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Why did dual durometer wheels disappear from street and park skateboarding?

WheelbyteWheelbyte
in These Wheels
Yesterday I was riding some unknown old 50mm wheels I found.
They had a hard blue core and what feels like a 90a ish outer durometer. They sucked! Slow and felt really weird. They made a squishy sound like when cheap wheels deform around the bearing under weight load.
Yet I see in softer durometer skate sports like long-boarding, roller skates and inline that just about everything is dual durometer or harder cored wheels.

Why did dual durometer fade from ALL street and park wheels?
I ride mostly stf in various sizes and have some spf60's for cement bowl so understand that dual durometer are not really necessary anymore with these new school formulas. But back in the day they must have had some benefit?
I'm fairly new to skating, even though I'm old and crusty, so wasn't rolling when dual durometer and little wheels were common.

What changed? Manufacturing costs? and the evolution of hard fast urethane's with better rebound and grip/slide characteristics?
I read some manufacturers were research and developing super-light plastic core park wheels,, so is there still a future for dual durometer in street and park? Or just for softer atf type wheels?


Comments

  • brigade_billbrigade_bill
    edited February 2019
    autobahn still makes them they were always famous for them along with darkstar and momentum also makes them but i think it is just something that didnt catch on i always though it was kind of stupid
  • WakeInFrightWakeInFright
    Powerflex do them too!

    Basically cored wheels
  • WheelbyteWheelbyte
    edited February 2019
    Oh okay, so they never disappeared, how dumb of me. Since I have been skating just a few years, I thought they were a bigger thing that waned.

    The cored wheels I have that are slow and squishy sounding look just like a powerflex wheel. I just aint seen cored wheels around NZ parks at all. I guess they all suck, not just mine.

    Clouds and 80HD have a tiny plastic bearing seat, but its so small in diameter compared to other skate sport wheels and the cored park wheels like powerflex, darkstar, autobahn etc.
    I had some 60mm Bombers and they were fine at 85a with no core.

    Just seems weird how roller skating and longboarding are all plastic/metal cored and street/park are almost zero. Maybe its just the impact from doing tricks and landing on ramps.
  • brigade_billbrigade_bill
    probably
  • SimpleJuggalo17SimpleJuggalo17
    I had a pair of Rictas probably 10+ years ago and I did one flat ground ollie and when I landed the outside of the wheel rolled off and I was left with the inner core. Mind you this was right after I learned to ollie and I really loved my power slides and reverts, but since then I've sworn to only use wheels made out of one solid piece. I had a friend back then that had his wheels for a few years, and he skated them down to 30 something mm. Looked liked a honda on low pros.
  • WheelbyteWheelbyte
    Yeahs now that I'm 8 months older and wiser and been skating and wheelbyteing a lot more I feel that standard skatebording involves a lot of unweighting and weighting and lateral forces,, and dual duro or cored wheels dont stand up to this category of use.

    At each meeting of materials an energy transfer occurs, at that border becomes a place where feel and feedback gets perverted by some sort of shudder or middleman sort of thingy ma bob

    They just dont stand up to real skateboardings more varied wheel stressors, and offer poorly translated feedback to the rider as road forces get warped or shuddered at the border of materials

    Its like bike frames snap beside welds, and too much gusseting and too many welds create a lack of shock absorbing flex in the frame creating a bony ride and low quality frame
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