Piper Time Wheel, the SSD Review

Luca Caiani
May 26
6 min read

The best ally for your training sessions

If you are searching for a high-performance wheel that can last, the Time wheel, from Piper is probably your best choice.

Piper Time Inline Speed skating Wheel — Piper Time Wheel

The Wheel

The 2023 saw the return of the urethane-chemist expert Neal Piper in the inline speed skating market.

Now Piper Wheels offers a great variety of products, from indoor skating to marathons.

The two most famous products dedicated to track and road racing are the Torch Pro and the Time.

If the former wheel was designed to offer a great grip and rebound that guarantee stability in the tightest corners, the latter feature a different urethane formula and a stiffer hub to promote rolling and handling. You can distinguish the two wheels from the hub color: a deep pink for the Torch Pro and Kelly Green for the Time.

Keep focusing on the hub, its shape is one of the most elaborated you can find in an inline skating wheel. The Piper Helix Racing Hub is a 9-spokes hub. But, compered to other brands that feature a similar turbine-like hub, the Helix Racing hub blades are quite unique in their shape. Each blade itself presents a bend or fold in its middle portion that extends radially for the entire length of the blade. This peculiar design enhances the energy return at the end of the push, something you can definitely feel when skating on any Piper wheel.

Like any high-performance wheel, the Time wheel exploit the Duo Tech process, developed by Piper, to assemble a double-compound polyurethane wheel that offer great grip and good rolling.

Three polyurethane hardness options are available. Proceeding from the softer to the hardest, we have:

Fast
X Fast
XX Fast

For this review we will focus on the XX Fast version of the wheel.

Piper wheels Helix Racing Hub Section — The Helix Racing Hub developed By Piper

Technical Specifications

The 110mm diameter Piper Time features the plastic Helix Racing hub with the following measures:

74mm diameter
24mm width

This setup leads to an 18mm urethane thickness, the thinnest available on the market.

As for any dual-compound wheel, every wheel features an external, harder polyurethane compound and an internal, softer urethane ring. Once cut in half, it is possible to appreciate the wheel section. We categorise the outer urethane profile as TYPE 3 following the SSD shape classification. This shape is characterised by a wide footprint on the ground that favor stability and grip over rolling.

Speed Skating Data Wheel section classification — Type 3 Cross-sectional Section

To offset this reduced rolling, Piper focused on the hub. The factory is able to produce hubs with the same shape but different hardness, with the RX1 being the softest and the RX10 the most rigid.

Piper made extensive tests and tried different hub options. Currently, Time Wheels feature the RX7 option, harder than the RX5 used for the Torch Pro and softer than the RX9 typical of indoor wheels.

Looking at the urethane formula, the declared objective of Piper with the Time wheel was to create a wheel that can last for a lot of kilometres and assist you during your training sessions.

For this reason, they decided to feature this wheel with the Insane-A-Thane, the same as the famous G14 that offers extreme durability while maintaining good grip, rebound and rolling.

The inner red ring has a trapezoidal shape characterised by a light curve of the wide base. Following the trend seen within all high performance wheels produced in the last few years, the inner ring section is relatively big, with the following measures:

A wide 10mm base
A 13mm height
A 7mm upper base with slightly rounded corners

For the XXFast hardness model that we tested, the outer urethane layer has a 88a hardness while the inner urethane layer has a 67a hardness.

The ball bearings housing has a 24mm width. For a smooth setup, the use of 10mm spacers is warranted.

Strengths

When the Piper brand decided to make its comeback to the inline wheels market, they needed to distinguish from the rest of the products.

The Torch Pro wheel, the most performant product of the Piper line was designed to offer the most stable wheel on the market and everything was made in order to achieve this result.

The innovative shape of the Helix Racing hub provides then wheel with incredible flexibility. The shape and the choice to build the hub with a relatively soft material allow the wheel to absorb the vibrations caused by the skating surface roughness, leaving the skater with a sensation of smoothness and confidence in every push. Furthermore, an elastic wheel is able to store the energy of the push during its initial phase and release it at the end of the push. This rebound effect increases skating efficiency.

Much attention has also been paid on the urethane profile shape. Compared to other brands, all the Piper wheels feature a profile urethane shape that is wider near its apex. This peculiarity offers a wider contact surface area to the skater, enhancing grip and stability.

The Time wheel was designed to create a less extreme wheel that can be used by any skater, providing good performance that lasts for long.

The Helix Racing hub, in its green version, features the same turbine shape, but a stiffer material was used for it. The result is a stiffer wheel with less vibration reduction ability and less rebound, but with greater rolling capabilities.

The increased roll was made necessary by the use of the Insane-A-Thane urethane formula for the Time wheel. This formula makes the Time wheel a little less performant wheel than the Torch Pro (featuring the Super G Plus urethane); but this was necessary to pursue the main objective of the Time project. The Insane-A-Thane formula offers, indeed, the great advantage of a reduced wear, compared to other compounds.

The extended life span of the wheel is the greatest strength of the Time wheel, and the feature that makes it your best ally for your training sessions.

Finally, the increased roll can be exploited to offset the weakest point of the Torch Pro wheel, the roll. The mixed Time + Torch Pro wheel setup is one of the favourite setups by long distance specialists with a perfect mix of grip and rolling.

Piper Time Inline speed Skating Wheel Section — Piper Time Wheel Section

Skating Feel

The skating feel is good. The wheel is well built and offers all the confidence needed to push hard and travel the most hazardous trajectories.

Both the grip and the rolling are great, making the wheel a very versatile product.

The rebound is good enough to give you an extra help at the end of every push.

If you are a top sprinter wanting to set a new track record or an endurance beast searching for extreme roll, you can probably find better alternatives, but the wheel is a good compromise between performance and durability.

The skaters more prone to suffer from shin pain will probably find relief in using less rigid options but, at the moment, the Time wheel is a very good wheel also for the management of one of the most common issues in inline speed skating.

Weak Points

The effort in trying to create a wheel that can last for hundreds of kilometres necessarily require a trade-off between durability and performance.

For this reason the Time is a great overall wheel but it is hard to spot it on international-level races. Top-notch sprinters can find more “grippy” options and long distance specialists can opt for wheels with an extra roll.

The price is competitive and availability is not an issue.

Best For

To sum up, the Time wheel is a great all-around product that can be used in any race, from sprint races to marathons (although no 125mm option is currently available) with a good elasticity rebound, grip, and roll; but for international-level races, better option are currently available.

The wheel works well in any track or road circuit, but we believe that the great roll can be best exploited in road circuits or street races with wide corners and long straights.

The best events to try them are: