achieve Even Edges
Even edges are crucial to the performance of your skating. If your skates have uneven edges, the “higher” edge will seem way too sharp, while the “lower edge” will seem way too dull. You may have experienced this before or can imagine how difficult it would be to make even simple maneuvers on skates with uneven edges. With Wissota’s 3D Skate Holder and edge checking tools, our machine allows you to easily sharpen to well within .001″ (one thousandths of an inch) of accuracy between your edges. To put that into perspective, the average piece of paper is about .004″ thick. While that might not seem like a lot, any decent skater will easily be able to notice .004″ of error when skating.
Checking for Even Edges
Wissota offers 3 different tools to check for even edges:
Wissota “Basic” Even Edge Checker
Place the center magnet of this tool onto the bottom of your skate blade with the skate still clamped into your skate holder. Now using the flat bottom bracket of the skate holder as a reference, look down the skate blade to see if your even edge checker is level or parallell to the skate holder bracket.
First clamp the backing piece to your skate blade using the clamping magnet. This will be your reference. Now place the magnetic center of the edge checker onto your skate blade directly in-front of your reference piece. Each etched white line in the backing piece represents .001″ of an edge change.
Hollow Depth Indicator (H.D.I)
Clamp the HDI to your skate blade using the black thumb screw. The center gold bar moves the gauge from one edge to another, so push it to one side to start. The numbers are completely arbitrary until you zero them out, so once you push the gold bar to one specific edge, align your gauge to read “0”. Now slide the gold bar to the other edge and look to see what the gauge is reading. Each line represents .001″ of an edge change.
Again, .003″ might seem like a very small amount, however it is very easy to noitice with any edge checking tool (and also by most skaters!).
The skate blade should always be checked in 3 spots (heel, middle, toe) of the blade to ensure evenness throughout.
How to Achieve Even Edges
Even edges are achieved by grinding the whole skate blade on the “crown” (point of highest curvature) of the grinding wheel. In other words, your skate holder must be level, perpendicular (completely “square” or at 90 degrees), and at the correct height where the skate blade is centered on the crown of the wheel. Even edges always comes down to the setup of your skate holder. If the holder is not level, has too much tilt (not square), or the height is too high or low, this is how uneven edges and “bad sharpenings” happen. For more information on setting up your skate holder properly please visit our Machine Setup page.
Questions?
Give us a call during our business hours at (952) 417-6611, or send us an email at sales@wissota.com and we’ll get back to you ASAP.
