Skatemate Sharpener review

[Query]

This reviews the Skatemate hand-sharpener.

NOTE: All sharpeners, require significant care, knowledge and practice to do a good job. If you've found a convenient professional sharpening guy or gal who does what you want well, and you don't like doing your own craft work, stay with the pro. High end figure skating blades are expensive to mess up, and it is easy to make mistakes.

(New Cost on eBay is about $18, 2 replacement grinding cylinders / $6.50. Free shipping. Compare: Pro-Filer Figure skating kit is $80+$16 shipping. Old fashioned used Berghman sharpeners on eBay for $5-$20.)

Due to accidental rust accumulation, I wanted to remove more metal than I would with fine grain hand-sharpeners like the Pro-Filer, and I didn't want to wear out the expensive diamond-dust abrasive cylinder in my Pro-Filers, so I tried using the Skatemate sharpener, which has a much coarser grain abrasive.

The Skatemate is well designed in several ways. You can easily adjust the gap-width - unlike the Pro-Filer. In addition, you can see what you are doing better than with the Pro-Filer, so it is a little easier to avoid modifying the toe pick - though with care and practice, that isn't a problem with any hand sharpener. Also, it is very light and compact.

One of the adjustment screws turned a little roughly - I ended up lubricating both.

I'm not sure how durable the "stones" are long-term - like super-thick tube shaped sand paper. I bet the diamond-dust Pro-Filer stones last longer.

Because metal comes off faster, it is easy to make mistakes - and at first I did, and made asymmetric edges. The tube is somewhat compressible - so the ROH is adjusted by pressure, which in turn means it would be easy to make a mistake and create a non-uniform ROH, probably not a good thing. But it sure removes material faster, and it's way cheaper. With a good deal of care, you could do a moderately good job of sharpening skates.

I haven't measured it exactly, but the default (low pressure) ROH is about 9/16" - larger and therefore effectively less sharp than most figure skaters and hockey players in my geographic area use. (7/16" - 1/2" is more typical.) And more pressure would create an even larger ROH. A well-practiced sharpener can create a longer edge (the tip of the edge isn't actually shaped by the ROH), which makes the blade act sharper.

I think that when you aren't trying to remove a lot of metal - you normally aren't with figure skates, the stone is a bit on the course side, so the edge won't be quite as clean. The "de-burring" strip is too. There is no built-in "gummy" (non-abrasive) stone; unfortunate - I think at least half the time skaters could straighten their edge instead of sharpening, and at least double the life time of their blades. Using an abrasive strip to straighten wears down the edge a little.

As with Pro-Filer and Berghman, lubricate the sides of your blades with oil before sharpening, so you don't scratch them.

I can't go so far as to recommend Skatemate to inexperienced sharpeners, at least not for figure skates. For that, the Pro-Filer is a little better designed. But like I said in the NOTE, sharpening well using any tool requires practice, knowledge and experience.

BTW, in many respects the old Berghmans were the best designed hand-sharpeners I've tried (not surprising - they were common before powered skate sharpeners became common) - except all the ones I've tried (I bought a bunch of the 1920's era ones on eBay) were made at a time that grinding stones were quite crumbly. Also, the Berghmans were limited to 1/2" ROH. I tried at one point to pad them with tape to let them them accept stones of other hollows, but that was problematic.

P.S. If you are a professional sharpener (I'm not), no hand tool can match the speed of a power sharpening tool, especially if you sharpen skates in batches, so your blade widths and hollows stay constant within a batch. Power tools will typically save several minutes/blade, assuming that most skaters sharpen fairly infrequently. Further, on a blade that requires substantial modification, hand tools are very slow. If you are able to get enough business to sharpen on a fairly continuous full-time basis, even a high end power sharpening tool (close to $30,000 for the best multi-station Blademaster and Blackstone tools) could pay itself back within a few months. (E.g., ($10/skate pair)*(10 - 20 pairs / hour depending on your level of care)*(2000 hours / year) = $100,000 - 200,000 / year, minus cost of labor, maintenance and materials (and of course, insurance and the cost of leasing retail space in or near an ice rink). On top of that, the power tools that take up a small room are much more impressive machines than hand sharpeners, and won't tempt customers to sharpen their own.

On the other hand, the power sharpening tools don't fit in your pocket...