So as many of you know, I play both ice and ball hockey (henceforth to be called “dek” because it has fewer letters to type!). I actually play more dek than ice, and enjoy it more.
We play on a heavily varnished hardwood floor. Now like other non-ice surfaces, jenpro tends to stick to the floor so what I needed was an easily removable more slidable material on the gussets for dek.
My dek groups are considering making the switch to felt pucks this upcoming season, and all reports I’ve heard from those who have used them they slide really well, and are very durable. Thus it hit me...Felt was the answer!!!
What I wanted to do was have slide plates of fairly firm felt attached to the pads via 3 straps, one above the knee rolls, one below the knee rolls, and one at the boot break. Because I wear Velocities, I could run the straps under the leg channel in the back, and over the face and through the vertical roll breaks on the front. The knee wing on my pads are nylon and slide well on hardwood, so I didn’t cover them, but if they were jenpro I would have added a knee wing to the felt plates, and had the knee strap run through it to hold it in place.
Off to my local “Fabric Land”! I picked up a meter of 1/8" thick felt, 4 meters of white nylon strapping, and 1 meter of white Velcro. (Turns out on of my adult piano students works there so I think I got a bit extra material
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I used a paper bag on the gusset to trace out the shape, and then used that to draw the shape on to the felt. I went 3 layers of felt per pad simply because I am only anchoring the felt to the pad in three places, so I wanted the plates to have some firmness to hold their shape.
I hand stitched the straps in place, and then got my wife to show me how to use a sewing machine. I caught on pretty quickly and in about an hour I completed the project.
Here is the finished product! First on their own:
Now on the pads:
I put them on and went into my studio bathroom, which is really big, and covered with textured linoleum. I did about 20 aggressive butterfly slides, both from an up starting position and a down starting position. Both plates stayed secure and slide pretty well. The hardwood I play on is significantly slicker than my bathroom floor so I anticipate these are going to work like a charm!!!
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Linear Mode
