How many pairs of skates can be sharpened without need of wheel dressing?

[Kaitsu]

If asking from me, answer would be zero. Some skate techs are however making several pairs of skates before they dress the wheel again. Here is example how the hollow may look then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pakNUSRIO7Y

Grinding wheels does not wear so that non consistent radial shape would limited just to areas which are not even in contact of the ice. Your edges are also affected and that cannot be good thing for the skater.

How many skaters has checked this issue from their blades or how they could even check this kind of issue? Not so many of us, I would say. We can also guess that non consistent radial shape is not the same every time, which means that skates feels different every time after the sharpening. On top of that you will probably get extra "bonus" when edges are grinded unevenly. Also that error is not probably systematically made, so that the direction and magnitude would be the same every time. Third very common "bonus" is bad surface finishing, which is often consequense of dull (non dressed) grinding wheel.

[tstop4me]

Yes.  Very good point.  I have Paramounts with 440C stainless steel runners.  I also have a Hollow Depth Indicator (HDI) gauge.  My tech is competetent.  But I noticed that after sharpening, the hollow in one blade was always consistently deeper than in the other.  I asked him about how often he dressed the blade. He told me once per pair.  I told him my results and asked him to dress the wheel fresh before each blade for me. He did, and the hollows were consistent.  But he also told me that he would routinely do it only for me, since no other skater ever brought it up.

[R45]

I can only do a good job if I re-dress the wheel for each single blade, before I do the surface finishing.
If you re-dress the wheel that often, the diamond dresser only needs a minor adjustment to get the correct radius back into the wheel.
Sadly, many skate sharpening shops maintain low standards for their professional services. Professional competence starts with technical knowledge and with awareness of the social context in which your work may be deployed. It helps a lot if the skate sharpener is a skater himself.
Professional competence also requires skill in communication, you need to talk to the skater to understand their skill level and issues in order to advise the appropriate RoH.

[supersharp]

I dress for every blade, and more than once if the blade needs a lot of work to correct previous bad sharpenings.  It's an easy, built-in reset on the size of hollow you create on each blade.

[Leif]

I too think the wheel needs to be redressed for every pair of blades. My experience (with hockey skates) is that many rink shops don't bother. I've seen some awful sharpens, in one case the wheel was not high enough to cover the entire blade width. The quality can also depend on how well the person doing the sharpening knows the skater i.e. how much care they take. I have my own blade edge tester, or BAT gauge, and I now have my own sharpener (Sparx).

[AgnesNitt]

I took a pair of boots into a highly recommended technician to save some time when I was out of time. I skated on them when they were done and they chattered like a machine gun. I don't think they redressed the wheel, so much as they threw the blades on the concrete floor. I'm still pissed about that 10 years later.

[AgnesNitt]

DELETE

[AlbaNY]

I agree it is optimal to redress for each blade, but I was not taught to even by the really good techs who I trust a lot. 

At the rink we were not even told to do it fresh if the last used radius was the same as what was requested.  That was almost only for hockey though and recreational figure blades.  Those guys always seemed really happy with my sharpenings and had me fix badly done jobs pretty often.  It felt really nice when someone would come back and tell me how much better they felt on the ice after a fix. 

Anyway, I am apparently not very sensitive to how well or poorly done a sharpening is, it seems, but I think the best possible effort should be put into it by a tech.  It's really not so hard to make sure every bit is done well, so I'm baffled by how frequently people get awfully botched or somewhat poorly done sharpenings.   

[Bill_S]

Sometimes it takes even more dressings per pair when tackling problematic skate blades. Look at this factory "sharpening" on a pair of Riedell Sparkles given to me recently. I've never seen anything so rough. It took a lot of passes to get the stainless steel blades to be level, smooth, and sharp along the entire length. I needed to dress the grinding wheel 4 times to get the job done.



It looks like the factory worker was attempting a new world record on how many of these beginner skates they could "sharpen" without dressing.

[AgnesNitt]

I was told that a lot of sharpeners leave it at 1/2" whatever they're asked for. For rentals and beginners (recreational skaters) that's fine. Some coaches apparently tell the sharpeners what to set.   I use a custom ROH that nobody else uses and I'm happy with it. I am sensitive  to my sharpenings--I got lots of skating flaws, but my feet and ankles know what my blades are doing. Fortunately my sharpener is a Silver ice dancer (13/16" ROH) so he puts up with my kinky ROH.

[tstop4me]

... Look at this factory "sharpening" on a pair of Riedell Sparkles given to me recently. I've never seen anything so rough. It took a lot of passes to get the stainless steel blades to be level, smooth, and sharp along the entire length. I needed to dress the grinding wheel 4 times to get the job done.

...

It looks like the factory worker was attempting a new world record on how many of these beginner skates they could "sharpen" without dressing.

<<Emphasis added.>>  Maybe it's deliberate.  It's a glitter pattern to make the blades sparkle.   

[LunarSkater]

My tech dresses the wheel a minumum of two times per pair:
1) to get the initial hollow
2) immediately before the final pass on the blade
3) if it's necessary, to refresh the wheel


I also think that a lot of techs - and I use that loosely - aren't actually taught anything but the bare basics. Either that, or they haven't bothered learning anything new since they were trained eons ago. My rink has a few people who are trained to use the sharpener, but they honestly have no clue. Turn it on and go. Dress the wheel once to set the hollow and not between blades. The skating club's off-ice room is the second floor of the pro shop and we can hear the machines. The old one is completely unbalanced, it sounds horrible. The two new Sparx machines? Dunno how those are doing. And the guy who trains the employees? He and I talked once about the rental skates. They're sharpened to a 1" hollow... because that's what figure skaters use.

[AlbaNY]

Bill, that photo disturbs me.   

Lunar, we use 1"?  Oh my...

[LunarSkater]

Alba, that's a complicated "yes." School figure blades, yes. Freestyle blades, no. (I use 1" on my figure blades, not that they're mounted to anything at the moment.) The guy at my rink? Learned to sharpen skates when school figures were still part of the sport. He never updated himself from there. 

[R45]

Patch hollows for the "Old School Figures" start at one inch and go all the way up to three or four.
1" for rentals is not a bad idea considering the level of the skaters and the long lasting edges of a shallow hollow.

[Query]

Fewer dressings means fewer replacement wheels, and more skates "sharpened" / hour.

So the answer is simple, for a typical pro shop that seeks to maximize profit: as few as the manager thinks they can get away with.

[Kaitsu]

Cheapest stainless steel blades are absolutely terrible to sharpen. You remove more material from the wheel than from the blade. Usually I change more coarse wheel for these blades. Chainsaw sharpener wheels seems to work quite well. Same I cannot say about the Blademaster 3DR wheel or white aluminum oxide wheels. This crappy steel is challenge also to the manufacturers as we can see from the Bill´s photo. Unfortunately "chrome removal" grinding is typically same terrible quality. 99% surely those blades are made in China. Russian made blades has often same steel quality.

With my experience from the well know brands, Edea´s and Riedell cheapes blades are ga...ge. A real skate techs nightmares.