How to Clean Skateboard Bearings Quick & Easy

Video Transcript

"My name is Shawn Connolly. I live in San Francisco, California. I'm a sponsored skateboarder and I also run a skateboarding program for youth called the SF Skate Club. And what I'm here today to do is show you how to properly clean and maintenance your bearings. Now all bearings are different. Usually the price of a bearing has to do with the quality of it. There's a lot of different A back bearings and I think they go from three to seven. And there may be some outside of that, but that's usually the, the numbers that they work with. Now the best kind of bearings are usually Bone Swiss bearings. And when it comes to cleaning your bearings, Bone Swiss bearings are usually made so that they can pop the shield off from the bearing. And then you're able to get inside the bearing. You take your bearing and you take something like a razor blade that I have here or anything that's really pointed small. Maybe a, a, a jackknife or something like that. And you poke it into the shield and you pop the shield off. Now that you've popped your shield off, you'll notice that you can actually see the ball bearing themselves that are inside. Now when it comes to Swiss bearings or Bone Swiss bearings I like to just leave my shield off and let the bearings ride. Now this does make it so that dirt can get inside of the bearings. But I find with Swiss it actually makes them a little bit louder and it gives them kind of a nice feel when you're skating them. So I keep the shields off. And I feel like it, since the shield is off, it makes it so that the dirt can eventually get out. But when it comes to cheaper bearings or bearings that need a little bit more precision that is, you'll want to put the shield back on after you've cleaned the bearing. Now there's a lot of different speed creams or brands of lubricant that you can buy to put into bearings, but make sure that you buy skateboard lubricant bearing specific lubricant. Because I've heard that DW40 doesn't work. I guess it breaks down the, the plastic that separates the bearings so you're not going to want to use that. One thing that I've heard that works pretty well is to use a small amount of gasoline and put the bearings, since it's mostly steel, just put the bearings in the gasoline and leave it over night and then come back, open them up, take them out of the gasoline and let them dry. Now what this does is it dries out the bearing as dry as it can possibly get. And then from that point you can add your lubricant after that. But basically you want to make sure that you keep your bearings out of the rain, out of water, away from sand and dirt and things like that. And that way you'll avoid the problem of getting your bearings too dirty. And this is how you properly maintenance and clean your bearings. My name is Shawn Connolley and I'm from San Francisco, California and I'm a sponsored skateboarder and run a program for youth called SF Skate Club. You can learn more about it at sfskateclub.com."