too much pride!!

[supra]

Any updates, phoenix?


Black looks nice. If I end up getting a pair for myself, I'd prefer the guys' version!

They're not bad looking skates really, even in person. The women's ones do look entirely cheesy, though. Jackson must hate women.

[Query]

Surely you provide a better example for your students by not using something that destroys your feet.

Would black boots on a lady provide a professional appearance? That always looks to me like hand-me downs. But maybe with an all-black outfit, it would look deliberate.

I love the boot cover idea. Or tape them to make them look like figure boots.

Surely some nearby rental counter stocks Softecs (or similar - there are several soft boot brands), so you could try them out cheap. Or maybe it's worth trying all the rental boot types available from your rink, to see if something works until the new boots come.

Hope your new boots are perfect.

[supra]

The problem with insoles, though, is as the OP said, the space issue in the boot. It might not be boot stiffness or softness itself that's the problem. My current pair of boots (not the Edeas I don't have blades for yet,) I couldn't even wear athletic socks in, they were so tight. So if I put 5-6mm thick insole in, no fit. The solution is pretty much just go up the smallest size increment in boots you possibly can, and use insoles in them to make up the size difference. A thicker insole will push the entire foot up in the boot. So a better longterm solution is getting another boot with the insole being in full time.

Also, regarding plantar fasciitis, I have a theory regarding that. It's pretty much caused by bad shoes. I started feeling it myself when I briefly switched to a pair of New Balance running shoes with lots of padding in the heel. It may cushion things, but the problem is, the feet muscles aren't worked the way they're supposed to be, and never move with the shoe really. Since I've been wearing a thinner kinda shoe, ie, a Converse or a Vans, with very thin or no insoles, my feet have felt way better. I have Vivo Barefoots now, which feel awesome, but they're not durable enough shoes, so I'll probably switch back to a pair of $10 Walmart knockoff Vans in the future. So I feel like gel insoles, etc, are a bandaid to the problem. But if you're on the ice more than in your shoes walking or standing, then it's the skates, obviously you can't have a moveable skate, so insoles may be the answer there.

Also, regarding sizing, it could just be your skates don't fit well and you're lacing them super tight and compressing everything to compensate. I know people that have skated for years (not figure, hockey) and their skates were too big for years, even a guy I know that figure skates told me for a number of years he was wearing the wrong size boot. So people complain about the area where the ball of their foot is hurting all the time, because they're lacing super tight to compensate for the skate not fitting. I had this problem in hockey skates. I started size 10 rentals (because my shoe size was 10,) skating like \ on the ice, then got to size 8 in CCM hockey skates. However, after trying on more skates, I should have really been in a size 7 (I tried on the hockey skates just for kicks at a sporting goods store after I got my figure skates.) Once I got figure skates, they were really tight and actually fit reasonably well, so I no longer had to lace super tight for them to be supportive. So no more blistered fingers from lacing skates up, that sorta thing.

[Query]

Supra: Everyone else on this board has already seen me say what I'm about to say (I have a website), so this is just for you.

Did you try taking out the original insoles altogether? Adds space.

Also, adding tape (e.g., "coach tape") underneath an insole (if space is limited, could be something thin, like a piece of paper cut to the same shape as your original insoles) is equivalent to using a thicker insole, and you can chose where you put the tape to balance the pressure on different parts of your feet. Then adjust blade placement for balance, and shim for blade alignment.

This is perfectly normal stuff, done for all shoes, by coaches, PTS and trainers in many sports. With more durable tape (like moleskin), you can change the shape of the sides and top of the shoe (or skate) too. Especially in places skates would otherwise fold in and break down, if they are too big there. Use stiffer materials or soft compressible foam in places you need them. 

With a few minutes work and experimentation you can make super-cheap shoes work as well as well as expensive brands.

But - sigh - I haven't found a practical way to stiffen skates sufficiently to get away with cheap skate boots. E.g., I can't turn Softec skates into "real skates". Full tape wrap around the boot works to some extant - but you have to re-apply it every time you skate. It's also hard to move and shim the blades on cheap riveted skates with plastic bases - I mostly haven't tried.

You CAN stretch leather boots about a half size to a size in spots - the toe box is hardest to stretch. Stretching boots is more work; let an expert boot fitter do it. So I believe it is better to start with skates that are a little bit big than a little too small. Easier to fill space than to create it. But almost everyone disagrees, and says you should start small.

