Wrapping the springs

The fibre-glass leaf spring on each boot is the powerhouse for your Powerisers. These springs will probably begin to get nicked as soon as you start to use them as they get knocked and banged. Once the springs get nicked the stands of fibre-glass will begin to splinter and seperate. This will lead to your springs loosing all their bounce and result in them needing to be replaced.

Powerisers normally come with a with some limited form of protection like shrink-wrap or a rubber-like protective coating but this is not really adequate to protect your springs form the kind of knocks that they will get during normal use. It is therefore a good idea to add some kind of additional protection layer.

A basic form of protection is to wrap the springs with some kind of tape such as Hockey stick tape, electrical or insulating tape. It is recomended to apply at least two layers of tape to supply addition protection to the springs. A colourful top layer could be added to personalise your stilts, a good choice of patterns and colours can be found at identi-tape

A method that provides a greater level protection is that of using a bicycle tyre inner tuble as an additional layer. The inner tube protects the spring from nicks by providing a durable rubber covering. This technique requires unbolting the spring from either end in order to slip it on. A word of warning is that the nylon lock nuts that are used to hold the bolts in place a bit of strength every time they are removed , these nuts should be replace before they lose teir effectiveness.

A great alternative to wrapping the spring in tape is to slip a bicycle inner-tube over the spring. The inner-tube provides the spring with a durable rubber covering that will protect it from nicks. The only downside is that you need to unbolt the spring in order to slip it on. The bolts that attach the spring ends to the frame have nylon lock nuts, Which lose their effectiveness once they are removed. You should replace them with new nylon lock nuts when you reassemble the spring.

Article added by: Andy R 23/01/2007