Vet88

Is the sizing still the same as the TF7/9 models?

You really notice it if you stick the boot into a traditional skate holder for a sharpen (the one that holds the boot sideways). The boot will sag alarmingly. This is one of the problems with a vertical holder like Sparx have, you don't see the sag anymore so issues with the blade in the holder can easily be missed.

The cobra holder was notorious for the plastic deforming under the head of the bolt that holds the blade in place. The bolt loosens a fraction, the blade becomes slightly loose and now the blade can move in the holder and open it up ergo your situation. I used to shim the bolt with copper washes that just fit into the hole but once the channel that holds the blade has opened up there is little you can do. I did hear of people heating the channel up (with the blade installed) and clamping the channel. I don't know any long term results of this method. You could try a teflon tape trick on each side of the blade (Bauer edge holder fix) to see if that will help. I haven't had my hands on a cobra holder for ages.

This raises an interesting point. In many countries there are now laws that protect consumers, in mine a manufacture has to make a product that is fit for purpose, durable (and yes, the cost of the product is part of this equation - the more it costs the longer it is expected to last) and that they must carry spare parts for the expected life of the product in the market. A manufacturer's warranty is no longer worth the piece of paper it is written on, what counts is a "reasonable expected life span" of the product. Puck strikes are part of the game and if it had happened here within a 2 to 3 year period of owning the skates I'd suspect that someone would be dragging Bauer's ass (or their agent, the shop) in front of the tribunal on at least 2 breaches of our law (and I can think of another 2 beyond durability and spare parts). disclaimer - I'm a litigious pita bush lawyer that has spent many many hours helping people out with cases against manufacturers / agents and their supposed warranties, marketing bs and disclosures.

Ask @PBH, he has as AS2001 (mine is on its way but taking a while due to current supply chain issues). If your steel is really low and the sharpening is flattening the middle I'd suspect the contact point / grinding wheel height setting and they aren't adjusting it when they put your skate into the machine?

This is also a problem with Hyperlites except they make it worse with a ridge there. I know of 2 attempts to raise the end of a toe cap that had success. One guy I know with Hyperlites got a potato (of all things) wrapped in plastic and wedged it into the toe cap. It took about a week but he got enough relief to stop the pinching. I'm not happy with this method because if you jam too much pressure into the top of the toe cap I believe you risk separating the toe cap from the sole. With my Hyperlites I used an Irwin bar clamp to clamp the toe cap / tongue area, the middle of the inside clamp presses the toe cap upwards whilst the end of the outside clamp presses down onto the middle of the toe cap and holds the toe cap in place relative to the sole. With a gentle application of heat, the end of the toe cap bends upwards as you tighten the clamp, it only has to move a small distance to get relief. The downside of this method is you have to bend the tongue right over to get the clamp on the toe cap and the clamp presses down onto the tongue. I didn't do any damage to that shitty (imho) Hyperlite tongue but I don't know how it would go with a tongue in another skate. Can post a pic of the clamp on a boot if you want to see how I set it up.

If you want to see how much your pronation is actually affecting you as you skate there is a simple test. Go for a skate with your laces undone, slip your boots on and make sure the laces can't touch the ice and then do some easy laps around the rink. Try some turns and crossovers, try accelerating from a standing V start, if you think you can do it try some front to back transitions. If you find yourself wobbling and unstable and or your calf muscles starting to scream at you after a few minutes, you are not neutrally aligned over the skate blade. If you find your foot collapsing inwards at all, this is pronation at work. If you find the whole experience meh with no collapsing feet, ie hardly any change to skating laced up, then congrats - you have good neutral alignment over the skate blade.

My apologies, I have reread your initial post and thought you mentioned arch pain but it was blisters. PBH covered this with a slipping foot. I can't see how punching the arch out will give you much more volume unless you are having pain at the top of the foot around the 5 / 6 / 7 eyelets down area. If you are looking for more volume in the skate to relieve the top 3 eyelets area (where most lace bite occurs) then I don't think an arch punch is going to help.

Fix your pronation, this is the issue. Your medial ankle pain and poor durability were caused by the foot rotating (pronating) in the boot every time you put weight on it. Read this post, do the drill, change the way you skate forever. Ask away if you have any other questions about pronation. As to the FT4's, either punch the arch flat or put in an insole that has the arch cut out of it, this will raise the foot over the arch shape in the boot and hopefully give you some relief (you also need to get your foot stable and not slipping in the boot).

