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flip12

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Everything posted by flip12

  1. He does go tongue under. If you search him on GettyImages and sort by oldest first you’ll see he was lacing loosely to the top until partway into his rookie season in the NHL and then started skipping the top eyelets. He continued with that setup for a while before adding the shot blockers. My guess is it was the best way to add protection to an otherwise prone area, since he had a few inches of ankle protected only by the skates’ tongues, while avoiding adding too much bulk, since mobility has always been one of his key assets. Speculating further, maybe he lets the top of the shot blocker flap out to avoid messing with his forward flex. I’ve tried a lot of different tongues in my skates and have surprisingly found that tongue stiffness is one of the most important factors to how a skate feels and responds. My preference is for the softest tongue possible if the boot has any stiffness at all. My Graf 701s have minimal stiffness, so they pair better with a stiffer 703 tongue.
  2. I was just thinking that. I've been good at hunting Grafs from Germany, and some of the guys on my club want to try something other than Bauer or CCM. One wanted me to watch out for a pair for him. Now True's got a great skate for beer leaguers whose partners might balk at a summer vacation invested in a new pair of skates and I'll recommend TF7s instead of ancient Grafs for him in particular. This is considerably more palatable in every way.
  3. Good question. He says it's for the stock skate and not the custom skate. He's holding and demoing with the TF9 shell in that sequence, so it doesn't seem like the fibreglass/composite difference comes into it. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CCofN_xDATP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Question about how to bake starts at 25:27.
  4. New bake protocol is 5-6 mins. total (you could flip at 2.5-3 minutes). SVH discussed it in the Instagram Live from last week. I’m super excited about my next skates. They’ll either be 7s or 9s but the TF line for price and features is insane. I’ve been skating in MLX boots and needed some time to figure out the ankle function that felt most natural, but they’re awesome in fit, performance, and protection and they’re also just built on a stock foot form.
  5. Stitched in. Don’t know.
  6. It looked like Bure left the middle loose intentionally once he was in Vapors. Other creasers I've discovered don't seem to do it to the same extreme Bure did. Those others include Marleau, and Kovalchuk. Once you look far enough back, all skates were creased, pretty much. I'm not sure if it's just hold outs from those days that still like a boot that has a lot of forward flex and a lot of lateral stiffness or if it's something we'll continue to see in the future. I suspect it'll die out with the future generations.
  7. If you don't want to risk damaging the shin maybe a shoe shop could do the trim for you? It would probably be trivial to do well with the machinery and skills they have. I'd imagine they could gently remove the bottom bumper strip and resew it for you to make the right-volume-but-too-long pad tailored to your height.
  8. I heard Chinese manufacturing contracts tend to be handled annually, so you get slotted in and have your production done according to when it fits in at the plant. That sounds in line with Bauer’s comment that everything for this year’s retail stock is in North American storage.
  9. Indeed! I just thought Eichel was a Kool-Aid case.
  10. I noticed that too. Thought he was in all Bauer everything.
  11. I’d like to try it. Perhaps it could also serve as a good alternative to traditional cloth tape for top hand grip, though I know there are already other alternatives for that use.
  12. Then again, he’s one of the best puckhandlers ever, so there’s a chance he’d be kernelyttere aware of that 20-30 grams and us mortals might not even suspect any difference. I’m purely speculating though. I’m not sure what all the pros use, but I have noticed anecdotally that some players have said they preferred heavier sticks themselves, including Gretzky, Heatley, Kovalev, Datsyuk, and Holmstrom. I’ll grant that a heavy stick is a heavy stick, but what is the threshold for a heavy stick? I would put it somewhere above 600 and maybe even 700g (not familiar with junior stick weights, that’s a different category). My >500g sticks I’d call hefty, but not heavy. On the ice, I don’t notice their weight.
  13. I’m happy with a 500g stick, or even more, if the balance is right. I have a Kovalev used stick (not certified or anything but with a grip type he used and his tape job) that I’ll have to weigh again. I think it’s 550-570g but perfectly balanced, it’s insane. The 425g RibCor PMT2 I have feels like straw, I think because the shaft is so light the blade is incredibly inert against the puck.
  14. All the Graf’s I’ve tried (701, 703, 705, G35 tech-mesh) were clearly built to allow ample flex in the ankle. Haven’t tried 9035.
  15. Good point. I think I overlooked that one because it was the shell under the surface that had the notches. It was still that idea though.
  16. Yeah. It was also tried in the 80's and 90's by CCM, Graf, and Micron...Mission and later Alkali featured it as well. That seemed to be what he wanted: 80's pattern cuts with 00's and 10's materials.
  17. I've been wondering for a while now if anyone has tried to get their new skates to crease when baking them or breaking them in from new. The reason I ask is I've always preferred a boot that has that give in the ankle, and I've noticed some pros who've continued to use skates with such extreme creasing that it seems as if it was an intentionally formed feature of their boots. Kovalchuk's the best current example (see below), but I've also noticed it on Grabovsky's, P. Bure's, Kucherov's, and Cogliano's skates.
  18. Or maybe a chunky two-tone glove like the old Flaks. Or shiny silver gloves. The aftermarket demand for those would be insane. So would the durability, I’m guessing.
  19. Looking less like Kings and more like Harlequins. Not that it's a terrible look. I like it better than these for instance: I kinda wish they'd just bring back the Burger Kings...
  20. It’s strange to see a hole there just as max height blades are catching on. It could lead to some strange bounces and maybe even trick shots. I’m surprised that form is legal for a blade.
  21. I’ve only ever tried 9’, 10’, and 11’. My favorite by far is the 11’. It still feels nice and rounded, but meshes much more naturally with my skating mechanics. I’ve learned to overcome that tipping over feeling on 9’, but on both that and 10’, I feel like I’m skating with a parachute on, always slowing down. With the 11’ I feel like I can isolate enough blade to make confident turns whether they’re tight or with speed. Crucially, I feel much more fluid from stride to stride, within that dragging, braking feeling always nagging me.
  22. @Phil8, how has the transition been going from inline to ice? Did you get your blades profiled? I wish I had known about profiling when I switched from inline to ice when I was 13. A lot of my initial struggles were due to trying to adapt to a setup that was very different from what I had been skating on for years. Looking back, buying a boot with a very different skating philosophy and not flattening the 9' profile to something longer kept me in the fish-out-of-water phase for a long time.
  23. Also, Marner doesn’t skip the top eyelet, so the inductive argument has no legs in this case.
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