flip12

That would be perfect with my usual skittles look, each piece a different color.

I saw one person's custom measurements, and if I saw correctly, there are two for volume: around the instep and around the widest part of the forefoot.

Yes, I think Mako and Vapor both have 9' radius. Isn't Bauer doing something with 10' now too? I just found that with my Cobra holders and Graf's stock steel, which I think is an 11' radius, my skating was much better. I didn't feel I lost quickness on the longer edge and now that I know what radiusing does I'd maybe try something even longer, but with the background in roller hockey first, it makes sense to me why a longer radius can feel much better: we're used to working foot quickness without the help of a smaller arc to swish through stride by stride.

My experience going from roller to ice was the opposite to what you're expecting here. I had Cobra holders, with a long radius (11' I think) and aggressive pitch, and that made going from ice to roller much smoother for me. It's the radius (9' still feels too short for me) that felt strange compared to being on 4 wheels. Now I can't go back to stock Tuuk pitch or radius without noticing a lot of skips in my contact with the ice. You may like the CXN more than you're assuming now.

Good to know, but I kinda figured that would be the case.

That's an interesting point. Cruikshank + Van Horne had a much more notched angle on the top eyelets of the prototype boot shown in various history of the Mako videos. It looks like MLX and VH both have more of that L-shape, like the Vapor...also, are Makos higher cut than VH? IIRC, they don't specify what other skates participants wear in the study, just that they use their normal skates for half of the trial and Makos for the other half.

They actually find that the skaters have less sagittal (front to back) movement in Mako skates. They anticipated to find the opposite, but they suggest that it's due to the better fit and softer boot allowing a more natural foot/body position. They don't really discuss differences in angle due to the holder and runner. It would be interesting to see that normalized.

Me too. I'm happy with Easton's broader lie 5 offerings now, E4 used to be all, but now I can choose from 28, 36, 3...so sweet for me.

It's easy to forget. It's the weirdest feeling to skate on steel that's not fully sharpened into proper edges yet.

How much has the new steel been sharpened? A lot of people had difficulty getting the new Mako steel to hold its first edge, as it seemed to require more priming than other steels. It could just be that effect all over again, as I imagine that's been left untouched.

Mission ice hockey is essentially gone though, much to the sadness and disappointment to the many big fans of their skates--though they did manage to go the wrong direction after the hit of the S series.

My experience is similar--used to skate in an 11 Graf, now I'm down to 10 because I know how skates should fit better, how much the boot will stretch and also my Haglund's deformities are half the thickness they used to be. But I love the stability and quickness I had on that 296 Cobra. I played roller hockey before ice so maybe that's why more steel feels good to me all around, but it does nonetheless. I just have a hard time thinking of geometry as a marketing gimmick, especially when it involves more mass to be carried by the user. Granted, this obsession with light skates has gotten even hotter since the one90, but there were other things one could then call gimmicky about the skate just because Bauer's users didn't support it, the shorter cut boot on the one90 for instance. I would also resist calling that gimmicky, again for geometric reasons and on the basis of my experience.

How do runner lengths compare from holder to holder? I thought I read on here that Cobra holders have longer steel for their base length than Tuuk, etc.

You're right, but at the same time it can allow the strength that is in your legs more room to operate. Personally, that's what I feel like on upsized steel, there's more room so I feel more balanced and I'm much quicker, both in long, full strides as well as in turning, where I can pick a portion of the blade to balance on and convert into a smaller effective radius than I can on shorter, normal length steel.

If you know where to get good profiling done. If you don't, how many multiples of that $15-20 are required to find it?

About the third shot I took with it (where I focused on getting the puck off from the toe and even looked at it to make sure it was there) it was like it was fired out of a gun. But I took me a couple-three weeks to really get a feel for the spot, but that was also only skating once a week and mostly scrimmaging, so not much stick and puck time, etc. Also, I hadn't played in 5 years, so a lot of it was just figuring out the balance of the stick, the length of the shaft for that blade, etc. When you say your accuracy is bad, is it consistently off, or is it completely unpredictable?

It does, I also thought of the Montreal M60. But both of those are more white, less of that nice fade effect Easton has incorporated into the their shaft. I like the look a lot better than those other two.

I was like that when I started playing with a Leino (Kovalev) pro stock, which is a kinkier curve and more rockered on the heel, but very similar in concept. I was trying to shoot from the mid/heel of the blade, instead of the toe. Once I got used to feeling the launch and release from the toe I was able to get really zippy shots low or high. It took me some time to get used to though, so I know what you're going through.

Sweet. Best looking stick Easton's had in a long long time. What's the pattern?

Just the fact of the area of applied pressure being smaller makes its effect more damaging, from a simple physics explanation...essentially, yeah, it's like a battering ram.

Nice Jensen. What's the blade geometry like?

Is it possibly more damaging due to the raised portion concentrating the pressure into a smaller point? Almost acting like a nail, even through that pressure. Plus, I can see that plastic not absorbing as much of the impulse as the softer body of the boot next to it.

Very true. I forget that sometimes

But the same foot doesn't fit the same size skate going from brand to brand or line to line--to me, if it's going to count, those ifs have to be whacked. When you look at the Bauer skates without the extremely light elements like the Supreme tongue or the old vapor tongue, the higher-tech liners, fusion steel, etc., then they're not all that much lighter than the Mako or the RBZ. I'm not disagreeing with your point, Bauer does make the lightest skates, but it's also misleading in my mind because you're comparing apples to swiss cheese then (without addressing those ifs). If Easton made a XLite Mako, with 30% lighter steel, an integrated tendon guard (exploding even), etc., then the gap wouldn't be so big in that direction. Also, a size-8 RBZ doesn't compare with a size-8 Supreme or Vapor, if I'm following what I've read on here. So even just to weigh the sizes out of the box appropriately, it would be better to weigh all of the sizes and plot them per line so you could do a better (more toward a normalized) comparison.

I just took those weights from Hockey Monkey, where they didn't have the Mako II weight when I checked, but what surprises me about the whole weight interest is there is no effort to compare the skates as apples to apples: we should be looking at the boots minus the weight of the steel to nullify the influence of scalloped or alumi-fused steel, and we should also subtract the weights of the holders, since those can be swapped at will as well.