A Reinvention Of the Wheel

Annandale Teen's Idea Brought Skateboarding Back to Life

By Eric M. Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2004; Page B01

Who knew that a Navy brat from Annandale would discover the key to the modern
skateboard?

But that is exactly what Frank Nasworthy did in the summer of 1970. By deciding to
replace his skateboard's clay wheels with high-tech synthetic rubber wheels he stumbled
upon, Nasworthy made it possible to do the sort of tricks that today's average mall rat
considers ho-hum.

"It was so revolutionary, it spawned an entire movement," said Stacy Peralta, a champion
skateboarder in the 1970s who produced the cult skateboard film "Dogtown and Z-Boys."
"Skateboarding wouldn't be where it is. It wouldn't exist."

Nasworthy's innovation, which he tested on the streets of Arlington and on the granite
and marble playground of the Mall during that summer, resuscitated skateboarding,
saving it from going the way of the hula hoop and the yo-yo.

Southern California was the center of surfing and skateboarding, but Nasworthy's
discovery will preserve a place for the Washington area in skateboard history, said
Michael Brooke, author of "The Concrete Wave," a history of the sport.

"It's amazing that the birthplace of the urethane wheel is Washington, D.C.," Brooke said.

Nasworthy didn't invent urethane. He wasn't even the first to make a wheel out of the
petroleum-based compound. But, in the best tradition of American entrepreneurs,
Nasworthy knew enough to recognize that the wheels would make a skateboard jump and
rock and roll -- and that a few bucks could be made on that.

Nasworthy's father was a naval aviator who worked at the Pentagon, so his family spent
the summer of 1970 in Northern Virginia. Elsewhere that year, "Love Story" and
"M*A*S*H" drew crowds to air-conditioned theaters. The Chicago Seven were
acquitted. In South Carolina, two white men tried to storm a school bus to prevent
integration. Janis Joplin died.

One day Nasworthy and a high school friend, Bill Harward, went to visit another friend,
whose family owned a plastics factory in Purcellville. The friend's dad tinkered with
making things out of urethane. In the factory was a barrel filled with small wheels.
"I just looked at those wheels and thought, 'Wow, those would fit on our skateboards,' "
Nasworthy recalled. "He told us to take as many as we wanted because they weren't
perfect, and they were actually trying to figure out how to dispose of them."

He took about 30 to 40 wheels. When he got home, he put them on his skateboard and
headed straight for the hills of Columbia Pike. Unlike balky clay wheels, the new wheels
rode like a dream as he cruised toward the Pentagon, using parking garages and
driveways along the way as private skate parks.

Then, he and his friends went to a nearby Toys R Us and bought up whatever clay-
wheeled skateboards the store still had since the first wave of skateboarding had died five
years earlier. They spent the rest of the summer carving the concrete slopes of the
Washington area, the first teenage crew anywhere to have what is now considered a
typical modern skateboard.

Their favorite places to skateboard included a Catholic girls' school and the area around
the Lincoln Memorial. "There was so much concrete and granite around, so to skate all
over it was a blast," he remembered.

The first skateboards in the 1950s were handmade, basically young boys nailing metal
roller skate wheels to a piece of wood. If one survived the ride, his teeth would rattle,
several skateboard pioneers recalled.

"First time I saw one was a bunch of kids coming down the Pacific Coast Highway on a
one-by-six," said Hobie Alter, surf, skateboard and boating legend. "I said, 'You guys are
nuts.' "

In 1959, the first skateboards hit toy stores. They were basically of the same crude design
except they were made in a factory. In 1962, the first skateboard competition took place,
and the first skateboard shop opened.

The skateboard craze took off nationwide in 1964, spread by Alter and a crew of the best
California surfers. That summer, they rented a Ford Condor bus, filled it with gas and
took off cross-country. In places where there were no waves, they played surfing movies
and showed off their skateboard moves.

"Nobody had ever seen it," Alter said. His crew even made it onto "The Tonight Show"
and had Johnny Carson riding a skateboard down a studio hallway.

But the early skateboards, with wheels made of metal or clay, just didn't grip well. "You
couldn't maneuver it well. It was a joke," Brooke said. Kids were getting hurt; police
chiefs were calling for bans on the boards. By Christmas 1965, the skateboard fad went
bust.

After the summer of 1970, Nasworthy moved to California, but he never forgot about
those amazing urethane wheels he got in Purcellville. Three years later, he got a company
called Creative Urethanes to produce wheels specially for skateboards. (Nasworthy called
them "Cadillac Wheels" because of their smooth ride.)

And he started pitching the wheels to skateboard manufacturers, skate shops and others.
After some success, he said, Cadillac Wheels were overtaken in the marketplace by other
manufacturers. Nasworthy, 53, is now an engineer for Hewlett-Packard in California.

