Skating in Edinburgh
Click here for videos (and interesting skates)
There's a paucity of information on this subject on the internet. This page is a personal view which will hopefully fill in some of the blanks.
Ice Skating
There
were 2 ice rinks in Edinburgh when I first started ice skating at the end
of the '50s, Murrayfield and Haymarket. The latter was probably better
known for curling.
My adolescence was largely spent at Murrayfield Ice Rink but the '60s came along with all its splendid distractions... Four decades later I revisited Murrayfield at a midweek afternoon session and took along my old hockey skates with their leather boots and tubular metal blade supports.
The technology had improved in the course of 40 years and I bought new skates. These were much lighter in weight, being all plastic except for the blade. They were much more comfortable with better ankle support - my skating was revitalised.
Inline Skating / Rollerblading
Like
many children growing up in the '50s my experience of roller skating
was with crude quad wheeled efforts that clamped to ordinary shoes and
had a strap round your ankle. These sometimes fell off (ouch!).
Some of us kids also made a prototype skateboard with a large book on a single skate. We would sit on this with our knees touching our chin and hurtle down hills at speed.
Inline skates normally have 4 wheels in line. So-called 'aggressive' skates have smaller wheels and no heel-brake. The ones shown here are classed 'recreational' - rather like some drugs.
Similarities & Differences
The method of propulsion is the same whether using ice skates or skates with wheels; you angle your feet slightly outwards and push sideways. Gravity can do most of the work for you if you're not in a hurry; transferring your weight from one foot to the other takes more effort.
To go backwards it's the same except you angle your heels outwards. Transferring your weight from one foot to the other will propel you along.
Hockey skates are popular for recreational ice skating. They have thinner blades about 2.8mm wide. Figure skates as used for ice dancing etc have blades about twice as wide and with a more pronounced 'cradle'. How much a skate can rock on a flat surface influences how sharply it curves when the skater leans to one side.
Speed skates are used for racing and are long and unwieldly, not for use in public sessions. They are very thin where they make contact with the ice and have a flat bottom surface about 1mm wide.
Sharpening
Figure skates and hockey skates have a groove running along the bottom surface of the blade. This improves the lateral grip for pushing sideways or for leaning over when swerving or performing tight curves.
A 2.8mm thick hockey skate ground with a groove of 5mm radius is a good compromise. It provides 2 hollow-ground edges to bite into the ice for good sideways grip, but the groove is sufficiently shallow to allow easy skidding for braking.
If you want to sharpen your own skates then hand sharpeners are available over the internet from Sweden. The device is a SkateMate and it works well to maintain sharpness if your skates have been professionally ground in the first place.
