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Sep 19, 2023

Skatescribe wants to create the perfect skate blade

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Sharpening skates hasn't changed much since the first hockey players took to Canada's frozen lakes and rivers in the 19th century. Running a stone or wheel along the surface of the blade grinds the blade down allowing it to bite into the ice.

These days, the process is handled by grinding machines that carve out a hollow into a skate blade — the deeper the groove, the more explosive the acceleration, while a shallow groove improves a player's speed. Nathan Chan, a commercial lawyer by training, felt there was an opportunity to be found in upgrading the skate-sharpening process for the 21st century. So he launched Skatescribe.

Skatescribe uses high tech computer-assisted machines capable of milling a skate blade to a sharpness impossible to achieve with a grindstone. Instead of rubbing away at a blade, Skatescribe's technique basically carves a new blade from the old one. Not only does it tailor a blade's hollow, or the groove, of the blade — it can alter the radius and the pitch of the blade. Players who’ve tested Skatescribe's work have found the result is a radically better skate.

Skatescribe currently has a location at Scotiabank Pond and a Markham facility, but Chan has much bigger plans for the company. Its leadership roster includes three-time Olympic gold medallist Jennifer Botterill and former NHL star Eric Lindros, and Chan says he is already supplying blades to some of today's professional players.

Chan spoke to the Star about the science of sharpening, competitors, and working with former professional players:

You have a corporate and commercial law background. What made you decide to get into automated skate sharpening?

It all started when my son was six or seven years old playing competitive hockey. One of his friends got on the ice and fell down right away — his skate blades didn't have an edge. I asked his parent what was going on. They said they had just bought the skates and had them sharpened at the store instead of taking them to a skate sharpener to get a custom sharpening.

That started my thought process. If we sharpened skates so we always got the specifications of the skater right, it would make for a great sharpening. That got me considering the science behind skate sharpening. Up to that point, it was seen as an art. My goal was to automate skate sharpening so the human element no longer came into play.

Where did the idea for the automated process you’re using come from? Was it something you came up with, or was it one of your collaborators?

My biggest contribution, at the outset, was to analyze. I started looking into laser visioning systems capable of taking an accurate digital image of the skate blade. Without that picture, we would be guessing how to sharpen or reshape the skate blade. With that digital picture, we then instruct the machine — in our case, a CNC (computer numerical control) machine — to sharpen the blade in a certain way.

How much better do blades sharpened with Skatescribe technology perform compared to a standard hand-sharpened skate?

Oh, it is night and day. The glide is different because the surface finish is different. The surface roughness is much less than your traditional hand grinding done with a stone wheel. It is very accurate.

The edges are different because we mill and machine skate blades. When you mill and machine — the exact same technology used for automotive and aerospace parts — you’re actually cutting into a piece of metal to a very precise tolerance. It just yields a better product.

Since we know what the blade looks like, and we can tell the computer and the machine what to do, we can cut crazy shapes that fit a player better. Not only do we cut a great product, but it has the potential to match a person's skating style or physical attributes.

There are other automated sharpening companies, including Elite Blade Performance Technology. How does Skatescribe differ?

Those companies still use grinding technology. Every technology out there distinguishes between sharpening, which is creating that hollow in the skate blade itself, and profiling, which is adjusting the shape of a blade where it makes contact with the ice. They’re separate processes. We’ll profile at the beginning and then we’ll sharpen them.

Grinding technology delivers a much coarser finish. I don't think the edges are as durable as a machine edge. The existing technology uses template bars to profile skate blades. The problem is that every skate size requires a different size template bar. All our templates are digital. You just change a number here or there. That's where I think we have a distinct advantage. It's the ability to profile on a whim.

Your investor pool has a couple of NHL veterans. Eric Lindros is one. How did you convince someone like him to get on board with this company when you don't have a background in hockey?

Eric is one of the most passionate people I’ve come across about this project. We had a mutual friend, and I persuaded Eric to just try out the blades. I believe he fell in love with the feeling of the blades, and he just became interested.

What perspective do former players like Jennifer Botterill or Steve Thomas bring to Skatescribe?

They have the ability to understand the hockey side of things and what teams may be looking for and how they operate. That insight has been really helpful to Skatescribe. You have to have a great product, but then you actually have to understand the business side as well — how equipment managers run their rooms, and how they evaluate technologies and how they adopt or do not adopt technologies.

We’ve talked a lot about hockey. What about other sports like figure skating? Could your technology be adapted to it?

Absolutely. Our technology and the way we sharpen skates is 100 per cent transferable to the figure skating world. It is a little bit difficult. Figure skate blades don't come out of the boot — they’re fixed. We have to find a way to reliably mount a figure skate into our machine. But once that is done, then our technology is absolutely transferable to the figure skating world.

Do you have a plan to go full-time at Skatescribe at some point? What is your company going to look like over the next couple of years?

No one is really doing what we’re doing. It's been so exciting in that regard. There is no set growth plan or road map that we can follow from other people. We’re just creating our own direction. I love this project with all my heart. It's so much fun. I would love to change into a full-time opportunity, but we will need more people involved. Our growth potential is through the roof.

Our patents have been issued not just in Toronto, not just in the GTA, but across Canada and the U.S. And we’re waiting for patents to be issued in European hockey-playing countries like Germany and Sweden. We really think this technology should replace traditional grinding. It is so fast. It is so accurate. The performance is there, and so the sky's the limit. It's a matter of identifying the best opportunities, and making sure we’re properly funded and moving on them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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