Soon skateboarders began using the new urethane wheels to redefine what could be done
on a skateboard. Stacy Peralta clearly remembered the first time he rode a board with
urethane wheels.

"I took three pushes to the sidewalk, and it wasn't giving way -- I could build
momentum," he said. "It was out of this world. Talk about a pinnacle moment in your
life."

Peralta was part of a group of surfers from a tough part of Santa Monica, Calif., called
"Dogtown." They would surf between the rotting piers of a closed amusement park.
When the waves weren't up, the surfers took to skateboards. They pioneered quick
surfing moves and a down-low style that created a new skateboarding aesthetic.

Soon, the group and its followers scouted the Los Angeles area for empty swimming
pools in which they could practice new tricks and routines on the smooth concrete walls.
Stylish photos of these radical pool sessions were reprinted in new skateboard magazines
that were snapped up in 7-Eleven stores across the country, spurring skateboarding to
new heights.

Skateboard routines and boards have changed since then, but the sport is still about
freedom and attitude.

Nasworthy said skateboards fulfill a desire of kids to move, explore and experiment.

"It is still about the thrill of potential energy," he said, "and doing it in a manner that you
can express yourself emotionally."

Skate History: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Wheels... and More
By Joey Ferreno
Thanks to Adrenalin Magazine.
Illustration by Arthur Carvalho
So I gets a call from Mike at the Adrenalin office in London. "Hey Joey," he says, "What
do you know about skateboard wheels?" What do I know about wheels? I'm no scientist, I
tell him, but I do know that they've come a long way since the early 1900s when metal
roller-skate wheels were first attached to a plank of wood.

Of course, it wasn't until around the fifties that proper skateboards were first produced,
but the wheels were still made of steel. I remember riding those babies - they would rattle
the money-clip off your Lincoln's and the gold right out of your teeth.

The sixties saw the first skate wave kick off. Steel wheels were replaced with clay
wheels, but of course, having as much traction as a rubber sole on ice, people were falling
all over the place, slamming and sliding right into a state-wide ban on skateboards: the
boys down at City Hall considered them too dangerous.

It was Frank Nasworthy who discovered some experimental roller-skate wheels in a

friend's warehouse and consequently created the famous Cadillac wheel: the first ever
urethane skateboard wheel.

Formulated in the 1930s in Germany, urethane was perfect for the job, with its good
abrasion resistance and high resilience. But despite Cadillacs being a hundred times
better than their predecessor, they still had drop-in bearings (16 per wheel) which were
far from efficient. Frankie didn't have the financial punch at the time to really take the
West Coast by storm.

Unfortunately this is where Richard Novak - owner of a company called Roller Sports -
stepped into the picture and bought up all of Creative Urethanes' stock. Creative
Urethanes was the company where Nasworthy discovered his urethane solution. Novak's
"Road Rider" wheel was the first to feature precision bearings. It went on to dominate the
market, quickly followed by Kryptonics and Sims. The problem with the Cadillacs was
that the bearings would pop out of the racers if the wheel was too soft. And everyone, of
course, wanted a soft wheel.

The progression of riding styles obviously dictated the type of wheel required. Back then,
speed and grip were key, meaning bigger wheels poured in their purest form: i.e., clear or
white, with no color. Any additional colouring would take up more room within the
chemical structure of the urethane, meaning less urethane per wheel, which in turn meant
a slightly harder wheel with less grip. Sounds complicated, but it's just like making
concrete boots - you gotta get the mix right.

Come the eighties, however, and coloured wheels were everywhere. You only have to
watch the original Bones Brigade video to see why - we were all power-sliding
everywhere, high speed, lay back slides with big gloves on our hands. Take a set of black
Slimeballs for instance (a Santa Cruz product, owned by Novak's company, NHS - nice
outfit!): you could have a set of 95a wheels and find them as hard and slide-y as a set of
pink 98a. Black has more pigment than any other "color", taking up much more room in
the structure. Capisci?
Dropping in on Grandaddy Powell years ago, I recall George was cooking up some
chemicals in his kitchen. He was making his first wheels in a homemade mould with a
material called "Upjohn". The result was amazing. His creations were twice as fast as
anything on the market, but he didn't stop there. He discovered that all the other wheels in
the industry were made from a Dupont material and started working with both urethanes
until he came across the perfect combination of both: exactly 1 to 9. This really is the
crux of wheel manufacturing: the raw materials and the process used are far more
important to a wheel's performance than its shape and size.

Then came the nineties - Whoa! Wheels became landing gear for skaters who learned to
fly, and with this kind of high-impact punishment, they needed to deform less. Engineers
refer to the flattening at the bottom of the wheel by a skater's weight as "deformation". A
resilient urethane wheel returns to its round shape - or "rebounds" - very quickly. The less
resilient a wheel is, the more energy is lost in the deformation, and the wheel will roll
away much slower. A harder wheel loses less energy, but if it's too hard, a tarmac road
will actually deform a wheel and energy will be lost into the road.

