Going shieldless

This morning both of my back wheels just stopped turning, out of nothing. Not sure what happened. There wasn't any more dirt than usual around, it's a concrete skatepark after all.

One bearing in a front wheel was causing troubles last week. But I found it strange that 2 wheels got stuck pretty much at the same time.

The big bummer is that those are Bronson Ceramic bearings, and they are not cheap bearings. I'm riding them for about 2 months and would have expected to get more life out of them

Later at home I took the bearings out. They would not spin at all. Popped all the shields, cleaned them with alcohol and put 1 - 2 drops Bones Speed Cream on them. That helped and they started spinning again. Maybe it was just accumulated dirt, who knows.

While fixing the front wheel last week I noticed that the shields caused the wheel to spin slower. With shields removed the bearing performance seemed much better.

Maybe the shields are bent or misaligned and add friction.

So I decided to join the circle of cool kids and pop the shields. Other then that the wheels spin really nicely with popped shields, I don't notice much of a difference in added noise or so. Feels good, let's see how long they last until the next cleaning session.