me and my friend own long boards and we just learned to power slide, but we‘re worried that it will ruin our wheels, now if u long board u know how expensive wheels are. they‘re urethane wheels if that makes a difference.
For a longboard, never get a duro above 84a. this is going to experience like bumpy trash. 90a is plenty too problematical for a tender journey. Sector 9 Butterballs are great. From own journey, Abec11 Freerides 81a are particularly consumer-friendly to slip with.
Hey! That was MY wife you're talikn' about! (he -he-hee)
Eventually, yes, sliding does ruin wheels. However it doesn't happen overnight. A big contributing factor to how fast they will wear out from sliding (and coincidentally how suited they are to sliding versus straight-up carving) is the durometer, or hardness of the wheels. (You'll find this marked on your own wheels, on the side, with the mm). A higher durometer (101a is really hard) will allow the wheels to break loose from the road surface more readily, and will generally last longer when used in a sliding application. Softer duromoters (75 or thereabouts) will be more grippy allowing for harder carving and tighter turns. Sliding on these is hard to do since they naturally don't want to break loose, and when they do slide it's somewhat similar to wearing down a pencil eraser (I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.) Even on softer wheels you can expect a fairly long life, unless you're sliding exclusively, every day, at very high rates of speed. So feel free to pull Colemans all the way down the hill. )
