How long until your ice skates need sharpening?

Question

How long until your ice skates need sharpening?

Answer 1

its not really a cut out time, but when you feel your blades start to slip you will know. make sure to wipe them off correctly and take out the sole when you get home from skating. it makes the sharpness of the blade last longer.

Answer 2

My kids need their skates sharpen about every 18-20 hours of skating. That's about the average for competitive figure skaters in our arena.

Here's also some information on boot and blade care.

"Keep them sharp -- but not too sharp: A sharp blade grabs the ice better than a dull one.  Sharpen your blades when they start to slide uncomfortably when you land.  Keep a log of the number of hours you skate between sharpenings.  After a while you'll figure out how many hours you can average between sharpenings, and this will help you to avoid surprises at inconvenient times.

You want a balance here -- if you wait too long, the change when you get them sharpened is pretty dramatic and your performance suffers.  If you do it too often, you'll wear out the blade too soon (yes, there is a finite number of times a blade can be sharpened).  In my family, we average about 20 hours on a sharpening - you might find that  you like either less or more than that though.

Sharpen responsibly too -- be careful of who you trust with your blades.  If the place you go doesn't have a specialist in figure skates, be careful.  Figure skates are sharpened with very different goals than hockey skates.  NEVER have them done by one of those automatic machines you find in some rinks.  Figure skates are ground with a "hollow" in the bottom (to give them those "edges" you hear so much about).  The radius of that curvature can vary anywhere from 5/16" to about 2" depending upon  your weight, the disciplines you skate (FS, dance, patch), and the level of jumps you do.  A good sharpener will want to know these things.  If he looks like he wonders why you're telling him that stuff, consider finding someone else!"

Answer 3

ya make sure you clean them right and when you get off the ice put on your guards, that will help, and when you take off your guards to get on ice take you glove and wip them off. make sure you find the BEST sharpening place cause i had fellow skating members who got our coach to take their skates to a sports store and they all try them out and all of the blades were slipping every where.

also make sure you blades are even but turning your skate upside down and then place the coin on top and focus your eye on the coin at eyelevel.

you can also test you skates before and after you get the sharped with yoiur fingernail too

Answer 4

I am a pro figure skater and it really depends on how much you skate. It is supposedly every 50 hours on the ice. You may not need to for longer or a shorter amount of time. Another way you can tell is when you scrape your nail on your blade then if a little bit of your nail shreds that means they are okay, but if It doesn't do anything to your nail it's time to get them sharpened. I hope this helps!

Answer 5

All below points are valid plus your weight and the number of times a week you skate may be worth taking into consideration too.  I take my skates to the person at rink where I skate as they do a good job on them.  When they seem to be losing their grip on ice and skidding around more I get them seen to but it is a very personal preference and some people may like them sharper than others.