YesLanges

Hopefully, they're just wrong about that. Any chance he'd redo the test after letting you do his normal profile on them?

That doesn't sound too good, but thanks for the update. Maybe I'm lucky they don't seem to have a record of the 2nd set I ordered. Any idea when they're going to be shipping these? The latest update over the summer said end of October. Did you profile his steels to match his regular profile before he tested them? Only asking because his comments would probably be similar if he switched from his custom profile to a stock profile. Nothing you don't know better than I do...just asking.

Welcome. I signed up here exactly 4 years ago, shortly before getting back on the ice for the first time in 24 years at 52. No doubt, the first time was brutal; but it comes back. Just go to sticks & pucks a couple of times a week and you'll be ready to play again in a couple of months. Everything comes back except for the speed and reflexes that you'd have lost anyway just by virtue of aging. If you haven't stayed in shape in the interim, you should just start working out and doing some cardio. That's something I never stopped doing and I know it would have been a lot harder to start playing again if I had. Been playing in a 50+ league, sticks & pucks once or twice a week, and doing clinics whenever I can ever since.

I recommend not responding to a 9-pg thread based only on reading the first post on P.1. The guy has come a very long way and has posted videos of his progress all along.

You might also want to pay attention to whether something in the way you lace and/or tape your skates is different with your pads on. I always had the opposite situation, because of the way I tape my skates around the bottom of my shin pads, which is impossible to duplicate without them. When I was an NNHA (now HNA) instructor, I always wore my shin pads whereas other instructors and coaches almost always just go with skates and gloves. If you normally put your skates on last, try putting them on first, because you might be pulling your laces and tying them with different tension when you already have your gear on.

PuckPilot, I don't mind having this conversation, but you sound a little hostile or worked up about it. I'm not arguing with you or ridiculing you; I just disagree with your conclusions and I believe your analogy doesn't hold up to analysis. This is just a discussion about a topic to me and not meant to offend you. First, some of the best hockey players I've ever known have been pretty scrawny, despite having done hockey drills for most of their lives. Second, if hockey developed muscles, many hockey players would have noticeable builds that corresponded to hockey to the naked eye, exactly the way athletes in sports whose training often does build muscles often do, like gymnastics, wrestling, and swimming. Third, if you could see some of the fossils I play with now, you'd agree that muscle mass is no prerequisite for hockey skills. (Elite players do often have something of a build nowadays, but that's mainly because all elite athletes do much more weight training now than they used to. Pro baseball players all look like NFL corners and safeties now, also; but it's not because playing baseball builds muscle.) Interestingly, skating does seem to build muscles much more often for women than for men, which probably has to do with women, in general, having better natural potential for lower-body development than men. But just because an athletic activity also builds muscles doesn't mean that the muscular development is directly necessary to performance in that activity. The muscular development that some people do get from skating (or tennis) is just a byproduct of the activity. If they stop playing, they lose skill the same way you lose foreign-language skills if you don't use them for a long time; but if they can't skate well the first time they get back on the ice, it's not because they lost muscle mass in their legs. While this is purely anecdotal, I've been lifting weights my entire life and was way too into it in my 20s and 30s and I played hockey until I was 30. I also did some personal training when I was in law school and I managed a couple of different gyms. If anything, playing hockey always interfered with maintaining the best build I (and others) could maintain through weight training. (And to whatever extent you need the hockey cardio to keep your body fat lower, any kind of cardio will do the same for you.) Even now, at 55, playing hockey a few times a week only makes it harder to maintain whatever build I'm managing to maintain. All of this sounding very familiar to me, so I think I've (also) explained before that your experience skating again after losing a lot of muscle to an illness has caused you to overemphasize the importance of muscular development to hockey. Just notice the difference in the way that (many) people who do something very physical for work and the way laypeople climb ladders, move furniture, walk around on I-beams, (or even just tried to load boxes on store shelves without looking like a spaz by comparison). The way the pros do all that shit so smoothly is repetition, exactly as you mentioned, but what that repetition builds is mostly neural connections in your brain and pathways in between your brain and the nerves and muscles involved. If you lose half your muscular bodyweight (or whatever) to illness, you can't really do much of anything you were doing before that happened to you because a certain amount of muscle mass is necessary to function. However, it just doesn't follow logically from that to a conclusion that the primary benefit of those repetitions is that they build muscle tissue.

