marka

Howdy, My son got to play an exhibition game at Quicken Loans arena yesterday. :-) He plays goalie and is just starting out despite being "old" at 10. The group he plays with is a local house league and this kinda came up outta the blue. He's been pretty ambivalent about hockey in general, and quit a different house team at the beginning of this past season, then didn't play at all for a few months. He just recently decided he'd like to go up and play with this local more laid back group. Anyway, I figured he wouldn't want to go to the exhibition game and would prefer the more low key approach. His only other 'real' game was a 0-16 or so complete drubbing that really hurt his confidence / enjoyment of the sport, back when he was part of the previous house league. Anyway, he finds out about the game and of course I was totally wrong and he really wants to go. We work out with the house league organizer that he'd go and be the backup goalie, just riding the pine. As the game gets closer, my son is more and more interested in playing, but gets that he's the backup. Anyway, yesterday to our complete surprise the organizer had decided to have both goalies (the other was a fill in from the local Squirt travel team) play! We knew none of this until we see our son skating out to start the 2nd period in net. I was a freaking wreck. The score at that point was 2-1, IIRC. Anyway, over the course of the 2nd period he got scored on 3 times. Two were fairly soft goals, but he didn't have much chance on the 3rd. We also scored some, and the 2nd period ends with the score tied at 4/4. I'm breathing a HUGE sign of relief at this point, because the other goalie is headed back out. :-) My son played ok... I think the best he ever has, but is obviously way behind either our other goalie or the other team's net minder. Still, he positioned himself better than I've seen before and was a little faster to try and cover the puck. Still not going down onto the ice soon enough to try and block shots with his pads, but for sure an incremental improvement over where he's been. Anyway, the other goalie starts the 3rd period and I relax and watch the game since my son is done. He's standing up at the boards, watching what's going on, and more into the game than I'd have ever expected too, which is awesome. Then he's skating out with about 5 minutes left in the game! With 30 seconds left on a penalty kill! What! Turns out the organizer had decided to split the goalie time equally between the two... Score was still 4/4. Game on the line. The kids had played WAY better than I'd expected, plus the other team wasn't as strong as I'd feared. But seeing my son the fairly new goalie, who's had a history of lukewarm interest, headed out to close out the game currently in a 4/4 tie... Damn. Nervous does not begin to describe it. :-) Anyway, the kids are playing well and they're controlling the puck pretty well. But then here comes the break away and my son the newb is the only thing between the puck and the net. He positions himself reasonably well and there's a good shot and wham! the puck goes off his mask and back behind the net. Save! I think he had another poke check save as well in there. Game ends, tied 4/4. My son had fun and is (rightfully) proud of how he did and his improvements. There's plenty for him to improve on, but this was his best performance on the ice ever. And I didn't have a heart attack. :-) Mark

Howdy, Cool. I just wasn't sure you were aware this was a NOS item that whoever the ebay seller is apparently purchased as part of a lot, vs. something they were producing now. [Edit: That's an assumption, of course... But after I won the auction for one of them (for $6) plus a few others (unrelated) I offered to pay another $6 for the other identical modsquad jersey he had listed that got no bids if he'd ship it for free in the package. Instead, he threw it in for literally nothing. It didn't seem like he was really trying to make money by producing new items, which is why I figured he got them as part of some big package deal.] PM me with whatever the profit is on these and I can paypal you some $$. [edit again: Or let me know if you'd rather do something else. I like the jerseys though. Pens/Bruins colors. :-)] Mark

Howdy, FWIW, maybe not... These apparently came from a closeout / "NOS" supply. My guess is that they were made back then and never sold? Dunno. I paid $12 shipped for both of them... http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=modsquad+hockey+jersey&_in_kw=1&_ex_kw=&_sacat=0&LH_Complete=1&_udlo=&_udhi=&_ftrt=901&_ftrv=1&_sabdlo=&_sabdhi=&_samilow=&_samihi=&_sadis=15&_stpos=44514&_sargn=-1%26saslc%3D1&_salic=1&_sop=12&_dmd=1&_ipg=50 Mark

Howdy, Doing my typical "cruise ebay looking for cheap interesting hockey jerseys" and came across a couple that I bet folks here know the story behind... http://www.ebay.com/itm/MEDIUM-ModSquad-Online-Report-Black-Gold-2-Throwback-Minor-League-Hockey-Jersey-/132118062236?hash=item1ec2d9a49c:g:-SoAAOSwzaJX-URq Mark @JR Boucicaut, what's the scoop on when these were made?

Howdy, Jesus. That's awful. Condolences to all involved there. Mark

Howdy, Last week I passed the "I've changed my work password 100 times" threshold. :-) Mark

Howdy, 7dm2 or the original? Either way, that should be a nice upgrade. :-) What're you you using lens-wise? I've been thinking I should dust off the photo gear and see how I could do. I expect getting exposures right is a challenge with so much white & the fast motion... Mark

Howdy, That's really no better than the other guy that can't let it go. Some people are assholes. Ignore them. Mark (and yeah, sometimes I break my own rule too. :-)

Howdy, WTF. NHL.TV isn't streaming the all star skills competition or game. At least NBC is apparently broadcasting the game, but still... WTF? Mark

Howdy, Yeah, I've done the normal reset your location stuff. Also confirmed that the NHL.tv app worked without the Yonder DNS servers in place. No dice. Only thing I haven't tried is doing it from a PC instead of my xbox one. Mark

Howdy, Grrrr. NHL.TV and Yonder appear to be annoyed with each other. I really wanted to watch some hockey tonight, not play network engineer. :-( Blackouts suck. Mark

Howdy, So, I've been searching a bit and not coming up with many (any?) NHL or other "I play hockey at a high level" people using FBV... Are there some and I'm just not seeing them? Mark

