- Hey surfskating friends,
Steve here with Surfskate Love,
here to show you how to maintain
your YOW Meraki surfskate trucks.
And at the top of the list
that means stopping any squeaking,
because I think that's the most common complaint
that I hear online.
In fact, I see that quite a bit
and I've even seen videos
of people posting their brand new YOWs
and they're moving those trucks
and there's a pretty horrendous squeak in them.
And I'm hearing reports of people who are opening those up
and they're finding no grease in them.
So I'm gonna walk you through this whole process.
We're gonna teach you how to take apart your YOW Meraki,
how to clean it, how to maintain it.
We're gonna look at the bearings, the springs, all of it.
So I'm assuming you're gonna be able
to figure out how to take it off your board.
And here's the tools we're gonna use.
I've got a, I believe this is a 9/16 inch socket wrench.
I've got a skate tool.
We've got some oil, some machine oil.
We've got some wax to stop squeaking and a pivot cup.
We've got some marine grease and some lithium grease.
You can use one or the other.
We're gonna use marine grease, but I'm just showing you
that you can use either and some Isopropyl Alcohol.
So the first thing we're gonna do is take this truck apart
and we're gonna start by taking off this kingpin bolt.
Now, unlike the Carver C7 or the SmoothStar
or the slide that Meraki is not adjustable
except for the kingpin bolt
which we'll just loosen up your truck on the bushings there.
So one of the most commonplace sources
of squeaking you're gonna get in any surfskate truck
or any skateboard or longboard truck
is the pivot cup right in there.
So that's the first thing we're gonna look at.
There are top bushings there.
We've got our bushings on the bottom here
and here's our pivot cup right there.
So I'll do this when we're putting this all back together
but basically to stop pivot cup squeaking.
And by the way, you can kinda tell.
If you got a squeak, you can kinda tell
the difference between a metal on plastic squeak
that's coming from say a pivot cup or maybe even a bushing
or you can tell when it's a metal on metal squeak.
So just kinda listen for that.
But usually I think not 99% of the time,
I think it's gonna be more of a pivot cup squeak.
But anyway, you can kinda just tell by listening to it.
If it's metal on metal,
that's probably gonna be your spring inside.
If it's the squeaking of metal and plastic,
it's gonna be probably a pivot cup or a bushing.
Okay. So when we come back,
we're gonna just and put this all back together.
I don't wanna do it now 'cause it'll spill out
but we'll put some wax shavings in there to make sure
that we're not getting any squeaks out
of our pivot cup.
All right.
So now we just have to take apart our Meraki truck.
Now I love the Meraki, how minimalistic the design is.
So really it just takes a 9/16 inch socket wrench
or whatever you got
and it's pretty tight.
That bolt goes on there pretty tightly.
And you gotta really kinda crank it both
getting it off and getting it back on
and I'll show you how to do that.
Okay. So this top nut comes off
and then you wanna pull this apart carefully.
And what you're gonna have in here is up top here,
you're going to have a set of bearings
and this thing will always stick in there.
So you've got a set of bearings that sits
between these little channel washers here like so
and that is gonna go right on top of there.
And then inside here,
we've got our spring right here
and inside the spring, you're gonna see
we have some other parts as well
but we're gonna just pop this spring out.
It can be kinda hard to work out here some times
and let's get all, there we go.
Okay. So you can see all of that grease in there.
So this one did come grease
and that one you can see is a lot better than this one.
But anyway, so in here now underneath
you've got a bigger set of channel washers with a bearing.
So like, so this is gonna go underneath, right?
Sit on top of that right there.
And I'm gonna show you how to put all this back together
but this is where you wanna make sure
when we put this back together,
that sitting snug on that metal piece right there
and this is gonna go in there as well.
So this is what you're looking at,
here are all your moving parts of YOW Meraki.
Here's your main parts that everything sits into
and you can see how this spring has little channels for it
in this section here and deep down in that section as well.
So those are the places that need grease.
You can already tell where that one has grease
and we'll go ahead
and put a little bit of grease on there as well.
But if you're getting a pretty nasty metal on metal squeak
like I've heard on Reddit and some other places,
that's probably the place to look at.
Probably came from the factory
especially if it's new and it's squeaking like that,
it may have come from the factory
without being properly greased inside of there.
So when it comes to maintaining this truck,
basically we're gonna look at, you're gonna open it up.
And first and foremost,
you're gonna make sure nothing's broken.
And I think what you're really gonna get broken
if anything breaks, is you can have these bearings break
or you could have this spring break.
In either case, all of these parts
are very easily replaceable from YOW I believe
and so you would just open this up and see what you got.
I know a lot of people break these springs.
I have yet to break one.
I need to order one
but I've heard a lot of this happening quite a bit.
So you're just gonna make...
First of all make sure nothing's broken.
If nothing's broken, then we're gonna look at,
well, does it need to be cleaned?
