allen key. You normally get all the tools you need with your skates but if not it's quite easy to find tools that will fit just at your local hardware store. So this is just again loosen it up, this is really tight because this is a really old plate. There we go and then that will just nice and easily just twist down and then once you're happy with where it is just tighten it back up again. A really important thing to check when you get new skates or if you've been skating for a while and you're having trouble with learning new skills is the fact that your trucks may not be loose enough. Now the easiest way to test this is to stand in your boot and lean all your weight to the inside on the big toe and see if these wheels here come together and do the same thing lean on your little toe and see if these two wheels here lean together. It's quite hard to do with your hands but the weight of your body will make that flex a lot. If they're tight we need to show you how to adjust them. Now these have a lock nut here so you will need to loosen that before you can adjust the top one whether it's an allen key or a nut there. So again you'll need to loosen that off one or two turns just to give you a little bit of movement. With trucks you don't want to be going a whole turn you just want to try like a quarter of a turn half a turn if they're really tight because any movement is going to make a massive difference. If you think you can move it with your hands that's definitely too loose so just to put it in and turn. So once you're happy with this bit you must remember to tighten this one back up again that's very important. So I turned that two because this is a click action so I did one two on that. These are really easy because all you've got is the nut on the top and you just loosen that to the left a little bit. So let me see so here we go so again you only want to go like half a turn put the skate on push and see how loose it is you don't want them too loose because you're going to just be completely out of control. If you can move it with your hand chances are it's too loose. In the hole there are two types of trucks this truck which is a bush truck bush nut so for that you only need to adjust this top nut and then you have this type of plate which has the lock nut at the bottom which you must adjust first to be able to adjust this top bit. One thing I do recommend especially if you are travelling a distance to roller skate is to take with you some tools so the bare minimum I would suggest would be a spanner for your wheel nuts and a spanner that also fits your trucks because if either of those are off you're going to have trouble skating. I would also recommend to take the tool that fits your toe stop for me it's an allen key and again if you've got a loose toe stop it's going to be dangerous to skate on so always best to take a bare minimum. Now you can make minor adjustments to your roller skates confidently so you've got your wheels rolling you've got your trucks moving better so this has been a really quick summary of how to adjust your skates but in a future video we're going to go into the full anatomy of the roller skate so you can make any changes that you want to customise your skates. One last thing to mention this sweatshirt is available on Amazon and we've also got a couple of different t-shirts on there as well so I'll put the links in the description box below. I'm Katie and you've been watching Skaty, see you next time!