How to Put Bearings in the Wheels and Wheels on the Skateboard

Keir Johnson: Hi this is Keir with Catalyst Skateboards showing you how to put a complete skateboard together. We just put the trucks on the deck. Next step is to put the wheels and bearings on. First thing you want to do is choose a good bearing I prefer the Bones Swiss myself, it's the fastest bearing, it's a little more on the expensive side, but in the long run, I think, it's definitely worth it. So, go ahead and pick out any bearing that you would like, cut it out of the plastic here, these bones come in a nice packaging here as you can see, I'm kind of old school about the way that I put my bearings on. I like to actually just use the truck to do it, lot of skate shops will have a bearing press that you can use. The first thing you want to do is, take the bearing in your hand, there is two sides to Swiss bearings, the side that you want to have facing out is actually the flat face. So this is the side that will face out from the wheel, facing into the wheel is the inside plate. This is actually the side that you to apply any oil to, if you ever wanted to make sure the bearing was working better. So those are the two sides of bearings. So, what I do is actually take my truck, put the bearing with the flat face out in like this, then I take my wheel in this case we have the Powell's five team wheel and actually put it in on and then use the palm of my hands to basically push the wheel down on to the bearing like this. Then as you can see it's nicely fitted in there. That's the basic concept, we are going to do for all four wheels on the board, each wheel is going to have two bearings in it, here is the other one here, so flat face out, apply and then just use your hands to basically push it in there. Now, we have got a nice wheel on there. A lot of skate shops will actually have a bearing press as you can see here, which is a bit easier. I'm just a little old school. But otherwise the bearing press is -- it's basically the same principle. You go ahead and put the bearing with the flat face out, facing out apply it like so on to the little axle here. Then, you take the wheel put that on top of that and you take your other bearing again with the flat face out, apply it to the top of the press here, fix it in, skew it back and then once you have got the bearing set up like this, all you do is just use your hand to press forward and this machine will actually do it in a nice fluid motion for you.

So, as you can see the bearing has being applied. Using a bearing press in a skate shop is pretty easy thing to do, but you don't always have that if you are out in the streets. So, that's why I actually use my hands because I have just gotten used to doing it that way. But that's not to say that the bearing press isn t a good convenient tool to use. Once you have got it on there, you want to actually take off these little key rings, this is going to separate your axle from the bearing a little bit to give it some protection. You can put the wheels in either way, it could be the outside face or the inside face. Powell's five wheels actually have graphics on both sides. I'm going to go ahead and go with the outside for this particular set up.

So we are just going to put the board on here, use your fingers first as to get it on there a little bit and then go ahead and use your skate tool to get it tightened down. When you first put a set of wheels on, you want to tighten it as far as it will go because this will actually push the bearing in to make sure that it's nice and snug in there because you don't want to go out skating and have a loose bearing in there.

So I'm tightening that down as pretty as far as it will go, then I'm going to go back. I have just tightened it, pretty fast on there. So, now I'm going to go back and actually loosen it a few turns and so I get just a tiny bit of slack. Best thing to do in this case, is just use your hand to make sure the wheel is just very, subtly able to move, and we are still able to get a nice spin there.

So, that's basically it for putting your wheels on. I'm going to go ahead and apply the other three wheels and then after that we are going to go to fine tuning the set up.