The wheel reinvented: Skateboarder raises $30,000 in 10 days to produce cube-shaped wheels he claims are faster and provide better handling
A company called 4Sphere is putting a new - pardon the pun - spin on a 5,500-year-old classic: the wheel.
Wheels, as most everyone knows, are round. But not 4Sphere's Shark Wheel - rather, a Shark Wheel, designed for skateboards, is formed around a cubed center, which its inventor claims allows it to ride faster and smoother than your traditional round skateboard wheel.
In other words, the company has literally reinvented the wheel.
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Behold! The wheel - reinventedShark Wheels
'When used on hard surfaces, the Shark Wheel produces a low friction profile similar to a high performance, low rolling resistance tire,' the company says on its Kickstarter page. 'This allows for less energy to be used as the contact patch is very small. Conversely, a wheel that would normally work well as a low resistance wheel would perform poorly in something like soft sand.'
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Shark Wheels are made up of three, helical-shaped strips that, when rolling, form a sine wave pattern when they make contact with the ground.
This pattern allows the wheel to roll faster than a traditional round wheel, the company claims, and provides better handling on rough, wet terrain.
