b-sharp

“Wear your guards”…

Coaches and skate sharpeners will tell you “wear your guards” while walking back and forth to the dressing room. Make sure to take them off when you’re traveling to and from the arena. Your skate blades will rust like this if you leave them on!

Gold Seal Revolution Blade Mounting.

Mounting Gold Seal Revolutions on any pair of skates is a tedious process. Gold Seals are a side honed(not flat sided) blade. They also vary in width between their front and rear stanchions(the upright bits) from 4mm to 3mm in the middle, back to 3.5mm. Think of them kind of like a pop bottle in shape. With the Revolution variants, carbon fibre toe and heel plates introduce movement where these plates are connected to the steel blade runners are by roll pins. Getting them aligned properly takes patience, a steady hand and a ruler.

Once mounted to the skate, the connection locations for the carbon plates creates a dampening effect to reduce vibration upon landing. This is why you see so many high level skaters, like Olympians, wearing the blades.

Joe makes it look easy, because he has had lots of experience installing these. Installing these on Aura Skates, now owned by the same company as Wilson blades, also speeds up the process. The “A” on the toe of the sole is the centre of the boot, so finding centre is very easy on these skates in particular. In this case, these blades are being back mounted by 5mm to place the rocker under the ball of the skaters foot to ensure proper balance for a 3A takeoff.

Worlds Best and most technical blades, meets worlds easiest to work on skate👌

If at first you don’t succeed….don’t work on actual clients skates. Find demo skates to practice on. Please.

Unfortunately in cases like this, we cannot add steel back to blades. We can fix the rocker curvature the best we can, and then square the sharpening. It only takes one sharpening to go from being skateable to needing to replace blades. This is another PSA that figure skates probably need to be going to a specialized shop.

*this is not the device we use for working on skates. It is a visual guide for showing the work we do.