Skate Guru

Thanks I will have a look at a few of those. Anyone else out there have an idea?

Does anyone know what product Blademaster Slick-It is? For those that have never heard of it, it is a pump spray lubricant for the table top of a skate sharpener. I have heard it is water based stainless steel cleaner, but none of those have any lubricating properties. Anyone know what that stuff is? A brand name or manufacture name? Thanks.

First off, I have no skin in this game. I don't work for a sharpening company and I don't care if anyone buys a sparx or any other sharpener. The reply above is from a salesman trying to sell more sparx machines, not correct inaccuracies. I get it, it's his job to sell more sparx machines. I gave an honest review and I am a professional skate sharpener. The only comment I made that he acknowledged as good was the one they got 10/10 on. Even the 9/10 was an issue, and he added a sales pitch to defend it: The one thing we hear from nearly all of our customers is that they can go from receiving their Sparx sharpener to sharpening a pair of skates in 10-15 minutes without ever having sharpened a skate before in their life. I have a few questions: This amount of accuracy in Grinding Ring movement is really impressive when you consider the alternative which is an iterative trail and error approach to alignment (like you get with traditional manual sharpening equipment). How is traditional sharpening trial and error? How is it any different than sparx? The centering skate clamp of Sparx, which is the exact same clamp design and hardware for both our consumer and pro machines, puts the blade over the center of the grinding wheel every time. How does it do that? The clamp never moves... Why not center the ring under the clamp at the factory and don't provide any adjustments? When dressed to a 1/2" ROH, a bonded wheel holds that ROH accurately for a couple rotations of the wheel hitting the skate steel. Where did you get this information? First, there are NHL teams putting players on the ice in NHL games with Sparx. Which NHL teams? Which NHL players? The first, "I would never let them leave my shop that way" is just totally false. How do you know how I run my business? We have visited dozens and dozens of shops and heard this exact same claim. When we then go and randomly grab a pair of skates from a shop's finished sharpening pile they almost always have some amount of uneven edges. Which shops? Where? When? You can just grab a pair of their sharpened skates? My post was a fair an honest review. This reply seems more like an attack against me personally or anyone with a differing opinion, filled with inaccuracies, and heavy duty on the sales pitch. I am a professional sharpener and an engineer. Buy one, don't buy one, it makes no difference to me. What I can tell you is that for MY pro shop the quality of the sharpening delivered by the sparx commercial unit I tested was poor.

This sounds very familiar to me. Chances are the rail the motor travels along is bent or not installed perfectly straight (ever so slightly).

I am glad your sparx unit is working great. I am sure it fits your needs perfectly. My experience was different. According to sparx each line on their edge checker is .002". They also say that anything within .002" is acceptable and does not require any adjustment. They go on to say that 2 to 3 clicks will move the alignment approximately .001" (2 to 3 and approximately are not good terms for precision work). They also say a bent blade may prevent the sharpener from putting level edges on the blade. You are correct and I was wrong. The spark does have a fine adjustment. My assumption that the guide rail in this machine must have been bent is probably correct. I was comparing the sparx edge checker ($178.63) to the Blademaster BR100 pro square ($99.95). I agree the sparx one is too expensive, but not because the quality is so good. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. For a Blademaster BR100 pro edge checker each line is .001". For a Blademaster SH6000 pro skate holder, each click (front and back) is also .001". It looks like the adjustment is not as fine as sparx, however from my experience the Blademaster adjustments are much more accurate. No pair of skates leaves my shop that is not perfect (>.001"). The sparx unit I tested in my shop could not achieve this.

I did not take any pictures of the unit. Sorry. They show it on their website. By no means am I bashing sparx. This was an honest review. I sharpen over 3000 pairs a year and know my stuff. I have heard some good stuff about the home units. The clamp system is the same as the home unit. The skate stays stationary and the disk moves. I agree with you that once centered blade thickness should not matter. But since this one could not be perfectly centered diffeent blades come out better or worse. This is why I think the motor rail is not straight not the clamp. If the adjustment was free you could perfectly center it. The advantage to a traditional sharpener is that the blade is always 100% square and you adjust the skate to align with blade. Adjustments on skate holders are very fine. The sparx adjustment is not very fine.

