Puckstopper

I'd probably go full Tampa on this set. My new team is black/neon green, but I just don't see myself buying gear to match that nonsense. I loved the big white five hole on my old G5 set and just realized I did it again here. Can't unsee Darth Vader...

I really need to try a Mrazek/Price wedge curve. I never found much success with a Bauer P34 back in the day and have avoided them since. P31/Crawford/Bishop have always treated me well across brands, but I tried out an EF4 Price curve that a guy had at the rink the other day and was launching missiles with the thing. No accuracy, but pucks were high and out of the zone with no effort.

I used to work for a hockey retailer as a second job to feed my gear whore addiction. Over the last 15 years I've used 2 different pairs of retail Brian's leg pads (Sub Zero and Gnetik of some flavor) as well as full pro custom sets from CCM (EF4, Axis and EF5) Warrior (in the thread linked) and Bauer (Hyperlite/US mix and match). Of all of the full custom sets I used, only the Eflex 4 set felt like it made me a worse goalie. The pads were too tall, slid poorly and the 590 glove and I just didn't get along at all. Most of that was me learning what worked for me, as I ordered my Axis and EF5 sets in 34" instead of 35" and with a 600 break and loved them. In terms of how much I liked the various sets, only the Bauer and Warrior G5 have stood out from the pack for me. I absolutely LOVED how light the G5 set was and the flatter blocker made rebounds much more predictable. Even if the pads were .5" smaller than full allowed spec, which they were not, I honestly believe I'd have stopped more pucks due to the mobility and rebound control I had in this setup than I would have lost due to shooters managing to put a puck in that missing 1/4-1/2". If I were ordering Warrior today I'd be going with a R/G7 blocker for the flat face, R/G7.1 glove with a sewn in 60 degree break and single T. That would allow me to combine all the features I loved in both Warrior sets I had. Edit: Feel free to hit me up with any more questions. I really liked both of my Warrior sets and recommend them highly IF the glove works for you.

My EF5 set has been going strong for a whille now as well, so I just went back and did my Axis set to breathe new life into those beauties. Cant wait to get them on the ice Saturday! Edit: Forgot to mention how much easier this was the second time. Hopefully I didn't forget a step, but honestly I think it was just the confidence of knowing how well the first application has held up. The biggest time savings was having a template premade on my wife's Cricut. I still had to trim a little, so I need to adjust it, but from start to finish this took under 30 minutes this morning.

This makes the most sense. Young goalies don't have linear development paths, so learning behind a veteran for a few years works well. Bishop/Vasy is the example that springs to mind. They'll make Askarov push Saros out the door rather than just handing the reigns to him unless someone gives them an amazing offer on Juice.

Based on the catalog there will be 2 pro lines, 1 mid tier line and 1 entry level line.

Yeah, I'd found all of that. I've also got an Ellipse 1 on my forward skates and didn't feel like it was anything special. To be fair though, it's the first time I've had forward steel profiled and I don't have a non-profiled set to compare it to, so I may be missing the nuanced improvements that come with a profile. I may just give SAM another try as a starting point and send them off to NoIcing for their triple if I really can't make the SAM profile work...

Has anyone tried the Prosharp Ellipse Goalie profile? I'm looking to upgrade to Pulse TI blades, and my regular profiler doesn't have them. It looks like my profile options are Goalie SAM or Ellipse unless I want to buy blades one place and profile another. I felt like SAM was kind of meh compared to my normal profile (not as easy to pivot/move in but still better than stock) so I'm curious about Ellipse. The descriptions I'm finding suggest it's "more stable" than SAM, so I'm guessing it won't be my cup of tea, but thought I'd see if anyone had firsthand knowledge.

Agreed. I don't want to see cheap shots on stars, but THAT WASN'T A CHEAP SHOT. He wasn't driven head first into the boards, he wasn't crosschecked in the neck by Jamie Benn, he wasn't driven into the glass at the corner of the bench at high speed, nor was he slew-footed or licked by Brad Marchand. He was just on the wrong end of a good clean body check, and even you admit should have had his head up.

I'm more like a EEEE, so I've held off. It'll be interesting to see what feedback comes out on these, as my True's are getting a little long in the tooth. So far though, they've been the only option that fits at all comfortably.

He's been rocking that Axis for a couple weeks now. Saw it in person in Dallas last week. I'd love to know where he got it, as it's obviously not new.

Holy Necro-bump...