[FigureSpins]

I didn't know that Plantar Fasciitis could be caused by bad shoes, but that does aggravate the injury.  Another term for it is "heel spur syndrome.". Many skaters develop heel spurs, which interfere with the plantar fascia and cause pain and inflammation.  The person then starts to compensate by changing their gait and walking more on their toes.  When shoes start to wear, that makes it even worse.

As a PF sufferer, I needed custom orthotics and several doses of steroids to treat it, along with RICE therapy and stretches.

New Balance walking sneakers were recommended by my sports MD, podiatrist and PT, but not NB running or cross-trainers, though.  It had something to do with the upturned toe.

[supra]

Supra: Everyone else on this board has already seen me say what I'm about to say (I have a website), so this is just for you.

Did you try taking out the original insoles altogether? Adds space.

Also, adding tape (e.g., "coach tape") underneath an insole (if space is limited, could be something thin, like a piece of paper cut to the same shape as your original insoles) is equivalent to using a thicker insole, and you can chose where you put the tape to balance the pressure on different parts of your feet. Then adjust blade placement for balance, and shim for blade alignment.

This is perfectly normal stuff, done for all shoes, by coaches, PTS and trainers in many sports. With more durable tape (like moleskin), you can change the shape of the sides and top of the shoe (or skate) too. Especially in places skates would otherwise fold in and break down, if they are too big there. Use stiffer materials or soft compressible foam in places you need them. 

With a few minutes work and experimentation you can make super-cheap shoes work as well as well as expensive brands.

But - sigh - I haven't found a practical way to stiffen skates sufficiently to get away with cheap skate boots. E.g., I can't turn Softec skates into "real skates". Full tape wrap around the boot works to some extant - but you have to re-apply it every time you skate. It's also hard to move and shim the blades on cheap riveted skates with plastic bases - I mostly haven't tried.

You CAN stretch leather boots about a half size to a size in spots - the toe box is hardest to stretch. Stretching boots is more work; let an expert boot fitter do it. So I believe it is better to start with skates that are a little bit big than a little too small. Easier to fill space than to create it. But almost everyone disagrees, and says you should start small.

Well the stock insole is like 1mm. No real point. Plus now I have Edeas that fit perfectly. My Jacksons are like, Mystiques or something, I don't know, but they have a PVC sole, and the glue started going on that sole very quickly (PVC isn't a naturally sticky material) so in each boot to hold the soles on I have about a dozen or so of my own screws I put in, and some glue marks from when I tried gluing them. They're pretty trashed. As far as their stiffness, I just sorta got used to them. It's gonna be an EXTREME change when I eventually get to skate with my Edeas, especially because they're already the stiffest boot Edea makes and they're extra stiff (custom made for another skater, he sold them to me after 3 months use, so somewhat broke down, but still.) MK Professionals, too, as blades are gonna be quite different from the Jackson MKIV, which I have the old style MKIV with less teeth on the toepick that's less aggressive of a blade. So as far as boot stiffness goes on the Jacksons, my concern is less the leather on the boots and more the sole itself bending because it's PVC, I've had times I've gotten off the ice and was like "huh, I really fell off the second half of this session" and then looked down and the toebox was detaching from the sole "Oh, that's why my waltz jumps got so bad feeling all the sudden." For the sizing, I just solve it by lacing them less tight, I could have gotten them punched, but I didn't trust the adhesive on the soles to hold the boots together if I punched them. Plus now I'm hoping to be in my Edeas ASAP, hopefully by tomorrow.

As far as idiotic loony ideas about boot stiffness, the inside is a no go really. You'd have to add layers to the outside I guess. One of my idiotic 21 year old guy ideas was to get aluminum flashing (it's like 1mm thick aluminum paneling for roofs,) cut it out and pop rivet it to the boot, and have metal boots. Thankfully I kept that idea in my head. You could possibly make it work better with say, a sheet of plastic of similar thickness, and get a heat gun and form it over the boot and attach it that way. But over the boot would be the only workable option, since you can't very easily take apart the boot and add plates inside it. And of course doing this type of thing wouldn't be the least elegant thing in the world and might not actually work as good as I think it would in my head. One lady who skated in like, the 60s, was telling me in the days of floppy boots, she'd add foam inserts around her ankles and tied the boot over them, so it'd be stiffer. So that may be an option to stiffen boots up.

[Query]

Did anyone heat-form your Edeas (as at least one dealer sometimes does) or are they stock? Who did the mods?

Minor changes to the inside are possible. A lot of people have done such.

