Heelys

Remember Heelys, the shoes with wheels in the heels? Just lift up your toes, and away you go. We were at least ten or fifteen years older than the target demographic, but got a pair anyway just to please our inner child and have some fun. Young kids would wear them everywhere and zip around inside stores to the annoyance of everyone but other young kids. We imagine some shopkeepers got to the point where they could spot the things as they walked in the door and nipped the skating party in the bud.

[DevNerd] has conceived of the ultimate plan: if you make your own Heelys, no one necessarily has to know unless you start rolling around. [DevNerd] started by cutting some large, 20mm-deep holes in the bottoms of a pair of Air Jordans and printed a sturdy wheel and a box frame for support.

Each wheel has a bearing on both ends that spin on a threaded rod. We’re not sure why [DevNerd] went with threaded rod, because it seems like that would prematurely wear out the frame box.

Don’t want to cut up your shoes, but want some sweet roller kicks for the daily commute down the hall? You could always make them out of pallet wood.

The kids are simply cooler than you. While you’re walking around using your feet like an animal, kids have shoes with wheels in their heels. These are called Heelys, and here’s how you make wooden clogs, with wheels in the heels, out of pallet wood. If you have to ask why, you’ll never know.

This build started off with a fairly large maple log, which would be the traditional way to build clogs. After taking this log to the bandsaw and looking inside, [Jackman] found a bit of spalting, or arguably aesthetically pleasing fungal growth. Whether the spalting would look good or not is a matter for debate, but either way [Jackman] decided to change plans and moved over to creating pallet wood clogs. A word of warning about pallet wood: you shouldn’t make anything out of wood from discarded pallets unless you know what you’re doing, and even if you do know what you’re doing there will be someone in the comments telling you that you shouldn’t use wood from discarded pallets. You can check out the comments to this article to verify this fact.

The construction of the clogs started with a few pieces of one inch stock glued up into a gigantic block, then several pieces of half inch stock resawn into quarter inch stock and laminated onto the sole of the clog. This was then shaped using a variety of tools from Arbortech; of note, we have the Turbo Plane, a wood shaping tool for a grinder that sounds more dangerous than it is, the Turbo Shaft, a plunge router or mortiser-sort-of-thing for a grinder that’s much cooler than it sounds, and the Power Chisel, something we can’t even believe exists and hold on here’s all our money.

These tools couldn’t get all the way into the toe of the clog, which meant [Jackman] had to saw down the middle and hollow everything out that way, but this did give him a nice flat surface on the inside to install the Heely wheels. This turns the clogs into something nine-year-olds simultaneously desire and don’t appreciate, because they’re kids.

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