The issue with doing it hard, or repeatedly (as you know @mik, but for others who may not) is that it folds the edges of the blade so they end up looking like this: (_) instead of this: |_| . Once you bend the edge in, it's more vulnerable to folding down onto the blade completely or breaking off. Sharpening isn't pricy and it actually helps your steel last longer if you do it before crossgrinding is needed. For that matter steel is cheap compared to the pain of a sprained MCL or torn groin because your skate blade failed on you while trying to react. Mik and WillyGrips understand how to use this tool correctly, but the vast majority of the hockey community simply does not and believes that if one light pass is good, 10 firm passes must be better. A gentle pass from a honing stone aligned flat along the blade is the best way to remove a burr after sharpening or nicks between trips to the sharpener. I also have one of the gummy ones. It does still wear away a tiny bit of the coating on my LS5G blades, but we all know the black coating on those is crap anyway. Otherwise a regular fine grain India oil stone will work wonders. I'm a big fan of Norton as a brand Link or Link but any decent brand of oil or water stone is good enough for deburring skates.

Sweetstik is utter crap and should be avoided like the plague. For every person who knows how to use it for 1-2 properly aligned gentle passes I probably saw 20-30 pairs of skates with edges folded over and completely ruined. We had one absolute psycho customer who would get his skates sharpened every 2 months or so, SweetStik them before every game, and bitch up a storm because the store I worked at "wore his blades out by crossgrinding them every time". Well, if you didn't wreck your blades we wouldn't have to waste our time crossgrinding them... /rant If you don't have DLC or a mirror finish on your blades, a honing stone is fine. 1-2 gentle passes is more than enough. If you can't solve the damage with that, it's time to get 'em sharpened.

Discount for forum members?

Don't forget about the option of PadSkins. I had decent luck adding a pop of color to sets with that before I jumped on the full blown gear whore train.

Dead center also doesn't mean a millimeter thin line in the center of the knee block. Personally I defined it as a 1.5" zone, with .5" below dead center and 1" above. If I'm hitting there, it's going to as close to perfect as anyone not playing pro hockey needs.

In my old home I was lucky enough to have a second set of laundry hookups and an exhaust for a dryer in my basement. I built a sealed (mostly) box with an ozone machine and fan to exhaust the ozone through the dryer vent. I only got to use it a couple times before we moved, but it seemed to work well. I would run the machine for 30 minutes, let it sit for 30 and then run the exhaust fan for an hour. If you have any kind of smarthome setup it's absolute cake to get a couple of smart plugs to automate that process. My garage is detached at the new place and I'm not playing much any more, so I just run the ozone machine near my gear now with a few fans to blow it around and though everything. It probably doesn't work as well as boxing everything up and concentrating the ozone did, but it has the benefit of killing all the bugs in my garage when I do it. As others have said, do not under any circumstances go anywhere near the device when running. Just a couple of breaths is enough to give you a nasty headache. At the old house I'd shut the basement door to keep the pets out when running it.

Landing on the upper portion of the block is a good thing. Unless the pads are custom fit and custom made to your exact spec you're very unlikely to land dead center anyway, and landing high on the block pushes the pad tip into the ice, where landing low pulls it upwards. Granted, you probably don't want to be landing as high as you describe after your mod, but it sounds like pre-mod you were landing exactly where you needed to. You'll do better to refine your technique to get the extra .5" of coverage that moving your pad up your leg would do, but if you want to experiment with it anyway, try building a riser in the boot area to force the pad to sit higher. You'll probably find that it's cumbersome and your pads don't move as well as you'd like, but try a few different iterations before giving up. If nothing else you'll gain a better understanding of how different mods effect how pads play, kind of like you did with the calf strap. Keep tinkering, it's fun to have a set of gear that's uniquely yours, and by gaining understanding you'll have a better idea of what to order if you ever go full custom.

This is a mod I've never understood. The nylon straps add minimal weight but provide a ton of peace of mind! Somewhere on YouTube there's a video of a goalie getting his pad ripped off his leg by a skater catching the tip of the pad with his toe. Watching the chaos as the pad flaps around on the toe strings gives me a case of the sweats. I always kept the nylon straps on my Warrior pads for that reason and ordered my CCM and Bauer sets with at least one hard strap running from knee to calf. In all cases I wear it loose, but at least I know I have something locking that pad to my leg.

Make sure it fits snugly but not tightly (if that makes sense) around your forehead and cheeks. Fit is more important than just about anything with a mask and you'd do better in a "lower grade" mask that fits properly than a top of the line mask that doesn't. Mask and skates are 2 items I would say are impossible to get right without a proper fitting unless you end up getting really lucky.

This. It's a huge leap forward for Bauer in terms of quality/durability.

Agree. I really hoped he'd break though in Detroit, but mental issues seemed to haunt him. Unfortunately he looked like peak form Petr last night. Some absolutely beautiful saves, but the second goal was really stoppable.

Quoted for truth! If I need to lug a telescope to the stands to see WTF is going on with your mask, you've done it wrong. I yearn for the days of Belfour, Cujo and Richter when you could make out what was on the mask watching terrible 90's TV.

You're correct of course. I am old enough to remember when people believed the Internet would advance the human race. Ah the optimism of the 1990's...