Post
by Andy Bittner » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:16 pm
I have a vintage set of 4, I bought sometime back in the late 70's. Unfortunately, the brutally heavy, but very smoth surfaced, ice storm we'd had the winter before, the one that actually coated the hills in our neighborhood with an ice rink-quality surface (on which we downhill raced regular figure skates) and inclined me to want the blades in the first place, has yet to repeat itself. On flat, the blades turned out to be mostly unusable (or, at least, not very fun), and I learned an esoteric little lesson (for those who don't ice skate) about skate blades. An ice skate blade actually has two edges, one on each corner of the width of the blade, with a little concave (side-to-side) pocket between them, running the length of the blade. An ice skating blade that comes to just one point does nothing but gouge progressively deeper into the ice. Unfortunately, the person who created and marketed the ones I have didn't know that. They are single-edged. So, foot pushing was pointless. There was no way to push hard enough to get even enough momentum for the board to keep moving while you put your second foot back on the board. It was... push, push, push and then try not to fall on your nose as the board ground to a halt. The only way to get them going a little was to run across the ice and do a skateboard long jump-style jump onto the board, and then start pumping, hard. Once going, it would pump for a little bit, and, fortunately for me, I was raised playing the shoe-wearing ice sport, curling, and am very comfortable running on ice. Then, after all of that, I could pump the board maybe 50' before it was just taking waaaay to much effort and dug in. So, if you buy blades for your skateboard, make sure you get ones that have a blade like a real ice skate blade.