"MY OWN"
FIRST ROLLERSKIS Ivo Romanelli
How I made a pair of rollerskis fitting me
I discovered rollerskiing about a year ago and up to now I was happy enough to go on training with my SKIWAY EASY 60cm with straight wheels. I have to say that I am very fond of skating technique and therefore I spend all my enthusiasm cross country skiing in wintertime and rollerskiing in the rest of the year on this one technique, moreover almost only in slope. So my objective, or better my fancy, became to build a low budget pair of rollerskis that could enable me to repeat a gesture as close as possible to that of skating on the snow. I think I can say to have reached in part this objective. Here you have the reasoning I’ve made to reach the results you can see in the pictures. First of all I started from the length of the alluminium bars and from the wheelbase; as point of reference I took the data of my SKI WAY rollerskis: bars and wheelbase of 600mm; but then I got the idea to build a bumper rear brake to face without too much worrying easy descents, so I placed two rubber bumpers similar to those used with in line type skates; that of course caused a total length of the bars of 740mm.
After that I had to choose the type of tires for the wheels: a set of in line type skates tires ROCES, 80mm. Hyper 78 A with extremely soft compound. Finally I bought the bindings that, for the length of the bars and for the will of performing a skating gesture as long as possible, couldn’t be anything else that the model Pilot by Salomon. At this point nothing else was left except going on with the assembling; after a couple of modifying during the works the prototype you see in the pictures has been born. The day of the test I faced a dozen of kilometers, the first half in plain and the second half in merciless slope; the response of the new born seamed positive to me, the first thing I noticed was the easy conducting of these tools, thanks for sure to the compound of the tires, really soft and good in cushioning the roughness of the asphalt. Secondly I enjoyed the couple Pilot – long bars, which enables to perform a long skate gesture also in double thrust and even to a very clumsy athlete like me. Finally, despite the weight typical of training rollerskis (800gr. each), I judge these rollerskis sufficiently fast to enjoy them even when the path becomes demanding.
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