Chris Chaput is my hero. Thanks for making such excellent wheels, Chris!

Kinda stoked about these wheels. Would rather he kept them in the Retro brand, so they’d come in other colors, but green is good.

Kinda can’t wait to wear out my current wheels so I can justify buying some of these.

If the 72mm Freerides are awesome (and they are, which is why I own 4 sets), an extra 5mm can only mean one thing: more awesome.

I see that these are currently available here, at longboardskater.com.

While on my previously posted trip to Austin and ditch session, I decided to try out some 77a Gravity “Burner” wheels I bought a while back.

77a Burners - on Tracker 149s and Mini-Carve. Good wheels.

For quite a few years I used to be a big fan of the Gravity Street-G wheel. Even when companies like ABEC-11 started coming out with some more expensive wheels made of a higher grade urethane, I still liked the Street-Gs a lot. Gravity made them for many years, so I was pretty shocked actually when they dropped the wheel completely and came out with an almost entirely new wheel lineup.

The Gravity’s 66mm Burner is one of the wheels in the new lineup. To the untrained eye, it looks a lot like the 66mm Retro ZigZag. It has a wide contact patch, kind of square lips. Looks like a slalom wheel to me. I’m posting a few pics of them on my Mini-Carve, so you can really see how they look. They are mounted here on Tracker 149s.

The 77a white formula really rolls smoothly over rough surfaces, but to my surprise it didn’t feel mushy at all. Sometimes a real soft wheel will feel like a marshmellow — like it wants to just pull right off the core under pressure. Sometimes you can feel a softy really deforming badly as it squishes around while you ride it. Not so with the Burners. True, the lips of this wheel do flex a quite a bit, but somehow the wheel’s shape doesn’t allow it to deform too badly. The result, I think, is a wheel that grips pretty well without squishing away all your speed.

Burners - Sideview.

While I was at the ditch for that session, my friend Army was riding the blue 83a Burners on his Mini-Carve. They also seemed to function real well. Very smooth, but with a little more slideability, due to the harder formula.

Another nice thing about these wheels is the price. They aren’t as expensive as some of the premium-grade wheels out there. Granted, they aren’t quite as fast either, but they are about $10 less expensive. I think it is a good tradeoff. They are still plenty fast. Unless you are actually racing, these wheels are just fine for most applications. When you use high-grade, expensive wheels for every day riding, I don’t think you ever really get the maximum benefit out of them, but you use ‘em up just as fast. My friend Mike “Grumpy Ol’ Bastard” Moore says I “ride light” because I don’t go through boards very fast. Perhaps that’s true, but I pump real hard in ditches, and I really can burn through wheels fast if I’m riding like that a lot. So its nice to save $10 where I can.

So I would say the Burners are a really good all-around wheel. I can see using them on carving boards, hill boards, ditch boards, whatever.

Mini-Carve with Burners.

On a slightly different topics I want to talk about riser pads on Mini-Carve decks. In short, you don’t need them. I have one thin riser under each of the trucks on my board, and really I could just get rid of it. The wheel cutouts in front and the tapering rail of the Mini-Carve just make wheelbite nearly impossible with most trucks.  I’ve run Randal trucks on mine, and no bite either. Army was riding Ace 33s or 44s on his board – no risers – trucks so loose the lock nut was about to fall off — and he said it will barely rub if he really gets down on it.

Now, Gravity sends these boards out (if you chose non-Randal trucks) with wedge risers to improve the turning. The wedges do, in fact, improve the turning. I rode mine like that for years.  Now, however, I like to keep my board as low as possible. And thanks to the many options you have for really great bushings, you can run a standard truck with no risers and still get great turning. On these Trackers, I am using the Tracker inverted “Grind-King” style kingpin with a Retro Lime tall bushing on bottom. The bushings really improve the turning to the point that wedges just aren’t really needed. If you really want to spend some $$, you could put some Ace/Core Hybrids from Milehigh Skates on there and still keep the ride low.

The standard Gravity setup isn’t bad. It works very, very well. But if you want a low ride, you can go that way with no problem. I’m not sure if I’d recommend the no-riser solution for wheels larger than 66mm, but I can tell you that up 66mm it works well.