I thought the same thing when I read PuckPilot's post and I think we've had this discussion before, but I'm not sure. You (PP) might be relying too much on your experience with a unique situation and assuming that it's more applicable than it is more generally. Certainly, if you lose a lot of muscle mass from an illness, you'll have a harder time doing anything that you used to do more easily; but it doesn't necessarily follow from that that strength is the most important component (or even a significant component at all) of that activity. I agree with Vet88 that skating (and soft hands and good shot) are all much more about coordination and technique rather than strength. In my opinion, if you took a test group of developing players and gave 1/3 of them only 4 extra hours of hockey drills per week, 1/3 only 4 extra hours of strength training, and you gave 1/3 of the group 4 hours of each type of training, you'd find that the group with only strength training improved the least (if at all), and that the two groups with the extra hockey drills would have improved significantly, but that there would be little if any difference between the amount of improvement in the two groups that received more hockey training in terms of hockey skills that can be observed and measured. The groups receiving strength training might only be stronger physically against opponents and have more stamina than before.

Before: After: Before: After:

I don't know about those flimsy old Jofa's, but I think the 40-year-old CCM Pro Standard and HT-2s (with some versions of their original padding) are as protective that way as current helmets. I've had my skates pulled out from under me and hit the back of my head on the ice as hard as you can hit your head and I was fine.

One I had from college and the other one I found on ebay. There was another one listed recently that was actually new and unused. If the Link doesn't work, just extract the item # from the url and search for it in "completed auctions." I don't know when they started or stopped making them, but they were standard NCAA issue beginning the first season that cages were required (1979). http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-PRO-TEC-HOCKEY-FACE-GUARD-MASK-CAGE-NEW-NEVER-USED-W-INSTRUCTIONS-/351829256660?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&nma=true&si=beYfJY2JiZvCcCEVlYjDPD7MYzg%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I didn't want to start a new thread for it. Is there anything under the bench area of rinks that has a strong magnetic field? I wear a mechanical watch and I keep my valuables in a bag behind our bench during games. On several occasions, the watch lost about a half hour during the hour or so that it was back there. Ordinarily, the watch is very accurate.

Yeah. There are a few other guys with old CCM HT2s and Cooper SK-2000s. I'm the only one wearing the original CCM Pro Standards with the foam side bumpers...all original, down to the leather chin straps. Naturally, when I ditched the half-shield last year after a few close calls, my choice for cages was a couple of vintage Pro-Tec cat-eyes but without the foam lip pad...just some tape around the bottom bar. I love all that old shit. Practically every time I show up at open hockey, someone asks how much I'd take for one of them.

#7 in green achieving one of hockey's rarest feats in my 50+ league last week: putting myself offside: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7b13qok732g9y6z/video-2015-12-08-21-26-34.mp4?dl=0

While you're waiting from a response from the company, I think I can suggest an explanation for that: The coating sticks much more to the inner surface because that's where most of the blade surface area is. The edges themselves are much narrower and also more directly exposed to friction (especially friction perpendicular to their length, such as from stopping), so it sticks less to edges and it comes off much quicker. Anecdotally, I can attest to the fact that even when you spread it on pretty liberally, it has no effect on how well your edges grab the ice.

I'm kind of surprised that 95/1 works so well for me because I was always 1/2" ROH and anything smaller was too much bite. I thought 100/50 gave me more glide but too little bite. Is there anything with bite comparable to 95/1 but glide closer to 100/50?

In my experience, it doesn't affect your edges at all...just answering in case you don't get a response from SK8TFuel until 2019.

I understand what you're saying, but I think you have to keep in mind that whatever I'm doing to my edges is only the case until the next sharpening because the machine takes off the entire layer that could possibly be affected, although I defer to skate-sharpening experts on this. It seems to me that the worst you can do overusing the stick in that regard is make it more easy to develop nicks, but only until the next sharpening. I started doing it because after a lot of stops, the inside edges don't grip as well on turns and the outside edges start to slip out on cross-unders and I think actually sharpening them after every skate is very much overkill, at least for me (vs. NHL players who sometimes have them sharpened or swapped out in between periods). I don't think I use it as a substitute for sharpening at all, but it does really seem to let me get the longest skating time from each sharpening. If anything, I think I still send them in for sharpening a little sooner than I could. I also play with some guys who use the stick for months in between sharpening and I see them doing 5 or 6 very hard passes in the dressing room before every game, which is what I'd consider a substitute for sharpening. And, in my case, what I consider a harder pass for me is more like "somewhat firm" rather than "light." I've never hit them with a single pass as hard as some of the guys I know who really flick that stick down the blade with a lot of pressure, and quite a few times. All I know is that my "system" takes blades that were feeling a little less grippy than I like the last time I got off the ice and makes them feel really perfect for me and with exactly the grip I need for hard turns the next time I use them. If anything, I'm sort of amazed at how well it works and how great my edges feel when I get back on the ice next time, just from this cheap little device.