In this case, this one does not need to be cleaned
but if you are especially I think living on a coast
which I think a lot if not most people watching this are,
you're gonna get a lot of sand and salt that can affect this
and probably needs to be cleaned a lot more
than probably I need to clean it where I'm at.
But I think as far as cleaning goes,
you would just look at these pieces in here.
And if this was really dirty
you can see there's kinda some dirt getting in that grease,
but nothing that I'm really too concerned about
but I imagine that you could very easily just deep clean
that every once in a while,
get all the dirt out and then just reapply grease in there.
And when it comes to the bearings, I would just clean these
with isopropyl alcohol, if necessary.
And then I would lubricate them.
You don't wanna lubricate your bearings with
like your marine grease or your lithium grease.
I would just use like Bones Speed Cream
or you could even use like a basic like machine oil
kind of a thing.
And also note on this,
you do not want to use WD-40 anywhere in here.
WD-40 in bearings will both dry out
and it will attract more dirt.
You're gonna use marine grease or lithium grease
inside of here for the main spring.
And you're gonna use
just some kind of a basic machine oil for your bearings.
So let's just assume that this wasn't greased well
and we'll just go ahead and apply some marine grease
to our spring.
And I imagine we can shove it down in there
and we could also, if we wanted to get real ambitious,
throw it on that spring there as well.
It's not like you have to grease this whole thing.
It's just where you have metal contact right there
in both of those pockets.
And so we'll do the same thing on this one here.
Let's get some grease in there
and I'm gonna go ahead and just kinda wipe off
some of this excess grease because I don't wanna
be attracting a lot of dirt and stuff in this.
So just enough to kinda keep it
in that channel there I guess.
Now, let's just put all this back together.
So there are people who are probably a lot smarter than me
who know of a better way to get these bottom bearings in
but it's kind of difficult for me.
Let me just show you how I have to do it.
So that spring is just gonna sit down
in that channel down in there.
And you really wanna make sure when we tighten this down,
we wanna make sure
that that's really sitting in that channel well
because I've actually...
Playing with this a long time ago,
had situations where I didn't have it
quite tightened down enough
and if it's not locked into that channel, then you can get
some issues on that spring kinda popping out and stuff
and it'll make noise and move around just a little bit.
So to get these in, we've got the...
Again you've got your two sets of washers and bearings.
You got a bigger set and a smaller set.
And the bigger set is what's gonna go down in here
and it can be a little bit tricky
because it doesn't just go straight down like that.
So what I have to do is kind of pull this spring
out a little bit, and then you have to kind of
get those pieces in at a bit of an angle
slip it underneath like so, and make sure
you've got your channels on where the bearings go there.
And you gotta make sure
those bearings are sitting
on that metal piece I showed you.
Sometimes they'll get like stuck
in the spring and not be quite resting on there.
In which case you won't be able to tighten this back up
and then you've got this metal piece here
that's gonna just slide over right there.
So now that we have this and we've got some grease
in our little channel right here, well
now this is gonna go back together like so
and you wanna make sure that that's aligned well
because if that isn't in angle,
these bearings won't fit in there properly.
So then you're just gonna take these again
making sure you've got your bearings
between those channel washers there.
And a smaller set is just gonna go up
over the top right here.
And again, you can see how those aren't quite sliding in
because there's been a quite aligned and there we go.
Now we're slipping in.
Now, tightening this up is very important.
So once we've got that in place,
let's get our nut back on here
and you gotta make sure
that you've got this tightened enough to where there's not
any kind of movement like this, but you don't wanna
get it too tight to where you're compressing those washers
on the bearings too much.
So we're going to tighten down our nut here.
And like I said, it's actually pretty difficult
to both initially loosen up
this nut as well as to tighten it down.
Okay.
So you can see right now, that's getting very tight for me
but I still have quite a bit of play in this.
Can you see that?
You do not want any of that play in that YOW Meraki.
We gotta make sure
that we're pushing that spring down
all the way and getting rid of all of that play.
And it can be difficult.
And about right there right when it pretty much just hits,
that's as far as you can go.
And now you can see, I have no play in that
and I've got my range of motion
and I don't know about you, but I don't hear any squeaks.
I mean, of course riding, it may be a different story
but I think it got some good shape.
We've got that big spring or greased up good,
you would have the bearings cleaned up and lubricated.
And now it's just a matter
of putting all this back together.
So if we wanna make sure to get rid of our pivot cup squeak,
well, we're just gonna take some paraffin wax
and just put some, you don't have to over-complicate this
just put some little shavings in there
and that's probably plenty just like so
and then we're gonna take our...
And by the way,
I've also heard people say that a good way
to loosen up bushings and may get even more play
out of bushings is to apply lithium grease to them.
I'm not going to do that
but that's just kind of an interesting tip that I've heard.
So everything's gonna go back on here like so,
and there we go.
There is a properly maintained Meraki.
We've got it cleaned.
We've got it lubricated up
and we've made sure there's nothing broken in there
and that's it.
That's how you maintain a YOW Meraki
and stop it from squeaking.