Hi all,
Has anyone ever heard of Gold Seal blades bending? I took my friends skates with Gold Seals to be sharpened today and the sharpening guy said he had a hard time because the blades were bent! I have heard of blades of all types bending and breaking but usually with an unusual movement or high level skater. My friend is around a bronze/pre bronze skater. They told me that Gold Seals are more prone to this? He also blamed her skating technique for the bend.

I now have Pattern 99's but in my early years of skating I had a more beginner blade that broke off right at the heal!

Anyone with experience with Gold S's bending? My friend thought maybe because she gained a significant amount of weight?

Depends what the sharpener means by bent........Most blades will torque a bit with the pounding of jumps and spins and often sharpeners will eyeball them to see if they are true or straight - and if not, just lay them flat on the edge of the table and apply a bit of pressure to straighten them back out.

We used one sharpener who consistently said all blades were crooked, and needed to be remounted with a leather wedge under the plate or fixed some how, especially if he didn't mount or sharpen them originally. We switched to someone who sanded the sole level and mounted the blades properly....

That said - a couple of my students have had problems with jumps until their blades were 'straightened' out at the next sharpening.....Gerschwillers, Ultima, Pattern 99, and Gold Seal -- all have been 'bent' or twisted' by the heavy pounding of double and triple jumps.

Perhaps these gold seals were not mounted securely to the boots, which resulted in the twisting. The skaters that I had the problem with were not heavy skaters -- just really hard on their boots (destroyed Harlick Finalists in less than a month once!)-

I once bought a new pair of boots and reused an old pair of Patt 99 blades. When I had the money, I bought a new pair of Gold Seals. The guy who mounted them reused the same holes from the Patt 99's, which torqued the blade - you could see the bend.

The man who remounted them used a straightedge with clamps to straighten the blade while he attached them properly.

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Not with gold seals, but when my (fortunately cheap) MK21 blades bent, the skateshop guy blamed an incorrect mounting.
He tried straightening them with clamps like Isk8nyc's did, but that didn't solve the problem for very long as the blades were still in place, so I got different blades with holes in different locations. Of course mine were 40 euro blades, not 400...

Interesting... The sharpener guy also said that all the screws were loose too. Maybe that's what helped them bend. As Virtual said 'maybe they were not mounted securely'. But my friend defintely does not do double and triples, barely singles. But the loose mount sounds logical.

And I don't really know what he meant by 'bent'.

Thanks guys.

I guess you can have sideways bending - make the middle length of the blade stick out to one side - or longitudinal twist - so the plane of the front of the blade wasn't the same of the back.

From what I understand, if you don't have uniform pressure all over the mounting plates, e.g., if the left or front side of a plate has more pressure than the right or back, that creates a torque that twists the mount, and the blade with them. I guess if one plate has more pressure on it than the other, that might slowly do it too. An extreme case would be if you put shims between the plate and the boot that left gaps.

I'm not all that certain how to tell if there is uniform pressure all over the plates, or how much variation you need to create a problem.

I guess in theory if you skated exclusively on your forward inside edges, or some other specific place, that could create a bending torque on the blade too. Many hockey skaters do that, with thinner blades - I wonder if they have problems.

In addition, if you have to force the blade into position to put the screw hole where you want it, that exerts a lot of torque. If the person mounting the plates was in a hurry, that could have happened. (Ideally you would move the other screws a little to relieve the torque; not a trivial matter because you have to fill the holes first, and/or use new ones.)

How did the sharpeners straighten the blades? Did they grind them to be straight, or do they bend them back? With what?

Or did they just change the mount to force the blade back into shape (in which case they probably had to overcompensate, and the blades will eventually bend the other way)?

One expert bootfitter/sharpener told me that every few years, one lot of MK blades would all come in twisted, and he would send them back. He also said once in a while a bad apple came that way anyway. (He happened to prefer Jackson Ultima blades.) Good fitters check for this all the time. Another told me that could happen if the maker had just bought a new machine to make them on, and it wasn't calibrated yet.

Maybe we should all work in a pro shop for a while so we would understand these things and be able to improve our own skates. I've been thinking about that; I'd want to find someone to sort of "apprentice" myself to who knew what they were doing.

In my case, if you turned the skate upside-down with the heel towards you and looked down the length of the blade, you could see the front part of the blade bend inward. BTW the bending had progressed very slowly until I started to jump, from there on it had gone very fast. I expect the added stress on the blade made the process faster.
It also made it essentially impossible to spin and doing a spiral on the blade which had bent most produced a sort of "dragging" sensation, almost scraping along the entire length of the blade like you'd expect on a T or Hockey stop.
To bend the blades back, the skateshop guy simply pressed the blade between two absolutely flat, solid metal blocks which he then pressed together by tightening a screw. He said he did it all the time, though not usually with figure skates, but that especially factory-mounted skates were known to have that problem.

wow. I hope my blades don't bend.

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Giaz.
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