A fun pipedream - making our own skate blades

[Query]

Some of the best skate techs reshape the blade the way they think it should be, custom, for the customer. It is possible that the amount of reshaping some of them do is as great as the original difference between many of the factory shapes. That takes a fair amount of expertise, knowledge and practice, as well as the right tools.

I once tried to reshape a pair of Ultima Dance blades (more specifically, Matrix I runners) to be like MK Dance, which I loved, but which are priced rather high. Since my hand sharpener would have been impractical to make such a major change, and I didn't have a powered bench tool, I tried to do it with a standard bench grinder, and had a pro shop put the hollow back in. I failed - some of the subtle shape issues are fairly small - on the order of a few thousandths of an inch or less. Plus, I wasn't up to milling a thinline grind, and there was no way to make that large a toe pick change, because the Ultima dance toe pick shape has metal missing in the places that MK has metal, and those two things are probably at least as important as rocker curvature and tail length. AFAIK, the shape of MK Dance blades is too different from any of the other blades to be easily imitated. I ended up discarding the result, wasting the $110 cost of those runners - which are no longer easily available.

What would be nice is if we could adapt one of those CAG guided re-profiling machines that the hockey crowd is so enamored of, to make our own custom blades, or match a desired measured blade shape. Some of the new CAG machines say they work with figure skate blades, but I don't know if they would do the job. I doubt they handle toe picks, and we would really need to start with blanks, rather than other blades, if we could get them, so we could add in the toe pick shape and placement we wanted.

Does anyone know anything about the new CAG machines, or about buying skate blade blanks? One person told me many of the blanks that some major blade makers use came from a single German steel factory, but I don't know which factory or company.

Alternately, are there affordable metal-crafting CNC tools we could get our hands on, with an error of no more than a few thousandths of an inch (MK says their laser cutters are accurate to .004 inch), that can handle blade-thickness metal? I'm guessing the laser and water cutting tools that have the power to cut metal that thick are all very expensive (I've heard around $100,000 and up), and hard to get your hands on.

I've looked into modifying the available high quality hand sharpening tools that impose a uniform hollow radii, like Pro-Filer or the old Bergman tools, by adding a very coarse sharpening cylinder, but haven't gotten far enough yet, and am not sure how fast that could be.

[Bill_S]

I'm guessing the laser and water cutting tools that have the power to cut metal that thick are all very expensive (I've heard around $100,000 and up), and hard to get your hands on.

I've been around laser cutters that cut steel into raw shapes for saw blades. A place that I used to work for did some of the setup work for Peerless Saw in Columbus Ohio. I wasn't involved with the details, but I went to photograph the machine in action for a brochure. This is back in the mid-80s...



Please note that this isn't the real color of the machine. I had colored gels over the strobe heads to add pizzaz to an otherwise drab scene.

I have other photos showing the entire laser cutting area and control center, but not at my fingertips right now. I'll look for them.

At 1/8" thickness, a common 10" tablesaw blade is a little thinner than skate blades, but Peerless was also making larger saw bodies for sawmills, etc. I'm sure that their machine could make the blanks for skate blades, but the question is, would they?

This equipment was very expensive back then.

[Bill_S]

I went to the Peerless Saw website, and found that they do custom part cutting using their laser...

http://www.peerlesssaw.com/laser-cut-parts/

"...We offer laser cutting services in our 8670  Saw Blade Alloy steel as well as carbon steels such as C1008, C1010, 4140, & A36.  We also offer cutting of 304 & 316 Stainless Steel as well.  If you need a simple mild steel part cut and shipped to you we can help. "

"If you need a precision made, hardened, flat and surface ground part we are the company for you.  Our factory is designed specifically to manufacture hardened & flat steel parts."

Nice!

[Bill_S]

I found some negatives from the visit at Peerless and scanned them. This might give you an idea of the scope of a manufacturing in a similar workflow to skate blade making. There are differences of course, but the cutting, heat treating, and grinding are very similar. Brazing too. A saw blade often has multiple carbide teeth brazed onto the saw body, but I'm not sure that Peerless did/does the brazing part of the manufacturing. I don't remember.

Another view of the laser cutting stations where steel plate is cut to near final shape...



A look at a stack of freshly laser-cut saw bodies and some of the stock from which they were cut. The little curly-cues cut into some blades are to reduce blade ringing when being used.



In the photo above, I can see laser-cut seats where the carbide teeth will be brazed onto the saw bodies. These seats will need to be ground flat before brazing.

A view of the grinding room after after heat treatment.

[Query]

Great!

Those are probably more complicated shapes than the runners of skate blades!

I don't have a clear idea whether any of those saw blades are as thick as figure skates.

I should contact them and ask them whether they could cut figure skating blades, and ask to what level of precision, and what the costs would be.

[Bill_S]

Most home workshop 10" table saws  handle standard kerf blades - 1/8". That's thicker than dance blades - at least the part that contacts the ice.

Give the diameter of some of those saw bodies shown in one of the photos, I'm sure that they can cut thicker material. I'm presuming that skate blade thickness (0.150 - 0.160") is something that they could do easily.

They have their own steel alloy for saw blades - http://www.peerlesssaw.com/technology/ If you contact them, you can ask about what alloy or material they might suggest. Aside from high temperature resistance, I would assume that many of the required alloy properties are similar (hard on the edge, tough not brittle, impact resistance, ability to braze, etc.). You'd have to find a method for preventing corrosion (plating, stainless alloy), which is something they don't have to deal with making saws.

I'd bet the tooling price for making blades would be breathtaking though. It won't be reasonable for one person to have just a few pairs made.

You'd have better luck finding an existing blade that's already close, then finding someone with a sharpener that can use templates to modify rocker shapes. That's not common equipment, but I assume something can be designed readily enough to do that. If I purchased a power sharpener, I'd want to look into retrofitting it with some sort of template capability.