I was told that the 3D scan is the start and then the fitter can make custom specifications such as "AA heel size" or whatever your heel size is. Whether or not you pay extra for this or how you access this option (as it becomes a pro fit specification) at a retail level I don't know, I would have to go back to the Bauer employee I was talking to. At the end of the day if you pay for a custom fit from the scan of your foot and the heel is too wide then you should be asking for the skate to be remade to your specs. But what I'd also consider is if you aren't getting consistency in your skating from one day to the next then don't look at the skate, look for the source of the issue which is your bio mechanics. I've gone thru this (and over the years tried every top end skate around in the mistaken attempt to fix the issue) and I've worked with dozens of skaters over the last 6 months who initially blamed their skates but after working on their ankles and alignments, all have come to the realization that it isn't the skate.

It's the amount of force you needed to flex the boot forward thru the 3rd to 5th down eyelet area. Think of it as a wedge that runs from these eyelets to the bottom of the heel, this zone would flex differently to the rest of the boot so you got better forward bend in the boot. They came in 75 flex and 85 flex (if memory serves me right), the 75 flex is the slightly softer skate. This isn't related to the stiffness of the sidewalls of the boot, just the forward flex. If I am wrong please jump in and correct me, this is all from memory as I never pulled the trigger on these as the foot shape was wrong for me.

At 6'6" he is a big lad but wtf, that is a sad looking holder...

I would suspect that lighter, thinner materials need more support, they got to save that weight somewhere to get skates under 700g (with steel). The NT3000 and NT5000 holders were beasts (other than the stupid screw support for the steel).

For turning right, this is an alignment issue. You can't put any pressure into the right skate because your alignment is off, you can't maintain any balance on it so your body transfers your weight to your left foot. Take a vid of yourself doing the turn, go thru it frame by frame, look at the blade alignment in relation to the leg, this will tell you what is happening under your foot. If you supinate off ice, you will supinate in skates. You know this because you "feel my big toe and arch curling in". You won't fix this on ice, you have to fix it off ice. I go back to the reason I posted this thread, do the exercise to straighten the heel (you are rolling the ankle inwards), keep it locked in this position (it will help to flatten the forefoot and strengthen the peroneal tendon as it turns into an isometric exercise). Try it for 2 weeks then go for a skate, it costs you nothing, not even time, you just have to remember to do the exercise during your waking hours (and it may help to address the next point). As to the pain in the bottom of the middle of the foot, you may have really flat feet and any arch shape in the sole can cause some discomfort. Add the slightly forward pitch of a skate and you curling your big toe / arch as you skate and this is putting a lot of pressure on your plantar fascia. This could all stem from your supination in the skate but you could try eliminating any arch shape, take an old sole and cut the arch out of it and put this in the skate, you are trying to make the foot bed as flat as poossible. As radical an idea as this sounds, go for a skate with your laces undone. Just slow easy pushes around the rink. Anyone can do this, you just have to be careful and slow. Instead of your foot getting forced into an unnatural shape in the boot, this allows your foot to sit and articulate more naturally in the boot. If you don't get any pain in the bottom of the foot then I would be looking at trying to change the shape of the footbed and or boot, for example a lift in the front tower to eliminate some of the forward pitch. Generally there is never a "this is it" answer, you have to try different things to identify the problem and then different things to find a fix. Again, I'd start at your supination first, by improving this you may then improve the pain in the foot.

Both. Neutral alignment should be the baseline, this is what we need to learn to skate from, our alignment / balance would be correct and we use our body position and leg angle to get the drive or edge we need. As you advance in skills and have complete control of the edge and any movement of the ankle then minor degrees of inversion / eversion could be used to improve the bite of the edge. I go back to the design of the boot as it is today, they are trying to lock the ankle in place which assists in keeping the skate / leg combination in a straight line and shifting the control of the skate to the biggest muscles in the leg. We want the ankle to be able to flex forward and back, just not side to side in uncontrolled motions. Depending on what figures you want to believe, 80% of the population pronate. Putting your feet into skates doesn't change that, your foot still wants to pronate and this impacts on our skating. In my 15+ years of doing learn to skates, I reckon the perfect neutrally aligned skater is around 1 in a 1000 and I can teach them more things in just 1 hour than I can teach a pronating skater in an entire term / year.

