Trips to the pro shop is as regular an occurrence as hitting up the grocery store or rechecking the schedule to make sure you didn’t miss an addition, time change or cancellation. As a still-new-to-this-sport hockey mom, every time I wander into one of my normal skate shops, I come away with at least a few gems of knowledge. In this ongoing series, I’ll share some of the best and worst tidbits I pick up along the way.
Hockey Knowledge Tidbit 1: Skate Sharpening
This is the single most frequent reason for my trips. It seems like once every week or two I am standing around with a pair or two of skates dangling from their laces waiting my turn. Yes, as the quality of the skate improves and by default the quality of the steel, sharpening will become less and less frequent. My kids coach swears he only gets his skates done once maybe twice a year. I’m pretty sure he could also put a chef’s knives to shame with the edges he’s working on. These magical pieces of steel were likely forged in the fires of Mordor and are far beyond the skates I’m dealing with at this point.
What seems a simple process can apparently be screwed up beyond all reason without that much trouble. I had my daughter’s skates sharpened at a skate shop I used out of pure convenience since I was already spending countless hours at that rink. Her next practice was a disaster and her coach questioned the skates. Yes, they just got sharpened but something was clearly amiss.
I take them home and go to the skate shop at a fancy private club close to my house (no, I am not a member – I prefer not selling my kidneys) and the guy takes one look at the blade and his face contorted as if I handed him a dead animal. “What happened to these?” The horror wasn’t waning. “I had them sharpened at X shop, but my daughter had a problem with them.” He rolled his eyes so far back into his head I thought he was about to pull an eyeball exorcist move. “Well that explains it.” I got the diatribe that they didn’t know what they were doing, while nice people, sharpening was not their strong point.
That also explained the coach’s rant to my husband the next day about how badly they messed up the sharpening on his blades and how we shouldn’t go back. That would have been good to know BEFORE this happened. After all, if someone screws up your crazy expensive pieces of steel that are part of your livelihood, you think a standard warning would be a matter of course.
Now we had never had an issue prior to that, but just like a restaurant, one case of food poisoning and you aren’t likely to go back.
“Here, let me show you.” The guy goes into the back and comes back out with something that essentially looked like some renaissance era celestial navigation device and attached it to the bad. “This is suppose to be level…it is not.” In truth it was probably a good 5 to 7 degree slope.
Knowledge point 1 – blade edges are suppose to be level. It never occurred to me that something like that could be an issue. I thought, well if you cut in on one edge more than the other, they won’t be level, but alas I was wrong.
Then I recalled another note the coach gave, “Can you make that a 3/4 cut.” I wasn’t even sure if “cut” was the right word, but he seemed to get my point. Huzzah. “Well this is a solid 1/2 inch, it’s okay, we can fix this mess.” Great, thank you!
I now know that which skate shop you go to, especially for sharpening matters, A LOT.
