Final review now that I’ve had a chance to skate on them.
The scanning and ordering process was easily, took under 30 minutes.
Production was insanely fast, just 9 days from order to pickup at Pure hockey in Anaheim.
Disappointed in the pickup process. I had watched the videos and read the instructions, and had to correct the LHS employee a few times, and a few things I let go. I don’t want to blame some kid making $14/hour, that’s on true and pure hockey to make sure they have the right process in place if they’re going to sell high-end product. As others noticed, there is a small amount of eyelet damage because he cranked them pretty hard while they were soft. I left the store thinking they weren’t going to work out because the tongue was crushing my feet, forgetting that it was adjustable.
The skate itself?
My one complaint is that it isn’t very deep, when the reason I went custom was specifically because I need an exceptionally deep skate (without it being wide or long). I wanted to be able to put my foot all the way into the skate without having the top of my foot stick out, and these might even be a little shallower than retail supremes.
But because of the moldability and adjustable tongue, the lack of depth isn’t causing any of the major issues I associate with shallow skates. The tongue feels like it is comfortably cupping my feet, not crushing them. I can’t get the laces through the eyelets once they’re on my feet, so I have to make sure they are all threaded then tighten them once my foot is in. I found it pretty difficult to get a grip on the laces for tightening today, which can be easily solved with one of those little metal tightener doohickeys that I have laying around somewhere. I went flopped today but I think next time I will try it tucked just to see if I like it better.
Length and width are absolutely perfect. Once I made a few adjustments, I was able to get that “feels like a firm but comfortable sneaker” fit that other people talked about.
But the ultimate test is how they feel on the ice. The answer: great.
I had a little bit of calf pain because I’m a lazy, upright skater, especially when coasting around between drills on open ice. These skates will fight you if you try to be upright, they want to force you into a hockey stance. I had zero foot pain, which has never happened even in skates I was used to and had broken in.
My old skates were giant boats that were way too wide for me, but they were the only skates I could wear that didn’t crush my feet from above. Left is old, right is new:
https://imgur.com/a/F0kENmj
This caused a lot of problems with edges and losing energy with each stride.
Skating on them for the first time, I could immediately feel my edges better and push them way harder. I could carve my c-cuts better and stop more forcefully.
I was getting more energy transfer through my foot, which made me noticeably faster going end to end and coming out of crossovers.
I felt like I could glide forever without losing speed, but that’s probably the higher quality steel and the shallower cut that I read most people recommend for these skates (I went from 1/2 to 5/8).
I still might adjust some things to try to get an even better fit. I wanna rebake them at home this weekend, with an ankle wrap, to see if i can’t get the heel lock from good to great. But that’s just tweaking.
All in all, I got what I wanted out of the purchase and would recommend.