Whilst the comment from GSwift is correct for a medical diagnosis, there are a number of things you can check yourself. If you look at your skates, does your tongue tend to turn outwards as you skate? This is a classic sign that you are pronating in the skate. For the purpose of initially determining if a skater pronates / supinates we have looked at a skater's stance in a static weight bearing position, knees slightly bent, not moving. This is akin to your glide position. If you pronate / spinate in this weight bearing static position then our data shows you will pronate / supinate in skates, be it in a glide or stride. Now this isn't all bad, after enough training and / or with good boot support, most people can learn to glide in a neutral-ish position. And if gliding was all we did then I'd end this discussion, it's when you get on an edge and or increase the forces thru the leg (eg in a turn) that all the problems come back. Without training, the ankle just cannot stop itself from moving in the direction it always has. For identifying pronation / supination, I do not favour the wet foot test, for example I have seen many examples of flat footed people who don't pronate. The direction of the achillies tendon and or the tibia are the indicators we use, the bones and tendons of the foot and lower limb don't lie. This vid does a simple analysis of pronation / supination from the rear by using the direction of the achillies tendon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWaQLlpJEyU This vid does a simple analysis for pronation from the front by following the line of the tibia into the ankle joint. Note at the end when he explains it should line up towards the first and second toe. Guess where the blade is aligned under your foot? Skate manufacturers have it under the 2nd toe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMd7ivUU-LI This one shows pronation / supination from the front, back and side of the foot and leg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qo4XQDGS7k Another good example of pronation / supination, slightly longer, from the front only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UwZPz0C_zg Whilst this one gives a much deeper explanation of the different terms and states used to describe pronation / supination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qguVWxPB9bg Whilst this doesn't cover pronation / supination, it is a very easy to understand 8 minute video that shows the anatomy of the foot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROd1Acma64o

Pronation affects your balance over the top of the skate blade. When you pronate whilst weight bearing, your balance is shifting over the skate blade. It is very hard for the ankle to stop this weight bearing inward flexion once it starts, now it is only the boot that is holding you upright. Catch an edge, you roll over. Transition an edge, you fall off it. Your ankle and boot can't support the forces been driven thru the leg, you start to lose your balance and you have to put the other foot down (or not even get it off the ice). Drum roll here for super stiff form fitting ankle hugging boots, yes they help but it doesn't eliminate the pronation. Your foot is still trying to pronate, this is what it has done all it's life (and the boot breaks down quickly). Try this, undo your laces, stand on the ice with your feet shoulder width apart and the ankles folded inwards, now lift one foot off the ice and try and keep your balance..... For inward bending skates it is obvious (I don't think I need to post any pics showing this), however it's the same problem on outside edges. You still pronate. Below is an example of a skater just entering a spin (spinning to her left). Look at the angle of the leg versus the shape of the ankle and the vertical direction of the boot and blade. She should be on an outside edge, she is trying to be on an outside edge, her brain thinks she is on an outside edge but she is pronating "across" the top of the skate blade so she is actually on an inside edge. The boot and blade should be in line with her leg. Because the boot and blade alignment is off from her leg alignment, as the forces thru the leg change in the spin (weight and direction) she can't maintain her balance in the spin. https://imgur.com/gallery/0hIckX7 Inside edges or outside edges, this is what pronation does, it throws you off the center of the blade. And I haven't mentioned anything about the health risk it is to the body.

They feel locked in, it's what you have got used to over time because your feet don't have anything else to compare them with. Put your foot into new skates and you will feel the difference. Did you ever have an injury on that ankle such as a bad sprain? This could be the cause of your supination to try and get on a deep edge, you might now hyper extend on the ankle because you don't have the strength and control when trying to balance on the edge. Ironically I just posted a thread about pronation, and the one off ice exercise you need to do. I hope it helps.

