“When I was 12 years old I got a pair of rollerblades for Christmas called the K2 Fatty. I was super stoked because at the time these were a super hot present because this was during the rise of stunt rollerblading or as ESPN called it aggressive inline. From 12 to 17 years old I totally fell in love with skating. In fact, my only childhood dream was to become a professional stunt rollerblader, so when I turned 18 I moved to San Diego California to pursue this life long dream. One year later I entered into the Aggressive Skating Association's North American World championship amateur competition and placed 7th, which qualified me as a true professional rollerblader! Shortly after I signed a contract with Team Rollerblade USA and skated professionally until I was 24. I eventually stopped skating professionally when I started my third year of college as a pre-med/Biology student. I had to focus so intently on school there just wasn’t enough time for both, but I did graduate with a 3.92GPA! Fast forward another 10 years and while I don’t do top soul 360 top soul 540 out on handrails anymore, I still do skate today for fun on my Razor Skates. And one day after a blade sesh I started wondering if it would be possible to strap large rockets onto my rollerblades and would this give me enough juice to actually make me go any faster? The first step was going down to Sunshine distribution, my old sponsor and seeing if we could get the proper gear for this experiment. We landed on using these ultra high frames so that we could fit the rockets on next to it without scraping on the ground. The second step in this process was to get my buddy Rob the welder to CAD image out this really bad sketch I came up with.Rob did a fantastic job making pretty much a way better version of what I drew! We made the frame wings out of aluminum and added spaces in between as a weight reduction measure. We then added an adjustable fastener to the top of the wing so that we could use different size rocket engines… start small and then work up. Since Rob pointed out that most of the force would ultimately end up on the chassis of the wheels we made sure to connect the rocket engine wing to both the bottom of the boot for support but also the side of the skate frame to get the most energy transfer straight to where it would matter. “ - Nick Uhas
Rocket Rollerblading With Nick Uhas And The Funk Bros
