When you leave your skates for sharpening, you will often be asked “what depth [of hollow, or profile] would you like?”
Please note that currently Rich@TheRink does not provide flat-bottom grinding.
Most new/beginner skaters will use 5/8ths for a short period before trying other depths
Once you've bought a pair of reasonable quality skates, and have some experience skating, you should look at whether that's correct for you.
Ice skate edges are formed by grinding out a (typically) circular hollow in the middle of the blade. The “depth” or sometimes “depth profile" or "depth of hollow" refers to the radius of the circle, in inches or millimeters. 5/8ths is therefore “5/8ths of an inch radius”.
As you decrease the radius of the grind, you increase the depth of the hollow, which makes the skate edges sharper.
Typically very new skaters will start at 5/8ths, but as they progress they may go down to 1/2 inch, then 7/16ths, sometimes even as far as 3/8ths but this depends on many factors and many skaters will find their preferred radius, even if that’s shallower at 11/16ths.
Ask your skate technician, and they will be able to give you some general advice – if you’re visiting a technician not based in a specific ice rink, or a different ice rink to where you normally skate, bear in mind that their advice will only be general, and you may prefer to go shallower/deeper from their advice. You may also end up going shallower/deeper depending on how confident you feel on your skates.
Our recommendation on depth is as follows, from shallower to deeper. While you can pick increments between these, we do not feel it’s worth it (why? see our ‘for the geeks’ section below, or ask us about our Visualizer tools).
It’s worth noting that figure skates blades are generally 1mm wider than hockey skates, and therefore for any given depth are sharper than hockey blades (i.e. if you grind a pair of figures, and a pair of hockey skates to 5/8ths, the figures will feel sharper). Why? See our ‘for the geeks’ section below, or ask us about our Visualizer tools.
No. Firstly, on the assumption that it’s appropriate to grind the skates you have deeper, the blades do not wear uniformally as you skate. If you were to grind the skates to 1/2 inch, after some time they will not be “5/8ths”. They will simply be a blunt 1/2 inch grind, as what makes the skates “blunt” are rounded edges.
In fact, counterintuitively, getting a deeper grind may result in your needing to have them re-sharpened more regularly, as the rounding on sharper blades happens faster.
Leaving your skates between sharpening for too long will result in a larger sharpness difference after you’ve sharpened them, meaning you’ll need to re-adjust to skating on sharp blades.
Leaving your skates between sharpening for too long may also result in deep rust – as the grinding process will remove any rust spots before they become a real problem…
How often you get your skates sharpened will depend on many factors too, but generally getting the ground deeper will not extend that time.
Blunt skates are caused by rounded edges – instead of a nice, crisp, sharp angle, the rounding will allow the skate to slip sideways.
One of our favourite pages for explaining depth:
https://wissota.com/support/skate-sharpening-101/choose-your-radius/
See the table below to convert the hollow radius, along with the width of the blade, to the angle of the edge against the ice. This doesn’t really provide any practical purpose, other than to illustrate that as you get deeper, you typically need smaller adjustments of radius to maintain a consistent difference between the angle. This is the primary reason we don’t normally use 9/16ths – the difference between that and 5/8ths is quite small, though some people still ask for it, and we’re happy to oblige.
