Why did patch skating necessitate special boots and blades?

My patch boots are actually the same make/model as my freestyle boots - I just had patch blades mounted on an old pair of boots. I don't jump in them, so the fact that they're somewhat broken down isn't a problem, and in fact helps me bend my ankle more. The second pair of boots is necessary simply because the blades are different. Maybe some people use a different style of boot for patch, but I think it's always been fairly common to mount patch blades on old freestyle boots. At least my coach says she always did this.

The blades have a different rocker and hollow, and much smaller toepicks than my freestyle blades. It helps with clean edging and forces me to place my weight correctly. If I get too far forward towards the toes, I'll fall. I'm pretty new at this, so I wear wrist guards when I'm in my patch skates. Going backwards is still pretty much an adventure!

Yep, in my experience you would put figure blades on free skating boots that were getting broken down and no longer suitable for jumping. That way you got extra life out of the boots. Not many people where I skated in the
'80s bothered to get figure blades, we weren't particularly high level, so I can't comment on the difference.

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Katz

Saved by Synchro!
I was over it, now I'm into it again !

Back in the day, they also reused old freestyle blades. A skilled sharpener could switch the blades to the very-flat radius of hollow (ROH) used in School Figures. They would also grind off the lower toepick.

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My patch blades (Comet Test) have toepicks, but they don't extend below the almost-non-existent rocker, so you can't push from them. The ROH is about 1.5" vs 7/8" for my FS blades. So you can skid very easily in them. The end result is that to skate in them you have to really be on the edge, you can't fake it as you can (or at least I can) in FS blades.

The upside is that they run very smooth and true and you feel like you can go a long, long way on one push.

Like the other posters mine are mounted on old FS boots.

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Gordon Zaft
http://sk8rboi.blogspot.com
School figures are skating's equivalent of the Latin Mass.

Thanks for satisfying my curiosity, everyone!

I only did figures for a very short time (less than a year) before they did away with them, and we just had freestyle blades with the bottom toepick ground down. They were my old pair from when I was still in junior club.

I actually wore the same boots/blades for synchro (still called precision wayyyy back then), they ground down our bottom toepick so we weren't noisy when we skated....this was before we started just wearing dance blades (and eventually they started making synchro blades).

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2010-2011 goals:
Pass Junior MIF test
Don't break anything