Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle Hanson.
Hi Kyle, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Well, it all started with this incredible machine called a Onewheel. My friend and business partner AJ Balanza had just gotten one of these speed machines. We were hanging out at our local drinkin’ hole and he was telling me all about it. How it feels like snowboarding all the time. How fast you can go with it. How you can take it off road. OFF ROAD…. that’s crazy. I was hooked. So we went over to his house and I jumped on it, immediately took off on the board and was cruising down road. At this point, I was having a blast, I rode back over to AJ and started attempting little tricks on the board. We were both having a blast. So we wanted to keep that going.
I grew up skateboarding and snowboarding so when I got my first wheel, I was trying all these tricks that neither AJ or I had seen before. AJ is a great photographer and he had an old go pro that he started to film with. That’s how we created Wheel Fun Stuff. We started off with an Instagram account that we were dedicated to posting daily content. Just little clips of the tricks we were figuring out and where we were riding. Local riders that we would run into, group rides we would go on. We just were posting all the fun that these onewheels were bringing us. People really loved it and responded to it.
Since I was coming from a skateboard background we were always trying out new tricks and big drops. Along with that came the beating of the boards. We were constantly just slamming our boards, into the ground, into walls, into our shins, and eventually my board broke. Sad times for us, but we sent it out to get fixed, picked up another board and kept on cruising. Eventually, I was breaking boards quite often and we started fixing the issues we could on our own because we didn’t want to wait while it was sent out.
At this point, we had a good following in the local SD onewheel community and people were coming to us with issues they were having with their board or simple maintenance questions. So we decided to start providing servicing to the community. We started off with simpler things like tire changes, footpad exchanges, grip replacements. Services we knew we weren’t going to mess up. AJ had a small photo studio at the time he was sharing with a good friend of ours Stevie Jay. He is a very talented music producer who slays the piano. This room was pretty small, seven feet by twelve feet. This was where we were doing all our servicing. We were appointment only, so we only had one customer in at a time, plus we didn’t want random people just walking into our little office.
We were doing pretty good in little studio thirteen but we eventually outgrew the space. We had all these random onewheel parts and tools scattered neatly all over the studio. AJ is a master at finding deals and he found this sweet studio office right next to Balboa Park and right up the street from Downtown. So we set up shop and opened the doors to walk-ins, and we got a lot! We were still doing appointments as well as walk-ins. We were open three days of the week. The rest of the time, we were out filming in the awesome playground we had right out our front door.
We eventually outgrew the Studio near Balboa and found an office location in Miramar with a storefront, a workshop, an office and a whole warehouse in the back. We call this spot the Funhouse! Moving to this location has helped us grow immensely. Just being able to have more space for product and more space in the workshop helps us bring in more foot traffic and another mechanic to help out on the servicing. Right now, we have Andrew as our mechanic, he was an aircraft technician before this and loves to onewheel, thankfully he loves to work on onewheels as well. We also have Mathew who we hired to run the front of the shop and he turned out to be an amazing editor and cameraman. We also brought on another partner, NeilsFunStuff brought to you by Neil himself. Neil is the man, he helps us out with any electrical issues we have and most importantly, he builds all our features for us. Slide boxes, spines, pyramids, if you have an idea for a feature he can make it happen! He has also helped in setting up onewheel lessons here at the funhouse, we do group lessons for adult beginners and for the grom beginners. We also provide one on one training lessons for people who want more advanced training or want more direction.
We love to create content here. We do a lot of different videos, all onehweel related of course. We have workshop videos where we talk about disassembly and product installs. We have a lot of fun edits to show off what the onehweels can do with tricks and when mashing offroad. We do a lot of fun random activities here as well like floor is lava with onewheels vs EUC. We really want this sport to progress and we want to have fun along the process.
We’ve built an amazing team here at Wheel Fun Stuff and I can’t wait to see what fun things we cook up in the future!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Onewheels were designed to travel over uneven and bumpy trails so of course it hasn’t always been a smooth road for us, but that’s the joy of onewheeling, we get to fly over that bumpy terrain! When we first started servicing, we had a customer come in for a tire change. He had a newer model board called the Pint. It’s a bit smaller than the regular board the XR. The Pint is infamous for being difficult for tire changes and difficult it was. We were taking out the hub bolts and the wrench snapped off inside the bolt. We tried getting it out and ended up stripping out the bolt. This means that no wrench would fit in there to loosen the bolt. We were stuck and at a loss for what to do. LOL, we ended up going to our local onewheel dealer shop and purchasing a whole entire new Pint. Swapped out the tire on the new Pint, being careful not to strip the wholes, and giving the customer the new Pint. We had told him everything that we went through and he was super understanding and very grateful for the solution. He ended up getting us some rad tools and walked away with a new tire n a new pint. We ended up with a lesson to remember and a Pint with only 6 miles on it that we then named Strip. We still have Strip but we have long since changed the hub screw that we could not get out.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
At Wheel Fun Stuff we mainly service onewheels. We do a lot of repairs and maintenance on them. For example, the tires get worn down and need to be changed out. This can be a bit of a struggle if you haven’t done it before. We’ve done quite a few here so we offer tire changes for riders to get that fresh tire easily swapped on. We offer many other services like bearing changes or grip tape changes. Board diagnoses if there are any weird issues happening. We have a big network across the US that we can reach out to if we have any questions or need some guidance. We also love to create content. We are constantly filming for different projects that we are working on. We have a youtube channel where we are posting weekly videos that include trick riding, trail riding, scenic riding, all kinds of onewheel riding. We are really trying to showcase the amount of fun we are having ourselves on these boards. The community really responds to our videos and the style of riding that we are promoting. We are just doing what brings joy to us and want to share that message with everyone. Do what brings joy to you. If you don’t know what that is, tryout onewheeling!
It’s very uplifting when we go to events and run into other riders who tell us that we inspire their riding and love the way we ride and how we are pushing the sport forward. This puts a smile on our face every time and we’re so grateful that people recognize that we love what we are doing.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Thank you to the readers who took the time to read this article. Come check out our shop in Miramar if you have any questions or are interested in trying one out.
Not sure when this is going out. We are having a fun weekend event planned on March 18th – 20th. We will be doing group rides and hangouts. Wheel Fun Races on Saturday at our local BMX track San Diego BMX. On Sunday, we will be having a trick competition and raffle. It’s going to be a fun time to come kick it and see what onewheeling is all about.
Pricing:
- 1 hr Group Lessons – $25 per person
- 1 hr One on One Lesson – $75
Contact Info:
- Email: wheelfunstuff420@gmail.com
- Website: wheelfunstuff.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wheelfunstuff/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wheelfunstuff
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WheelFunStuff
Image Credits
Pete Santos