I pronate and have been measured as a severe pronator on both feet (20 and 23 degrees). In addition to this my right ankle has suffered multiple critical sprains during my life and has never worked properly since my teens. For those of you that have read my many posts on the subject, I support lace free skating - to teach you how to skate and to counter pronation. On the former, it definitely does this, you can't hide from poor technique. On the latter, it does work, to a degree..... It works for balance, it works for straight line skating, it works for mild edges. But after 3 years or so of training lace free I still find that when I get deep on an edge with lots of power I pronate. My reasoning for this is 2 fold - 1: You just can't spend enough time in this position to retrain your muscles. Maybe after 20 years of training you might get there, I don't have that time. Or if you spent all day every day in skates but that is just not practical. In addition to this, training lace free is hard. It comes with a lot of downtime as you retrain and often is considered just too hard to do for most skaters. 2: As soon as you take your skates off you go back to pronating, the muscles just do what they have done for most of your life and follow the path of least resistance. PRONATION IS YOUR NUMBER ONE ENEMY IN LEARNING TO SKATE!!! So it was back to the drawing board. I'm not going to include the theory, last year's 15 skater pre trial study, the 100% improvement success stories (see end for 2 stories) or the 120 skater study we are going to do this year. What I will state is this: The calcaneous (heel) bone is the most important bone in the body in relation to ice skating. It is the largest bone in the foot and it is the one that takes the most weight. Now here is the important bit - the angle of the heel bone in relation to the lower limb determines the angle of the boot and blade in relation to the lower limb. This is why manufacturers make ultra stiff form fit hugging skates, to help straighten and hold the heel bone and ankle in place in relation to the lower limb. The downside to this approach (unless you can afford these skates whenever you want) is that you are STILL pronating in the skate. Over time the skate will open up, guaranteed. And even with the stiffest best fitting boot, get deep on an edge under power and you will pronate in the boot. So what can you do? The known boot fixes - orthotics (these don't work for pronation) / shimming / holder movement / posting are just band aids on the problem. Whilst they can help for a straight line glide, get on an edge under power and all your pronation problems are still there. The fix is to address the problem outside of the boot and off ice, we need to reshape the heel bone to get it in line with the lower limb and to set it permanently in this position. Others have posted various off ice exercises, the toe scrunch with a towel is popular (see reference in video later on). Myself and 4 of our study group tried this for 6 months, it made no difference. I don't discount the drill, it does help to strengthen the intrinsic muscles at the front of the arch but we found it did not help to straighten the heel bone. However there is one exercise that specifically targets the heel bone and straightens it and the ankle in relation to the lower limb. This exercise you need to do - every. single. minute. of. the. day. The beauty of this exercise is that you can do it every minute of the day, you don't need to set time aside, you just have to remember to make it part of your waking life. Watch this video, it’s the exercise from the 6:10 minute mark (thanks to Sport Injury Physio for this video until we can do our own) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ompYPEHbyM See how at 7:15 she “rotates” the ankle outwards. This is the exercise you need to do every minute of the day. You can do it sitting, standing, driving the car, washing the dishes, cleaning your teeth, eating breakfast / lunch / dinner, at work, anywhere anytime. Every single minute of the day you want to be trying to rotate your ankles outwards to straighten them. Start with sitting, then standing, then balancing on one foot, then balancing on one foot and doing a small squat, then try walking – I would take 3 steps then stop then lock the ankle then walk 3 steps trying to keep it straight then repeat (I now walk the dog for around 1 hour a day practicing this). How do I know when I am rotating the ankle enough? The key is to look at your achillies tendon, the ankle is rotated far enough when the achillies tendon is straight up and down in line with the middle of the lower leg and you can hold it in this position as you weight bear on it. For example if you are slightly bow legged this means the heel needs to supinate slightly to get this line correct yet the forefoot is level on the ground. As you get the heel starting to straighten then focus on the forefoot, concentrate on pushing the ball of the foot into the floor (with toes relaxed). You have to untwist the forefoot AS WELL as straighten the heel (when you first try the ankle straighten, watch the forefoot and big toe, see how it rises as the foot follows the ankle shape). After a while you will find you can activate the ankle roll by pressing the ball of the foot into the ground. Re the other exercises in the video (and other exercises for pronation), they help but the heel straighten is the key one, straighten the heel and the rest will follow. A straight heel in skates means you will balance easily over the skate blade, a pronating foot makes it hard to balance properly over a skate blade. Become obsessed with this, try and do it every minute of every day, make it part of your life and it will change how you skate. If you do try this, let me know how it goes. Then message me in about 2 months time and I will give you other drills to strengthen the arch and keep the mid foot / heel straight whilst under load. However you can't do this drill until you have learnt to straighten the heel and untwist the forefoot. I will give two warning notices with this:- 1: the recommendation from the consulting PT's is to not do any running whilst you are doing this, at least for the first 6 months or so. This is changing your bio dynamics, pronation is a natural foot movement and acts as a shock absorber for the foot. You need to learn how to walk before you can run. 2: Lace bite. When you first start this you will be activating the Tibialis anterior muscle and the Extensor hallucis longus muscle. These are the muscles at the front of the ankle that are involved in lace bite, by rotating the ankle outwards you are activating these muscles. For the first 6 months or so, until this becomes learned muscle memory and these muscles begin to relax, you may get lace bite. I didn't as I don't lace up, 3 skaters from our pre trial control group reported minor pain, they were in low volume boots. Success stories (these are 2 of the 15 skater pre trial study group): 1: 45 yo female figure skater, ex national single figure skating champion. Retired from all skating 4 years ago after falling in competition and breaking 2 bones in her right foot. Her right ankle has never worked properly since the very first day she put on skates, for example she has never been able to properly do a one foot slalom on it. She pronates badly in both feet (<20 degrees), has tried everything to fix it, nothing worked. 3 months after doing this exercise, she can now balance and slalom properly on her right foot. She has removed all modifications to her skates with the blades returned to a center alignment. Her pronation has gone, both on and off ice. She has now entered our 2023 national figure skating competition. 2: 25 year old male figure skater, beginner (started skating 3 months before entering the pre trial study). He pronates badly in both feet (<20 degrees), has tried everything to fix it, nothing worked. At the time of entering the study, he could not skate backwards, he had no balance. He spent 3 weeks off ice doing the exercise. On the day he returned to the ice, within 15 minutes he was able to skate backwards and balance on an outside edge. His pronation on and off ice is still there but greatly reduced (<10 degrees) and we expect his heel to return to neutral alignment within the next 3 months. In summary - do the exercise in the vid, it will fix your pronation. It has completely fixed mine and improved / fixed everyone who has been involved with the study so far. Fix your pronation and take your skating to a new level, I can't say strongly enough how this is a game changer for pronation. I don't know why pronation isn't talked about more, it's like the dirty secret of ice and inline skating, it impacts on EVERYTHING you do in skates. I just wish I had a coach who told me this 40 years ago, if you pronate I hope this helps you.