More recently, wheels have become harder and smaller in order to suit more technical
tricks. Engineers have needed to find a compromise between traction and slide in order to
make wheels more forgiving when the board lands at a slight angle - a bit of slide is
required. A bulbous, ball-like shape also means landing can be less exact and aids in
landing rotational tricks more easily.

So wheels have become harder in order to deal with today's street style, but speed is lost
and flatspots wear a lot quicker. This is where dual-durometer comes into play. A
durometer is an instrument used to measure a substance's resistance to penetration. The
"A" Shore durometer reads from 0-100, meaning 101a is more of an indication of
hardness than an actual measurement. Dual durometer is not a new thing - Nasworthy
pioneered that too - but the processes used today are highly technical.

To create a wheel with a high abrasion resistence - long life, a high rebound,
maintainence of potential energy, and a bearing seat that holds the bearings true - two
materials of differing hardness are needed. A hard "hub" that holds bearings firmly would
conventionally use an injection-moulded material. The only problem here is that you can't
chemically bond an injection moulded material with the gravity-poured urethane of the
"tyre". To solve this, engineers created holes or slots in the hard hub that would
physically lock together with the gravity-poured urethane "tyre".

More innovative companies in recent years have discovered processes that allow them to
cast the hub with a gravity-poured urethane - harder than the tyre - which chemically
bonds to the softer urethane giving the wheel a more solid feel and eliminating any
possible vibrations, translating directly to greater speed. Another problem with injection-
moulded hubs is that they will want to reform when subjected to heat, as this is how they
are moulded in the first place. Speeding bearings create a great deal of heat, and in a
gravity-poured hub there is no softening under heat as the shape is set chemically and not
by rapid cooling.

And that's all I know. So if anyone ever refers to your board as a toy, give them a
chemistry lesson, and then give Joey Ferreno a call - an' I'll take 'em for a long drive in
the desert!
From 2002

Then came Kryptonics, and they ruled...

Skates first used wooden wheels, then steel. In the 1890s, the first all- steel skate was
introduced. The turn of the century brought the ball-bearing roller which allowed for the
development of the modern skate. Rubber-wheeled skates were introduced in the 1920s,
but most rollers still used the noisy metal models because the rubber was hard and
slippery. That’s the way it stayed until the late 1950s. Now is when the story gets
confusing. Like with most inventions, more than one person takes credit for the invention
of the urethane wheel. Dupont, the chemical manufacturing giant, came up with this
"space age" material called adiprene. In 1963, Tom Hitefield, while playing with some
adiprene that his father Vernon was developing, asked his dad if he could make a wheel
out of it for his roller skates. After some reformulating in his basement lab, he created
polyurethane. Vernon designed a cast-molding system that made the originally soft
urethane harder and faster, as well as capable of holding loose ball bearings. All this
contributed to the primal need for speed.

Vernon named his company, appropriately, Creative Urethanes. Then came

surfer/skateboarder Frank Nasworthy, who thought the polyurethane roller-skating
wheels would solve skateboarding’s traction and control problems. They did, and he took
the new wheels to San Diego in 1971 and started selling them to surf/skate shops. He was
selling 8000 wheels a year by 1973. In 1973, Frank went out on his own and started
Cadillac Wheels in an effort to meet the specific demands of skateboarding. By 1975, he
had licensed his designs to Bahne, a surf and skateboard company, which took sales to
the one million per year mark. This refinement of the original polyurethane formula was
essentially the same compound we know of as skate wheel urethane today.

One would think this is where our story ends. We're not that lucky. As with many
innovations, there are many people who came across the same thing about the same time.
This is also the case with the development of polyurethane and its skating application.
Tom and Vernon Hitefield were the first story - now for the second. This one will
probably be more familiar to you since it involves one of the more known wheel brands
in in-line skating.
In 1965, Chuck Demarest started Kryptonics. The name is derived from the Greek word
"kryptos", meaning concealed or secret. During his work in nuclear physics at the
University of Colorado, Demarest became a polyurethane technologist. Demarest was
fascinated by polyurethane's amazing strength and ease of production. During the 1970's
skateboarding boom, Demarest decided to apply Kryptonics' technology to the design and
production of skateboard wheels. He developed a formula for softer, grippier urethane
wheels. It was a much needed improvement. They were known as "Kryptos" to young
skateboarders throughout America. Kryptonics wheels performed so much better than the
wheels of the past that the company established itself by producing an entire line of
wheels, some of which it still manufactures, to fit the range of skateboarding needs.

By the 1980s, Kryptonics was the world's leading manufacturer of high performance
skate and skateboard wheels. Those early developments in urethane wheels by
Kryptonics and Creative Urethanes were instrumental in the progression of
skateboarding’s tricks, as well the sport as a whole.