If you've been skating long enough, you've heard this argument. Probably at a skate shop. Probably from someone who was very confident. The "spacers don't matter" camp tends to be loud, and frankly, they're not wrong — but they're not entirely right either.

Here's the thing: both sides of this debate are technically correct. It just depends on what you care about.

The Case Against Caring

Let's start with the dominant street-skating mindset, because it has real logic behind it. Skateboard wheels don't spin fast. Compared to bikes, inline skates, or anything else running on bearings, the speeds are modest. At those speeds, tiny alignment advantages don't translate into anything you'd actually feel under your feet.

Most of what kills a bearing is dirt, water, and impact — not microscopic misalignment from skipping a spacer. Plenty of pros have ridden without spacers their entire careers and never had a bearing-related complaint worth mentioning. That's hard to argue with.

And if you're not cranking your axle nuts down tight — which nobody does, more on that in a second — the bearings aren't getting stressed anyway. So what exactly are spacers solving?

The Mechanical Argument

Now for the engineering side, which is genuinely more correct on paper. Bearings are designed to handle load through their inner and outer races in a specific alignment. When you tighten an axle nut without a spacer in there, you can push the inner races slightly inward, introducing side-load stress the bearing wasn't designed for.

A spacer creates a solid metal column through the center of the wheel — bearing, spacer, bearing — so when you tighten the nut, you're compressing metal against metal rather than squeezing the bearing itself. Less deformation, more consistent spin, potentially longer bearing life. That's the idea, anyway. It's also why something like the Dimebag Hardware spacer pack is worth throwing in your setup — it's the kind of small thing that's easy to overlook until you start thinking about it mechanically.

Here's where it gets interesting though. Most experienced skaters don't ride with their axle nuts snug. You tighten it down, then back it off until there's a bit of side-to-side play. That's just how it's done. Always has been.

But that means the spacer — at rest, wheel spinning in the air — is doing absolutely nothing. It's rattling around loose in there. The "rigid compression column" the engineers describe only exists when force is actually applied to the system: when you land a trick, lean hard into a turn, or put lateral pressure on the wheel. That's when the slack disappears, everything compresses together, and the spacer actually earns its place.

It's also worth noting that skateboard spacers aren't precision-fit components. They wiggle. Wheel cores vary, bearings aren't always perfectly seated, and tolerances are sloppy compared to something like an inline skate setup with a stepped center spacer. The engineering ideal is only partially realized in practice.

So Who's Right?

Use them if you want. Skip them if you don't. The debate never dies because both positions are defensible, and the difference in real-world skating is small enough that nobody can prove the other side wrong from feel alone.

But if you're asking what's slightly more correct from a pure mechanics standpoint? Put the spacers in. They're cheap, they don't hurt anything, and on the rare occasion they're actually working — when you stomp a landing and forces spike through the wheel — they're doing exactly what they were designed to do. If you want to just grab a set and stop thinking about it, the Dimebag Hardware pack has you covered — spacers and washers, all in one, nothing to overthink.

Good mechanical hygiene. Almost zero real cost. That's a pretty easy call.