Yipee! Found a pro shop to learn boot and blade skills at.

[Query]

I haven't been able to find a pro shop that needed an inexperienced employee.

So I asked a good pro-shop manager/technician if I could apprentice, as a volunteer. He said I can come in and watch, and ask questions. Maybe I'll progress to doing more.

It's a start.

[Query]

I spent a day watching and asking questions of one of the indicated boot/blade technician, and will do so again in the future.

I'm not publishing to the board or the Internet most of what he says, in fairness to his ability to stay in business. It is only fair to treat most of what I am told, that I did not figure out myself or receive from other skaters or published sources, or which is not already common knowledge within the professional boot/blade technician community, as trade secrets, unless permission is given. I will try to apply the same standards to other technicians who have helped me in the past.

I haven't decided how this will affect whether I will teach any future classes on using hand tools to sharpen skates or modify boots in the future. It would probably be unethical to teach or otherwise steal away customers, of these technicians, using knowledge gained from those individuals.

The expert skate boot and blade technician community, like the figure skate boot manufacturing community, contains a small set of self-made masters and their apprentices, each of whom creates their own very different sets of techniques, and each of whom emphasizes somewhat different issues. The best masters all know of each other, and occasionally converse, but not much.

The master/apprentice system is a very effective way to pass down knowledge, but has limitations. These limitations are quite typical of other industries where there is a master/apprentice system of learning, according to a master electrician of my acquaintance. Knowledge obtained by hard-won trial and error does not propagate much between the masters in such systems, or back to the suppliers of equipment and supplies. (In the electrician case there are some legally established standards, and there are certification requirements, which is not so of the boot/blade technician community, but there is little propagation of knowledge and experience from the electricians back to creators of those standards, and the standards do not cover detailed methods of application.)

Within the boot/blade technician community, most leave the industry too young to have become genuine masters, or to pass on much of their own accumulated knowledge.

Naturally, I have my own ideas, which differ somewhat from what these people have told me, as they to differ from each other. But my knowledge has largely been based on my own boots, blades, and feet, and what other people on this board and elsewhere have said (often in disagreement to what I have said), not on the day-in, day-out professional experience and interaction with customers and medical professionals that a technician of his class receives. His knowledge is of a much higher order. Further, professionals need create a financially viable business, which imposes many practical limits on what he can do.

For example, instead of fixing many problems, he returns a substantial fraction of new boots and blades that he considers defective - he chose to return both boots and blades during the single day I was there! This includes problems that I and other people on this board have fixed on our own equipment - it is not worth his time to fix what he feels the manufacturer (or other less expert boot fitter) should have done right in the first place. I'm certain that manufacturers consider him picky and try to send him their best equipment, but he says the figure skating community isn't large enough or knowledgeable enough to insure adequate quality control within the manufacturer community. Likewise, he won't go to some of the extremes I have gone to keep using old equipment, and he refers some problems in the foot bed to a small community of knowledgeable medical experts.

But I'm amazed at the degree of individuality he applies. He doesn't generalize fit parameters and requirements from one skater to the next, or boot modification techniques from one brand of boot to the next. In the past and on my web pages I have said some things which were clearly in error, because I failed to realize this degree of individuality. There is no good universal set of fit parameters nor universally applicable techniques. Sigh.

I haven't seen anything so far that is done substantially better with power tools, or with the most expensive grade hand tools, that can't be done with simple hand tools, if you work hard enough at it, though the best tools do some things much faster. I think the main limitation on what people do with all these tools stems from the limitations within the instructions given out by the tool manufacturers and by boot and blade manufacturers, not on what those tools can be made to do.

[sarahspins]

For example, instead of fixing many problems, he returns a substantial fraction of new boots and blades that he considers defective - he chose to return both boots and blades during the single day I was there! This includes problems that I and other people on this board have fixed on our own equipment

I think this is a catch-22 situation though.. when you get down to it, many of us have modified our boots* in ways that would easily void a manufacturer's warranty.  I would never want nor expect a skate fitter to go to those lengths to correct what would be considered a defect with a boot... especially as you go higher and higher up in expense.  I'd want them sent back so I could get what I paid for.  Likewise if the factory sharpening on a blade was so far off that one would "lose" a significant amount of the blade life correcting it, I'd want that replaced, not fixed - because I want what I'm paying for.

* (for the record, my boots didn't have a defect, I was allergic to the foam lining in the tongues, so I ripped the foam out and replaced it myself after getting reassurance from Jackson that if I totally screwed the tongues, that they would replace them completely for the bargain price of $50 plus shipping.  I've also made many changes/adjustments to the footbeds as well, but all of that is easily removed.)