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It's all about the guys in the locker room. Win or lose the guys on my team have become my best friends and I look forward to seeing them.

Opinions are like assholes; some are larger than others. I'll take the word of a guy who has fitted 900+ pairs of the things over the word of others, EVERY TIME! The idea that a custom skate should fit perfect right out of the box is scary to me. Whether it's scanning, measurements, whatever, there will ALWAYS be something not quite perfect, and there will be tinkering needed, even just the slightest bit, in order to get it 100%. Maybe YOUR idea of 100% is less than, only because TO YOU, the skates fit you BETTER than your last pair. You might be surprised what can be done at a far less cost than ordering custom skates. With that said, lots of Kool-Aid being consumed here lately; custom skates, Sparks, crazy times!

Okay guys let’s get back on-topic. We don’t need to fill the thread with the basics on how to use the Internet.

Howdy, "Quit" is strong, but "take a vacation" is my recommendation. Burnout is a real thing. From what I've seen, you've been going hard at hockey for quite a while with no breaks. Take a planned "palate cleanser" break for a few months and see how you feel. Maybe that break is from teams you're increasingly ambivalent about playing for, maybe its from playing goal, or maybe its away from hockey altogether. Its hard to take a break from hobbies we use to define ourselves. I've done it a couple times in my life and its helped me be happier. One thing I always struggled with was the "who will I be without that?" factor, as well as the "but if I want to do it again in a few months, I'll have given up a bunch of ground by taking a break". For the first one, when I've taken a break I replaced the activity with something I was freshly excited about or just wanted to try out. For me, that's the easy thing as I've usually had something else out there that looks fun but I haven't had time for. That helps with easing myself out of "I'm a <blah hobby> guy", if the new activity starts taking over for me, but its still a bit of a blocker. It doesn't need to be though... You'll still be a hockey guy even if you don't play for 6 months. For the 2nd one... Adult hockey is something that will be there when you're excited about it again. You're not going to miss your window. 🙂 Take some time off and get back going when you come back. Sure, it may not be with the same team or same friends or whatever else, but there will be a new team and new people. But the big thing is... You don't have to fully commit one way or the other. Schedule yourself a 6 month break or something like that. Feel it out. See what you want to do. Mark

Adjusting the wheel up or down doesn't itself change the force applied by the wheel on the blade. However, that's not the point - the point is, the higher you start up the blade, the more vertical travel the wheel has to make to reach the bottom of the blade, and that puts more load on the spring (shown top center in this pic below). This causes more force (Hooke's law) to be applied to the steel. As you push the wheel down, that spring in the pic extends - the more it's extended, the more force it's applying on the object extending it. So the whole point of the height adjustment is to allow you, for any depth of steel from banana blades to brand new Step, to find the height that allows the wheel to start a small ways up the toe or heel, and still smoothly travel the length of the steel with optimal force applied. If you go up too high, and you have newer LS3/LS4/Step with 10" radius that hasn't been rounded off - you will be applying more than the optimal force on the blade, and you will hear this in pitch changes 2/3/4 times down the length of the steel. In my experience, dropping the wheel another notch or two will reduce the vertical travel of the wheel, and therefore reduce the friction and eliminate the 'skips', resulting in a smoother constant-pitch sharpening pass, with no skip/stop marks on the finished hollow. A perfect finished hollow should look uniformly polished toe to heel all the way with no interruptions when held under the light. Again, in my experience, if you are getting pitch changes and non-uniform looking hollows (from a polish POV), try lowering the wheel and doing a couple more passes and see how it then sounds/looks. It probably makes next to zero difference in performance on-ice, but sharpening blades is one of those things where we all just strive for and crave perfection, isn't it?? 🙂 colins

Finally made my school's hockey team! This school year as a whole has been better for me as well, I've had good grades and made some new friends. Plus I picked up a QX Pro yesterday and I'm really excited to try it out. Hope everyone else is doing well going into the new year. Edit: The QX Pro is awesome! Going up to 75 flex and switching to a new curve (W05) has been really nice. It feels way easier to pick my spot when I'm shooting and passing.