Howdy, So, tried FBV for the first time. I was kicking around between 1/2" and 3/8" ROH, settling on 7/16" for the last while. I went with the 95/75 FBV profile. Fairly impressed! Even with my relative newness to the game, I can feel the difference in glide. My skate doesn't seem as "sticky" on my non-push foot. And at the same time, I seem to have as much or perhaps even a touch more edge grip when turning. Skates don't seem to dig in quite as much when stopping, at least initially, but if I consciously bend my ankle to dig them in more, that seems to work. Been out on them for two games now and the other thing that's interesting is that the edge grip doesn't seem to have changed at all over that time. So far at least, I'm a convert. I've heard that when they get dull its a little more of a "falling off a cliff" kinda thing vs. the gradual dulling I've experienced with standard ROH sharpening. We'll see how that goes. Right now I'm planning on trying to get around 5-ish ice-hours on a set of blades before sharpening, but no real clue if that's aggressive, reasonable, or too conservative. One thing that's interesting is just how flat the blade looks. All the drawings you see online are so exaggerated that I wasn't really prepared for just how completely flat / featureless the edge is, but it makes sense when you think that the last number of 75 is a height difference of only .00075"! :-) Mark

Howdy, Yeah, yesterday when I posted they had both 7/7.5 and 8/8.5, but I see they're out now. I was pretty happy to see them, as I hadn't found normal steel anywhere in the 7/7.5 size. Mark

Howdy, I _think_ this is a pretty good deal for Mako folks? CXN holder w/runner for $30, plus 25% off at HockeyMonkey. http://www.hockeymonkey.com/catalog/product/view/id/140459 Mark

Howdy, My time at the local rink tonight would have made a great advertisement for Sparx. :-) Local rink guy I'm friendly with (and remain so) sharpened my skates but edges were _way_ off. Like, very easily visible to the eye. He didn't see it before he gave them back. Not adversarial and he was kinda embarrassed when I pointed it out. Then he tried to cut them again, without much better results. During this whole process, it was clear that he could do the job when everything worked right, but didn't have enough experience to recognize/fix other problems. He's a nice guy (I'd say "kid", but he's probably in his 30's, so that mostly shows that I'm old I think... :-) and wanted to do the right thing, but just didn't have the experience / knowledge. My guess is that something was wonky with the holder but ?? Anyway, making a long story short, my skates are still up there and the old guy that knows more will cut them tomorrow. On most levels, no harm, no foul. Sure a little steel is gonna be gone that really shouldn't be, but hey whatever. But I'm still wishing I had my own sharpener (absent that whole $900 to buy one thing :-). Mark

Howdy, Anyone used either of these? I wouldn't mind owning an edge height checker, but $100 for a BR100 seems a little silly after having used one at the local rink. Mark

Howdy, Kicked in the head by a student in the classroom? WTH? Mark

Howdy, I don't have the experience lots of you guys do, but I really like the Warrior Pro bag I ended up with after going through a couple cheap used bags. The only thing I'd change on it would be to change the straight zipper through the middle to a "flap" style top opening. Mark

Howdy, Is there a reason the skate clamp can't be wider, if mildly bent blades are a common problem? Mark

Howdy, Re: bent blades, wouldn't a sufficiently stiff clamp fix this, at least in terms of keeping the center of the stone in the center of the blade? My only real experience with this was buying some used skates for my son. The monkey at the Play it Again store "sharpened" them before I talked with him (he wouldn't have had the chance after I talked with him, given that he didn't have any idea what radius of hollow he was using or anything else beyond "my manager sets the machine up every now and then and tells us not to adjust anything". lol!) Anyway, in addition to other issues, the blade was bent a bit and that made the poor sharpening even worse. To fix this, I removed the steel and then basically just played with various shims and pressure on the blade on the bench until it was "more straight" (I would be quite surprised if it were _actually_ straight to the thousandth or whatever). Then I got my local rink guy to sharpen it and it came out looking & skating reasonable. Anyway, through that I learned that at least those blades moved fairly easily. I would assume that most subtle bends could fairly easily be eliminated _during the sharpening process_ by a sufficiently stiff blade clamp. And that should produce good edges, even if when you remove it from the blade clamp the bend comes right back. Somewhat related assumption, my guess is that as long as the edges are consistent, a minor bend in a blade isn't going to be noticeable when you're skating. Curious about your thoughts though! Mark

Howdy, LOL. Don't be. There's every chance that I don't mind the sharpenings I get because I suck enough not to notice any issues.... :-) Seriously, I've had a couple bad sharpenings and yeah that sucked. So I'm a little more careful about who sharpens my stuff and I eyeball it some when I pick it up to look for really bad problems. I also use standard sharpenings vs. FBV or whatever... If I wanted to use FBV / Fire then a Sparx would make more sense for my situation. Mark

Howdy, For me, the Sparx machine seems like a great thing for those who need or want it, but I have to assume there are a hell of a lot of folks like me out there and I'm pretty firmly in the camp of "I'm reasonably happy with most sharpenings I get and I can pay for a hell of a lot of $6 sharpenings before I get to the cost to buy and maintain a Sparx machine". Mark

Howdy, Replacement steel for these... I was bored and looking around online... I don't have a need yet for new steel, but is it available? It seems like the CXN holders/runners are Mako only, and I'm not finding the size 7/7.5 steel anywhere... Should I be looking for this and stocking up, or is it readily available and I'm just not looking in the right places? Mark

Howdy, So, been in these M8's for the last four times out or so... I occasionally seem to be falling back on my heels at times. Anyone know what the radius and pitch (and whatever else) is between the M8's and CCM Ribcors? I'm just curious. I'm sure I'll adapt and its not like its a huge issue, just wondering how much is due to skate differences. Mark