To answer Blum's (the OP) three questions directly...
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Originally Posted by glovesave90
would the rbk cowling be able to fit on my skates if i bought them?
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Yes, the Vapor XXX boot will fit easily in an RBK cowling.
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and how much is the normal price?
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It entirely depends on how much RBK/CCM business your local hockey shop does. The lowest prices I've seen for the cowlings and blades (sold separately!) are from hockeygeeks.com -- $90 for a pair of cowlings and $71 for a pair of blades. However, the best overall price I ever heard of was from JR at The Goalie Crease, who was selling them for $189 including installation.
That's really the unknown in the procedure: the labour. JR, for example, has switched cowlings more than a few times himself, and done some fairly adventurous boot-cowling matches. He's done it before, so it's no trouble to do it again. A pro-shop in a local rink might not be so cheap.
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and how long would it take them to switch the cowlings?
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Again, depends how knowledgeable the your local shop is. JR at The Crease could probably do it while you went to get lunch. Guys without his expertise might not be so quick about it. I'd figure most places should be able to figure it out in a day.
Now, to answer everybody else's questions...
GoalieMonkey was no doubt hesitant to give a direct answer over the phone, because this is very much a hands-on procedure -- especially with Graf boots. As you may have read in Graf's advertising copy, theirs is the only goalie boot that is lasted with a plastic outsole, which is one of the reasons their boots are so durable. The problem here is that the plastic outsole gives the Graf boots a definite heel-toe pitch that shouldn't necessarily match any other cowling but the Graf Cobra. Now, in reality, you should be able to put a Graf boot in anything but an SLM/CCM Protectall 1 cowling. It just won't be *that* easy to negotiate the mating between the heels and the toes.
For everyone who doesn't have Graf boots, you're in much better shape. Because Bauer, RBK, CCM and everyone else *don't* put a plastic outsole on their boots, once you remove the original cowling, they're flexible enough to adapt to any cowling you like. Be aware, however, that putting them in a new cowling may *slightly* change the way the boots fit, since they're adapting to a somewhat different underlying structure.
All your local shop will do is match the boots to a cowling and rivet them together. They should use the holes in the boots to make new holes in the cowling; though some of the holes in both may match up.
For porretts (hey buddy - still rolling those Supremes?), my guess is that you need a size 9 RBK cowling. That being said, just take your XXXs up to JR. It'll be way cheaper than buying the parts and having them shipped from HockeyGeeks in London, and he'll install them for you while he regales you with tales of his latest conquests.
He's also getting frighteningly good at blade-profiling, so you may as well take advantage of that too.
For everyone else, there really isn't a handy guide for sizing cowlings against boots. The only way to do it by phone (if your local shop won't/can't order the RBK cowlings) is to measure along the bottom of your current cowlings with a soft tape measure, right alongside the blades, then call up a shop that carries the cowlings in stock (ie. HockeyGeeks) and have them measure the bottoms of RBK cowlings in the nearest sizies (so if you had a size 8.0 Bauer boot, they'd measure sizes 7, 8 and 9 in the RBK cowlings). This is definitely less than ideal: you really do want to take your skates in to a shop and have the techs eyeball them next to some RBK/CCM skates.
Oh, and just FYI, the RBK cowlings are exactly the same as the CCM Vector cowlings. The only difference is that the RBK's have about six grams of plastic cut out of the heel. You can use all the CCM blades in RBK cowlings, and vice versa. Personally, I went with the CCM cowlings and RBK 9K blades, because the RBK's were a lot more flexible in that heel area, and six grams isn't enough weight to sacrifice that bit of protection.
Oh, and Jim, they did sort of fix the problem by including the washers, but I came up with a better solution. It turned out that 6mm metric washes fit *perfectly* over the barrel of the nut that passes through the blade, and in turn, the outside of the 6mm washer fits perfectly in the recesses on the outside of the blade holder. So, not only do I get better lateral tension with the washers, I also brace the blades fore and aft against a hell of a lot more cowling.
That said, I did lose one screw/nut combo during a recent game. I got a replacement, and will soon add semi-permanent Loctite.
All said and done, the RBK/CCM cowlings are probably the best you can get. The replaceable blades are a great invention, and their stainless steel is far and away the highest quality available for goalies. I've been getting about 20-25 skates per sharpening, as opposed to 4-5 with my old SLM blades, and my blades don't dent on the posts at all.
Hope that helps...
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