I know Chad's not a fan of the Sweet Stick, but I've had no issues with it whatsoever. The honing stone can only smooth out small nicks that extend beyond the sides of the edge, but it can't "restore" the edge itself at all. I understand that on a microscopic level, the V-shape of the Sweet Stick only bends the edge toward the inside, but to the touch of a finger and (definitely) on the ice, it feels like the edges are "restored" to being much sharper. The only issue I've encountered is increasing (my perception of) bite too much with too many passes or too much pressure. In my experience, the Sweet Stick allows me to keep them nice and sharp a lot longer and I've noticed no difference whether they're ROH or FBV. Initially, I was very careful not to use as much pressure as I did with ROH, but after trial (and no error so far), I use the same pressure as I did with ROH. (I cut down to 2 passes recently instead of 3, because 3 left them with a little too much bite stopping, although I appreciated it turning.) The stoning part of my "system" might not be necessary, but my standard home blade prep in between skates is to use the honing stone first to reduce nicks that extend past the edges as much as possible. Then, I do one medium-pressure pass with the Stick from toe to heel, and one more pass increasing the pressure gradually to fairly hard as it moves out from the center of the blade to the heel, because I want more bite for sharp cuts and not as much for stopping. Then, I go back over them with the honing flat stone. I go both directions with the stone on the flat but I'm also careful to go only toward the rounded toes and heels and never inward from the toe and heel because I just don't like the idea of moving it "against" the curve even though it's only on the side of the blades. I only exceed 2 passes with the Sweet Stick to get larger nicks out and I try to hit the rest of the blade as little as necessary to do that. So far, I've never had a big enough nick to ruin the edges, which was surprising to me based on how much more delicate FBV edges are supposed to be than ROH edges. Usually, when I'm done, none of the nicks I could feel with my finger beforehand is still perceptible, with the only exception being the occasional nick that's just too big to keep going back over with the Sweet Stick as many times as would probably be necessary to reduce it further. I finish off with a coating of Sk8-Fuel but I'd appreciate someone explaining why the instructions say to wipe it all off afterwards. I wipe off only the excess, but I don't wipe the bottoms of the blades until right before I put them on; and I've also just left it on.

Just had the chance to play on 95/1 and it really felt great; it allowed me to cut as sharp as I can possibly cut without bottoming out and hitting the edge of my boot on the ice. Meanwhile, no bite issues stopping whereas on a ROH cut, anything that didn't hold me back on turns was way too much bite stopping. Like you, I don't really notice the difference in glide but I'd bet that it would be perceptible in a negative way if we went back to ROH. To me, the main benefit is no longer having to trade the sharpest cuts to avoid catching an edge stopping. As far as adapting to different ice conditions, you may just want to try the Sweet Stick Re-Edger stick for hard ice, because I've noticed that (at least for me) it works just as well on FBV as on ROH and really restores the edge and tremendously extends how long I can go between sharpening. If anything, the trick is learning how many passes is too many and which parts of the blade need more passes or fewer. For me, it's only two full-length passes with only light to moderate pressure and then one heavier pass from the middle of the blade to the back end to hold sharp turns. I know that Chad's explained that it just bends the edges back in, but (again, for me), the feel is that of a sharper edge if I do it right and too much bite if I overdo it. Big fan of that Sweet Stick.

Thanks again, Chad. I was just logging in to edit that before you responded because I meant to ask about 95/1 not 90/1. (I assume you meant 90/1, not 90/a). Why do they use "100" for some cuts and "1" for others if they're equivalent? Because that's very confusing. No-Icing says that 95/1 is the smallest possible increase in bite from 100/50, but how does that change affect glide?

Thanks, Chad. Could I trouble you to explain the difference between 95/75 and 90/1 and why some FBV cuts are in the format of single digits for the second number instead of two digits? (Thanks in advance.)

I cover as much ice as anybody (or more) and am usually the most aggressive forechecker and backchecker, but it's mainly because I'm also a very lazy skater in that I do a lot more looping and circling without the puck to conserve energy than stopping and starting. Google "John Kerry" + "Rink Turns" and that's basically me to a T. Example from my 50+ league here (I'm #7 in orange and the only one in orange socks and the ancient CCM helmet and gloves): www.dropbox.com/s/5forg5lm1yyllbo/video-2015-07-19-18-59-17.mp4?dl=0 I recently switched from a 1/2" ROH to FBV 100/50 and am thinking about going to 90/1 to hold sharper turns if it won't cost me any glide because I'd like to cut sharper than 100/50 allows @ 182 lbs. 8'/13' dual radius (and FBV) from No-Icing.

Is there a noticeable difference in glide between 100/50 and 90/1? (Thanks in advance.)

I'm curious why the instructions say to wipe it off a few minutes after application. Why not just leave it on once it's applied? Thanks in advance for your answer.