I've dealt with this for most of my life and helped other skaters with it. I find it generally means your foot is leveraging against the boot and over time this is compressing / wearing / opening up the boot. Now the boot doesn't hold the foot as tight as it used to, this allows the foot to move creating irritation points. New skates generally fix the problem (until it happens again), a rebake sometimes helps, bunga pads / eezyfit booties / home made gel pads or doughnuts are all band aids on the problem. I say band aid because they don't fix the root of the problem, why is your foot leveraging against the boot? Do you pronate?

A lacing pattern that will actually give you more volume

Everything @puckpilotsaid is correct, there is no retail boot that will fit you today. Go for the narrowest heel (fit 1) and then fix the volume with what puckpilot said. Eyelet extenders can be purchased from greatsaves.org. Or if your volume is marginal you could try a lace hack I have used. The 1st version I used is to get a spare lace and then starting from the top eyelet, thread it down one side of the boot, across the bottom and then up the other side and tie it off at the top eyelets. You are creating a loop between each eyelet, now take your normal lace and lace thru the loops, you only get every 2nd eyelet laced but because the lace goes over the facing, the top of the facing is the lowest point of the lace. Issues - it's a lace thru a lace so you get no lock like you would from an eyelet. Another option I have considered is to put a loop in each eyelet, thread the 1st lace thru the eyelet from the inside and then feed it back in again. I will post a pic of the threaded lace idea so you can see what I mean, I have used this for the past few weeks with my fit 1 hyperlites (I have the same foot shape as the OP).

Try a P92 (Bauer) curve, the elevation thru the mid blade and toe might be closer to the Drury you used to use. My reasoning for toe curves is you provide a flatter surface for your passing but the shot slings off the toe for elevation in close. For boots it's not just the stiffness, they are made of different material (the stiffer the boot the more carbon fiber it has in it) and have other upgrades such as the tongue and a comfort edge and the steel. There are pluses and minuses to a Sparx but as long as the operator knows what they are doing, it removes the risk of uneven edges and uneven pressure from the operator (which leads to a ruined profile over time).

This I disagree with. It has the least discomfort because it fits the biggest overall around the foot. This doesn't mean it fits well, in fact it often means it fits very poorly (too big) in a lot of areas but people think that's good when it isn't. Then when you start to use it and the foams begin to compress and your foot starts slopping around in it and you wonder why you brought it.... Personally I start with the laces taken out, if you can fit your foot into the boot like this then everything else can be worked on. You jam your heel into the tightest fitting heel pocket you can find, you can't make a boot smaller but you can widen it, punch it and have the foams settle to give you more room. Try this, take the laces out, pull the tongue out, put the boot on, lift your foot into the air (relax the toes) and shake it about. If it feels like the boot is going to slip off your foot then it is too big. Again, a boot doesn't get smaller but I guarantee it will get bigger over time.

If you do go the DIY punch route, message me. I've simplified the tool I use to do the punch with and it's so much easier and simpler now.