gosinger

The upper part looks like a Marsblade chassis upper part, maybe a prototype / DIY construction?

Better make sure you know what you are doing, you don't want to blast paint chips into your eyes upon impact. So make sure you are using a suitable paint and not just the first white spray you see on the counter.

Still on VH skates, but I had both my copper rivets on the tendon guards fail and replaced them with t-nuts. Never pushed on the tendon guard and keep them at the rink rather than tossing them in a bag or something.

Just to make sure, you are talking about something like Epoxy putty, right?

Thanks for the follow-up, I'll definitely check out Ko, Pure if there is time. Both will be amazing compared to any LHS here, but of course pro-stock would be a plus. I'll be staying in Downtown, 3 blocks from PPG Paint Arena. Over here some rinks offer rental equipment (from single player who drop-in to whole locker rooms for company events), so as long as you bring your own skates you should be fine to pop in for a quick shinny - naively I was assuming this was a standard offering everywhere 🙂

Hi, I've got a business trip to Pittsburgh (PA) Mid-August, and decided to add a week of vacation in Downtown. Since it is early pre-season prep-time currently, I'd love the opportunity to get a few ice-times (3-4) in and maybe get some nice pro-stock gear while I'm there. So I am looking for: Rinks with Pickup hockey / Stick & Puck and Gear rental (traveling from Europe, can't bring full gear bag on company flight) Shops with a decent selection of gear (preferably pro-stock stuff hard to get in Europe) Maybe someone is familiar with the area and can help me out? Any hints are greatly appreciated.

So the chip looks to be from a skate blade, if someone steps on a stick with a bit of force it will always leave a mark. Will be interesting to see what Pure says.

A lighter boot and different tongue would be great - I can't fit mine (granted, second hand) with the default tongue. And the "other cool feature" of the holder might be a pitch adjustment system or similar, something people without access to a blade profiler would appreciate 🙂 So this has convinced me, I'll wait with ordering my own True skate until the new one is in production.

@IPv6Freely very interesting girdle, could you maybe share your thoughts after a little use on how it compares to e.g. the One95/T1/NXG/MX3/... or the Project?

@Vet88 if you ever get the time to snap some pics of your process and prints it would be greatly appreciated - for the visual learners among us 🙂

This one always cracks me up, I just paid 23 € (Link) for the version with the sock attachment, prices in Europe range from 20-40€ depending on the seller. Fantastic cup, I don't get why Rbk wouldn't sell in in the states...

Then again, emotions can run high (especially when losing), and in the heat of that moment it is easy to chew out someone else about something minuscule (that you wouldn't usually care about) when you are unhappy with your own performance. So I'd stay on the side of "these things happen" and wouldn't give it much thought anymore, and just assume the other person won't as-well.

Our local rink banned the usage of a specific type of cheap European puck, as they shattered way more glass than any other. So while the dimensions and weight might all be more or less the same (meaning within the specs), the quality of materials used / manufacturing / composition can still be different between manufacturers, which results in different behavior (chipping, brittleness, ...) at different temperatures.

Anyone spotted those eyelets (TSE2EW washers, TSE2* eylets) in Europe? I've only been able to find the 711* type washers and eyelets over here 😕

I'd also greatly appreciate the Coaches Corner proposed by @stick9, however with a focus on coaches helping coaches. Exchange of practice plans, drills, team psych, etc - without stepping on anyones toes obviously (i.e. no re-posting of content by some other (paid) website). Also nice would be a "ask members about their gear" feature, so that people could select their gear and you could send a question to everyone that rocks/owns that type of gear for some informed feedback. Obviously some technical issues here (inventory lists vs free text, tags, etc), but might be nice.

Tbh this thread is starting to sound like feeding the trolls... Simply all be decent human beings, acknowledge that wherever humans are working there are going to be honest mistakes rather than malice, and work directly with those humans in question to address. In this specific case, lets have smu receive his new skates, see what he can work out with Rob directly, have a summary and go from there.

It is certainly possible to remove the holder, fill the holes with epoxy and re-drill them slightly offset, so this can be fixed. The question now is if it is necessary, if they are only slightly crooked and it is more a mental thing than anything else (meaning they are mounted straight and once in-game you don't notice it), I'd say keep em as they are. I recently moved from Make 2 (2 seasons) to Vapor 1x (1 season) to a second-hand VH skate that just happens to fit me decently, and I love them so much my next pair will be my own custom True skate. Take the "horror stories" with a grain of salt, very few (if any) people reported on issues with the fit so severe as the current case but that one spans the last few pages of the discussion.

It might be a kinda stupid question, but are there significant differences in construction between the VH player skates with shotblockers and the VH goalie skates other than the missing tendon guard? (obviously the goalie skates have cowlings and this leather loop in the back) Reason for asking, I might be able to score some cheap VH goalie skates regionally and remembered that some goalies removed the tendon guard from the Mako and used them as goalie skates, so maybe it would work the other way round as-well if one adds their own tendon guard?

Very much looking forward to seeing how this holds up, might be worth buying for some repairs as-well 🙂

Just check your local classifieds, ask at your local pro-shop (one of ours sells used skates from the pro team), ebay, for the US also stuff like sideline-swap, etc.

Sorry, I know nothing about the XX, before my time. However, rather than modifying the toe cap I'd look into stretching the boot, the XX might be old enough to be stretched successfully. I doubt it is worth it though, just flip em and get a pair of used ice skates that fit to convert (I recently picked up two pairs of APX and an 1X for ~60€ each).

I am a big proponent of sticking with skates that fit, so I'm mainly gonna talk about Bauer Vapor in your case. So the material your XXXX had was Tech-Mesh, which was on the top model until the x:60. Then it was available on the second-tier (x7.0) to the APX which already featured Curve composite. The completely different cut Nexus had Tech Mesh on the top skate for a little longer, but also made the switch to Curve. If you take a look at the Bauer Roller skates, you can see that they essentially added more wear guards / bumpers to their ice skates to make the suitable for outdoor play. Last season I took some Kydex (thermoformable plastic sheet), heated it up and glued it to the high wear areas of my APX skates - it held up nicely (especially in area where the toe-cap and the boot meet) and will most likely extend the life of the boot by quite a bit. Others on this forum have added multiple layers of 2 component epoxy as "bumpers" to the same area for wear protection. However, I only covered the regular high wear areas, so if I was to take a high speed spill / slide the boot might come into contact with asphalt in other areas as-well. If you are concerned about something like this (rather than usual wear and tear), you might consider covering the entire side of the boot with Kydex (kind of like a shotblocker would be mounted) or b) switching to a different boot.

On a side note, I was at the Las Vegas Center Ice hockey shop a few weeks ago, they had a stack of Mako II and a few Mako I available, sizes <= 8 and >= 9.5 iirc. Might be worth a call if someone is still searching.

Looking very much forward to this sub-forum :) About me: While working full time, in my off-time I am co-coaching our clubs beginners practices (40 ppl between 16 and 60), host a few small training sessions before shinny most weeks, and have recently started working with our local girls hockey team. I currently hold the lowest certification level of our national hockey body, but am looking forward to spend the time next year to progress to the next level. I looking forward to exchanging drills and experiences on running practices.

Sweet looking! Very nice setup.