Skateboard and longboard bearing cleaning guide

Crud and dirt collects easily within longboard wheel bearings and can really slow you down. If your bearings are making noise or your wheels don’t spin freely, you’ll really benefit from keeping your bearings clean! Even if they don’t seem dirty, cleaning your bearings regularly will keep them in good shape and hopefully you can avoid having to replace them completely. Plus, riding bearings that are super dirty and un-lubricated will increase friction and cause excess heat, creating more wear and tear on the bearing balls. Eventually your bearings can even stop spinning and lock up and that doesn’t sound like any fun.

What you will need:

- A skate tool (Check it out in our shop, selling for $10)

- A rag that you don't mind getting greasy

- A knife blade

- Some sort of degreaser/solvent

- A tray to soak your bearings in (preferably with a lid)

-  Bearing lubricant  (Check it out in our shop, selling for $5)

Take the bearings out:

Using a skate tool, take the nut off the axle and slide the wheel along the axle so that the innermost bearing is just on the edge of the axle. Using the same kind of motion as you would to open a bottle of beer, prise the bearing out of the wheel. Flip the wheel over and repeat.

Remove the bearing shields:

Once you’ve got your bearings out of your wheels, you need to get inside the cartridges. If you’re lucky your bearings will only have a single shield, but most likely you’ll have to take one of the shields off so you can get to the balls and cage. With a rubber shielded bearing this is easy – just prize one shield off with a small razorblade or anything sharp enough to go in between the bearing shield and the metal surrounding. Skatebruh boards all come with rubber shielded bearings to give you, out valued customer greater convenience in maintaining your skateboard bearings.

Cleaning

Next you need to get all the grime and grease out of your bearing races. The best bet is tosoak the bearings in some solvent or alcohol. We recommend using rubbing alcohol for this.

Soak your bearings in your chosen solvent try putting the bearings in a jam jar and shake the bejeezus out of them for about 2 minutes, then rinse them with some more clean solvent.

Lubrication

Dry your bearings off (hair dryers are handy here), then relube them with a touch of oil or grease. You don’t need much lube in there so don’t go too crazy! The thinner your lube, the faster your bearings will spin, we recommend our affordable and trusty bearing lubricant that goes for only $5, check them out in our shop!