One boot tech partially rebuild an old pair of my boots (Reidell 220's, back in the day when they were a single layer of thin leather), by gluing stiff leather on the inside surface. But that was only possible because the boots had stretched too much over time. Besides, he didn't feather (thin) the leather he glued in at the edges enough for the result to be comfortable. That same person has been very successful rebuilding and improving speed skates using fiberglass (or similar fibers) and resin on the outside, together with heat molded liners, somewhat similar to those used in XC and alpine ski boots. But those things require a lot of time and high class craftsmanship (as I discovered when I tried to experiment with gluing leather to the inside myself) - which costs a lot of money if you hire an experienced  pro like him. (The racing crowd is sometimes fanatic about equipment.) If the goal is to save money by making minor changes to inexpensive boots, these approaches simply won't work.

So far my attempts to make tape wrap construction technology boots (I started with duct tape ) hasn't panned out either.

I think skates must be among the most difficult shoes to create. It's nothing like buying a moccasin kit in the craft store and stitching it together with basic tools and maybe some glue.

For now, it makes sense to get good figure skating boots made by first class experienced figure skate boot makers... Of course, there are only a few, and they charge whatever the market will bear.

So, the idea of starting with Softec boots and turning them into something just as comfortable but better for figure skating - sigh.

What we need is a vending machine. You put in $29.95, select color, skating level and preferred liner, stick your feet inside, get scanned, balance on both feet, take your feet out, and out pops a couple of perfectly fit boots.   

Another vending machine can sharpen your blades. (A rink I used to skate at had such a machine for hockey skates. Someone inserted figure skates and wasn't happy.)

[supra]

The big problem is really just market demand. Figure skating is just less popular than hockey, so boots will be more expensive and will have less technological innovation behind them. It's a problem of the sport of figure skating as a whole. Figure skating is really still a rich man's sport. Even on the USFSA website for grants for skaters I remember reading "For children whose parents make under $200,000 a year combined household income" and that sounds laughable, you know, 200K is extremely rich in an era where official unemployment is 10%, but at the same time, figure skating is an expensive sport. Coaches where I am are like $50-80 an hour, and it's not uncommon for parents to just pay a coach here for like, "unlimited" coaching, like 20-30K a year.

By nature, it obviously is a more expensive sport, unlike basketball or soccer or something, it needs to be done on artificial ice, and a rink costs at least 500K or so a year to operate, and I don't think rink management is a serious money maker by any stretch. I know one rink near me's been bankrupt like 3 times and has even at times, when the power company shut their power off, switched to a diesel generator and then got their oil shut off by the oil company. So the reality is, it'll probably remain a rich man's sport for a long time, just because artificial ice is so expensive by nature of being artificial ice. At my rink, there's Russians and Eastern Europeans that come from their home countries, paid for by the governments of their respective countries, just because there's very little ice there.

That's the reality of figure skating, $1000 skates is just a symptom of it, if you think about it. So if you want skate prices to go down, you need a bigger market of people actually buying skates for the competitive level, and figure skating would have to be a more open sport. Any kind of "closed" sport just is expensive. Ice skating at least sorta has a logical reason to be expensive, but like, Olympic style weightlifting is a sport I'm kinda getting into now, and the coaching costs just as much as skating coaching does, plates cost comparatively a lot , about $2 a pound (for what they are, just giant blocks of rubber,) and then there's shoes. The cheapest shoes you can get are $80, weightlifting shoes are a lot like ice skates, in that they have a raised solid heel to hit depth easier. For a custom pair of lifting shoes, it's easy to spend like $500+ on them. Before the Chinese really hit the market with shoes, the cheapest Olympic lifting shoes were $200 Adidas. And weightlifting doesn't even require artificial ice, just it's so niche of a sport that people can kinda charge whatever. Same way Ferrari parts cost more than Toyota parts, it's not that Ferrari parts are necessarily inherently more complex or something, it's just there's not a big market.

As far as the actual boots themselves, well, I can make another post about that, but that's the reason why figure skating boots are expensive. The only real way to get them cheaper (besides China obviously being involved no matter what) is to open up the sport of figure skating more, and get more people skating. 

EDIT:
Regarding my Edeas, they fit well without being heated, but Edeas you actually aren't supposed to bake, you're supposed to only heat certain spots up with a heat gun, basically doing the same thing as punching would. You could also perhaps run a shoe stretcher after heating with the heat gun, though. Edea really cautions against baking the skates, in fact they say to not even leave them in a hot car, because it could re heat form the skate again. Instead of gel packs in Edeas, the fiberglass/plastics themselves heat form. As far as the stiffness, they're supposed to be extra stiff straight from the factory. The guy I bought them from said Edea only does it for a select few people. He was selling non-extra stiff ones, too. He bought a few pairs, the reason he sold was because he switched to 300mm instead of 290, so I got his 290s.

