Most of the bits have arrived for my custom roller skates!

I've got some DC shoes, Sunlite plates and soft Radar wheels.

Not-pictured - a sheet of aluminium to make the insoles from.

I need to grab some bearing spacers before I can build up the wheels.
I'll probably get some better bearings too because the cheap ones I got from a local skate shop don't spin very well.

Using spare toe-stops from my parts bin for now.

Cutting the insoles and fitting the plates at the hackspace tomorrow.

My main concerns at this stage are:

The shoes fit me and are not oversized. Over sizing is recommended for custom Vans skates to allow for the metal insole. Concerned they might be a bit snug! But, they're soft shoes so I reckon they'll be fine.

The plates are 2 sizes smaller than Sunlite recommends for this size shoe. Made this choice because the wheel base of these seems correct for my feet, but idk what I'm doing honestly.

I managed to cut two alumninium insoles last night, and sand one of them to fit in the shoe.

The hackspace's bandsaw was out of action ( for stupid hackspace reasons that are not "its broken" ) so I ended up using a jigsaw that was worse than the one I have at home, just because I'd gone to the hackspace so goddamn I was gonna hack.

Being able to use the variety of bench sanding tools was, however, very useful.

I might eventually re-cut the insole I did do because it is rather shorter in length than it needs to be.

On account of figuring out how best to get it to slide into the shoe *after* I'd been trimming material off. I reckon I could trim less off and still get it to slide in - resulting in slightly stronger shoe and an easier time fitting the skate plate.

But maybe I'll just see how I go and cut a new insole if the need arises.