Leaderboard

The whole curve thing has always confused me.

Sharpened these blades last night. Worst I've seen so far. These were apparently done on a DupliSkate machine at a local Canadian Tire store. I don't blame the machine, obviously there must be some adjustments on it the kids who operate it aren't familiar with or just don't care about. Here's what they looked like when I got them. I also learned that the Sparx is compatible with Disney skates. Ground breaking... colins

Hello MSH’ers, We, the Sparx Hockey Team, just got back from MN and the Lets Play Hockey Expo. Minnesota certainly deserves their “The State of Hockey” title. 21,609 in attendance for a High School hockey game – truly unbelievable! We were blown away by the hospitality and kindness received from the Minnesotans we spoke with on our trip. I wanted to reiterate our company’s mission. We are hockey players and parents, just like goblue9280 (we couldn’t have said it better ourselves), looking for ways to save our precious free time and also give ourselves and our players improved gear to enable us to perform better on the ice. A huge thanks to Zylos45 for pushing us over the Kickstarter goal! Here are answers to some of the questions raised in the previous posts: shoeshine boy asked about the finishing pass – our system has a consistent pressure between the Grinding Ring (what we call the grinding wheel) and the skate blade. We set this pressure at a level such that each pass has consistent material removal and the surface finish is always at the quality level of a finishing pass. We found this was the best solution as it keeps every pass consistent at every point on the blade. This also guarantees that the blade material stays cool (doesn’t alter the microstructure of the steel as temperature is kept low) during the sharpening. Mojo122 asked about the Sparx machine being engineered to prevent a blade from being banana’d over time. The consistent pressure described above also ensures the profile (rocker) is also never modified by our system. Benson asked about the ROH and how it works over the life of the wheel. Our Grinding Ring is a steel alloy that is precision CNC turned to be exactly the ROH that is specified. The Grinding Ring is then plated with an abrasive (a synthetic diamond-like material called cubic boron nitride). The abrasive is what contacts the skate blade and also protects the precision machined steel substrate from being altered during sharpening. Since the abrasive is a coating on the ring, there is no dressing of the grinding surface and the ROH put on the blade is exact at every point on the blade and every skate that is sharpened. This consistency is a major advantage of using the abrasive plating. Traditional sharpening machines are only as precise as the person who is operating them. Mojo122 commented on the flat bottom version of the ROH. We are looking into this and will likely make flat bottom versions of our ROH cuts. Just as a bit of history on the patents here, Redmond et al has a patent on the flat bottom geometry that expired approximately 15 years ago http://www.google.com/patents/US4392658 mc88 asked about dual radius – Sparx will sharpen any rocker and not alter its shape. We currently have 19 different ROH Grinding Rings planned from 3/8” to 1.5” at 1/16” increments. If anyone skates on something else please let us know (besides the flat bottoms as discussed above). Is anyone out there on a flat cut? mc88 mentioned Sharks Ice. I know it well. I lived in the Bay Area for 8 years and spent hundreds of hours at Sharks Ice when I played for Stanford University. Valco was another place I played at for years and I never had any luck finding sharpening nearby. Don’t be surprised if Sparx Hockey winds up having a Bay Area satellite office in a couple years ;) TBR asked for a video with the machine in action. There are a number of Instagram and vine videos circulating around now. Burrs are still removed manually. Grinding Rings cannot be redressed and replacements are available from us online when they wear out. Cost for the wheel and other details available on the Kickstarter page (see the FAQ section). Iceman8310 asked about cagone. The Sparx machine is the result of years of research and development. We looked at what works well in existing products and what needed to be improved upon. The customers will judge for themselves, but I’d encourage you to check out our Kickstarter page to see the testimonials from some pretty sophisticated users who have gotten a chance to try Sparx out for themselves. We have tested our machine with hundreds of people and many of our investors are former collegiate and pro players that would not have backed us without believing we could provide pro quality sharpenings. Stewie mentioned that he saw some ways that our machine is different than others. You are correct Stewie. Without spilling all of the beans, our product has a few major differences. The first is the Grinding Ring design. One of our most significant observations when researching and prototyping was that the smaller we made the grinding wheel, the more true it ran and the better the surface finish was on the skate blade. There is some science behind this (rotational inertia) that I’ll skip, but we have by far the smallest grinding wheel of any sharpener. We also use a spindle construction which is similar to the way a precision CNC machine is built. Our grinding ring is mounted on a shaft which is supported by a separate bearing stack (a “spindle”) and not directly on the motor arbor. This insures that the Sparx Grinding Ring’s accuracy is defined by our spindle components and not the tolerances of the motor and its internal bearings, etc. Another major difference is our skate clamp. Our skate clamp (patent pending) is a self-centering design. There are some neat innovations in our design which ensure that all of the slop needed for the clamp to move is taken out of the clamp mechanism when it tightens up against a blade. Another major difference is the integrated dust handling system. We saw, time and again, that people purchased home sharpeners for thousands of dollars and then used them without purchasing the dust handling equipment needed for safe operation. Sparx has an integrated dust handling system complete with a HEPA filter at the exhaust. This allows the system to operate in any room of the house without blowing skate steel dust everywhere (we also eliminated the grinding wheel dust as our wheel doesn’t get dressed). Another major difference are the safety covers over the skate entry slot. These insure that foreign objects can’t touch any moving parts while the system is running. There is also a limit switch on the door to ensure it stays closed and the motors have current monitors on them to detect and stop the machine if a stall condition is sensed during operation. All of these differences (and more) were designed into Sparx to make sure that our machine operates safely and with consistent performance. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks to all of the MSH’ers for their support. Cheers, Russ