But I think manufacturers will eventually do what Edea's doing regarding materials. In hockey they already do. No hockey skates except for Graf are predominantly leather anymore. Most are fiberglass with some carbon fiber parts sometimes. It's cheaper and easier to work with a skate that way. I've tried on whatever the new CCM $60 skates were, and new Bauer Vapors and Supremes, and to be honest, they're fantastic quality skates. For the same $60 spent (well Vapors run like 90-100,) I don't see any figure skates even near in quality and boot stiffness. And the reason again, is, more people play hockey, thus development goes faster and the trickle down happens quicker. And speed skates, while they cost more, are light as feather and feel like wearing shoes. Much of what's holding figure skates back is tradition and resistance to change. People like the leather boots, people like the brands that have been around forever, and are resistant to change.

But, somewhere along the line, the Chinese will invade. They already have, if you go on, say, alibaba.com, look up figure skates, you'll see boots that look identical to Riedells and other's lowend boot models, so the manufacturers already work with the Chinese to make lower end boots, but the Chinese aren't dumb, and not everything they make has to be inherently low quality. So if someone really wanted to, and felt it'd be a profitable thing to do, they could easily have the Chinese make high quality stuff. I witnessed this occur with airsoft guns (plastic pellet guns for playing wargames with) there were a few Japanese makers, the Chinese made low quality stuff, and in a span of like 2-3 years they were on par with the Japanese, and then in 4-5 had pretty much overtaken them, and made higher quality stuff for significantly less money (ie, a gun that would have sold for 1000+ before the Chinese, you can buy the Chinese equivalent for like $200-300.) Figure skating is a hard market to crack, though, as it is so "closed" of a market, and it's a small market also. I think the reason why the owners of the major skate companies haven't worked with the Chinese for a low priced high quality boot is mostly for image. They'd have to fire the US/Canadian/German workers that make the high quality boots, and that's not really a good PR move. That, and having things made in China doesn't really bode well with a "premium" image, either.

Oh well, sorry for my essay about figure skating boot prices.

[Query]

There is another factor. High end skates are made under the supervision and involvement of high end craftsmen, specifically the master boot makers. They are relatively small businesses in which that master craftsman has a strong input, and wants to retain strong control.

Many people also place a high value on being able to talk to that master craftsman in person, or by phone, to specify personalized factors. So they have to be fluent in a language the buyer is also fluent in. Must be a little hard for those that don't speak English for most brands, or Italian (I think) for Edea.

I believe you are correct - most of the low end skates are made in China.

A hockey store manager told me a major problem with the Chinese factories is that they need a long lead time. May have something to do with shipping everything in a small number of shipping containers (which are roughly the size of a bus). You have to order the entire year's stock, for all brands of hockey equipment, at one time. The once-a-year thing won't fly in the custom figure skate market.

BTW, speed skates are a much smaller market than figure skates. Which may be be part of why extensive custom work is more common, and why most racers sharpen their own skates.

[supra]

There is another factor. High end skates are made under the supervision and involvement of high end craftsmen, specifically the master boot makers. They are relatively small businesses in which that master craftsman has a strong input, and wants to retain strong control.

Many people also place a high value on being able to talk to that master craftsman in person, or by phone, to specify personalized factors. So they have to be fluent in a language the buyer is also fluent in. Must be a little hard for those that don't speak English for most brands, or Italian (I think) for Edea.

I believe you are correct - most of the low end skates are made in China.

A hockey store manager told me a major problem with the Chinese factories is that they need a long lead time. May have something to do with shipping everything in a small number of shipping containers (which are roughly the size of a bus). You have to order the entire year's stock, for all brands of hockey equipment, at one time. The once-a-year thing won't fly in the custom figure skate market.

BTW, speed skates are a much smaller market than figure skates. Which may be be part of why extensive custom work is more common, and why most racers sharpen their own skates.

Well speed skating most people sharpen their own skates, well, because they can. You buy a $100 jig and stone setup, and you just gotta get the blade flat, it's not a hollow ground.

[isakswings]

2 very well respected coaches at the rink we skate at, have worn those skates. They wear them while coaching and they wear them for comfort and I believe warmth. I never thought anything of it. My daughter's coach considered a pair as well but did not like how they felt on her feet. I think it was more of an issue with how high the back of the boot was on the back of her legs. She said they were uncomfortable.  Hopefully you have found something that works better for you by now.