Just tested the new Sparx PS100 commercial unit in my pro shop for 3 days. Set up (9/10) - easy to set up right out of the box Adjustment (4/10) - you center the disk to the blade by looking through a 10x magnification window. Problem is that the adjustment is in intervals and not graduated. So you are one click left or right and can not dial it in perfectly. Any experienced sharpener knows that CCM blades are wider than Bauer blades, and you get a different sharpen on sparx with each one, so you have to make adjustments to each skate. Ease of use (10/10) - could train staff to use this thing in 5 min. Very easy and simple to use. Any player over age 10 could handle it safely. Speed (7/10) - I can sharpen a pair of skates faster, and I really take my time to make sure they are perfect. Advantage is you can set it and leave and work on other things. About 7 min a pair with changing the skates out. Quality of equipment (4/10) - it is a heavy-ish unit, however heavy does not mean quality materials and construction. For a commercial piece of equipment, it looks and feels more like a toaster oven. The vacuum (that you must buy or they void your warranty) is a bucket mount POS that you can buy at home depot. They do include a hepa filter that is just a piece of foam (we are sucking up metal - the only thing needed is something that does not allow the metal particles to go in or near the motor). The motor is bigger than the one that comes with the home unit, and they say it is good for 3200 pairs a year. I dont believe that for a second, however I have no evidence or facts to support my statement. The edge checker is crap. The lines are very far apart, and the general construction is not good. The stone is also crap, but not really a big deal for a pro shop as we have plenty of high quality stones. Cost of use (2/10) - they say 3-6 cycles per skate (a cycle is back and forth once) Standard is 4, Probably 10 (max) for a new pair of skates. They say 30 - 50 pairs per disk. $49 US per disk. So if we say 40 is average that is approximately $1.65 Canadian per sharpening. A regular grinding wheel that is dressed A LOT would be 100 pairs for around $21. So around $0.21 Canadian per sharpening. If you leave one head at 1/2" all the time they will do 200 pairs no problem. So on a busy weekend I would be spending over $100 on disks. So doing the math each sharpening costs 8x as much as a traditional sharpener. The other issue is the sparx can not jump around on hollows easily. So if a customer brings in skates with a 3/8” hollow and wants to try 5/8” you have to run the whole 10 passes, or use their cross grinding disks which are $69 US each. This could really add up fast. Quality of sharpening (3/10) – we tested many pairs of skates and had two of them tested on the ice. After much fine tuning and adjusting, we could not get a single pair to come out with level edges at both ends of the skate. Not out by much, but out enough that I would never let them leave my shop that way. Part of the issue is the click adjustment setting, and the other is that I think the rail the motor and disk runs on was not straight. Not out a lot, but enough that skates were not level at both ends. You could get one end level but not the other. Click it one adjustment the other way, and it would do the exact same thing the other way (vice versa). One pair tested on the ice was by a coach and he said they were fine and felt no difference. The other was tested by a Bantam player, and he knew right away that the edges were out. The disk leaves a very heavy burr (compared to a standard sharpening wheel) along the entire edge of both sides of the blade. This can be removed with a course stone with extra passes. With standard sharpening a fine hone works great. The hollow itself does have a little bit of chatter. Probably about the same as traditional sharpening. However, if you make a slower last pass and / or use finishing oil or wax, traditional sharpening has a far superior blade finish. This was a brand new in the box demo unit (we were the first test). Maybe this was a bad one, or maybe this is normal for the sparx. Either way the quality was not good enough for me to actually send a pair back out over the counter to a paying customer. Cost of unit (4/10) – cost of the commercial unit including vacuum, edge checker, pick guard, all 3 blade holders for loose steel, and a 3 pack of stones is $3244 CDN. If you run a busy pro will need all of those things. One scary thing is they do sell a 2 year and 3 year add on warranty? Why do I need that if it is designed for commercial use? Most skate sharpeners in shops are good for 10+ years easy. You get a 5% break on disks after you have purchased your first 30 (big deal). You can get a really nice single head portable for less money than that. Practicality for a pro shop (5/10) – It has some good points and some bad. Good is ease of use and training staff. Bad is quality of sharpening and cost of each sharpening. As a back-up machine to a regular sharpener it might have some value if it produced quality sharpenings. As a stand-alone machine in a pro shop no chance. There are too many variables it can not accommodate for. Bent blades, differing thickness of blades, nicks, gouges, changes in hollows, bent holders, loose blades, etc. For home use on 1 to 5 pairs of skates all at the same hollow it would probably be ok. Hope this help anyone looking at this machine or sparx in general