about that Bollerwagen

(This should show up as a different kind of post)

Mid last year, we acquired a Hauck Eco Mobil hand wagon. It’s a really cool looking thing and for transporting two small kids and various .. stuff, it is quite useful.

But there’s a catch, namely that the wheels use quite a hard rubber as their covering. This is fine as long as you roll on earth and grass or smooth tarmac. It becomes a problem once the surface you pull your kids across is our typical German inner-city cobblestones. A lot of vibration ensues. This is noisy and also uncomfortable for the children involved.

So, I decided I wanted different wheels. I thought this would be relatively easy, given that the wheels here have standard industrial bearings, there’s a fixed axle and they’re mounted with a standard nut (M12). Turns out, though, that the exact combination of bearing (12mm inner diameter) and axle-length (35mm) used here is extremely uncommon. So uncommon in fact, that no matter on which website of wheel-selling merchant I looked, it was impossible to find wheels that fit. 35mm axle-length are only available as extremely tiny diameter wheels with 8mm axle-diameter, whereas 12mm axle-length only gets combined with 50mm or upwards axle length.

After a lot of searching, I finally found out that the wheels used in so called “Cross Skates” have, in some newer versions, the required bearings while also employing an axle-length of 35mm.

So I bought (at a place called rollenshop) a set of four pneumatic wheels and these, as far as I can tell, now do work nicely on our wagon. They look a bit weird, as they are somewhat smaller than the original wheels, but the added comfort of using pneumatic wheels should definitely compensate for the looks.

So. Putting this here in the hopes it helps others with their googling. I probably should add the German terms Luftreifen, Lufträder and Bollerwagen.

Also, not all of the nordic skates pneumatic wheels work. You have to make sure you get ones with 6001 bearings (that’s a definition of bearing size).