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📋 Buying Used Skates

What to check, what to ask, and when to walk away — before you spend money on someone else's boots.

About this guide General buying guidance only, compiled from manufacturer documentation and skate-tech sources — each section lists its sources. It is not a fitting, not personalized advice, and not a medical opinion. Boot fit and blade condition affect injury risk, and neither can be judged reliably from a listing photo, so have anything you buy assessed in person by a qualified skate tech or fitter before skating on it. Equipment specifics vary by model and change over time: verify anything here against the manufacturer's own current guidance for your exact boot or blade before acting on it.

Brand fit character — and matching stiffness to your jumps

Boot stiffness is the whole game, and it is the thing a used listing almost never states. A boot too stiff for the skater blocks the ankle bend that skating depends on; a boot too soft stops protecting the ankle on landings.

No manufacturer publishes numeric last geometry — heel width, instep height, volume — for any brand. Everything known about how brands differ in fit comes from fitters and pro shops describing what they see on real feet, so treat the descriptions below as experienced opinion rather than spec.

The broad picture fitters describe: Jackson runs wide in the toe box with a narrow heel and suits the most feet; Riedell runs narrow and tapered through toes and instep, suiting slender feet; Graf has a higher, rounder toe box and a high vertical arch; Edea is built around the heel first and offers four widths (B narrow through E extra wide), which the company says covers over 90% of feet. Risport is the one where sources actively disagree — described as narrow with a medium arch by one shop and as having a gradual instep lift that suits flat or pronated feet by another.

Stiffness ratings are numeric but NOT comparable across brands. A Jackson 60, an Edea 60 and a Risport 60 are not the same boot. Jackson publishes a scale running from 2 up to 85 and explicitly cautions that weight, height, and skating frequency confound any simple mapping. Edea gives model recommendations in prose rather than tying numbers to jumps. No manufacturer publishes a rigorous "triples need N" rule, and anyone presenting a cross-brand equivalence table has constructed it themselves.

Buy stiffness for the jumps you land consistently, not the ones you are learning. Too stiff restricts ankle dorsiflexion, which forces a forward lean and shifts sustained eccentric load onto the back of the leg — a pattern podiatry sources associate with Achilles tendinopathy. Too soft means the heel counter cannot hold the landing.

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Heat molding and boot life

You will read that a boot can only be heat molded two or three times before it stops taking shape. No manufacturer publishes any such limit, and the figure appears to be shop convention rather than spec.

What manufacturers actually say is milder. Jackson states plainly that reheating is fine and that a second molding is acceptable if the first did not shape properly. Riedell says most of its boots can be re-molded and that most skaters should not need more than one or two sessions. Edea says the process can be repeated and that boots can be adjusted many times, though once or twice should give a good fit.

The published constraint is qualitative, not numeric: if a boot needs molding repeatedly to become comfortable, that points to a fitting error — wrong length or width — rather than to a molding problem. That reframing is more useful to a used buyer than any count would be, because it means "molded several times" is a signal the boot may never have fit its previous owner properly.

Critical brand difference: Edea boots must NEVER be oven baked. Edea uses spot heating of specific thermoformable areas by a trained technician and warns directly that putting the boot in an oven will damage it. Jackson and Riedell do oven bake, around 165–170°F for a few minutes. Getting this wrong destroys the boot.

What nobody publishes, and worth knowing you are guessing about: whether prior molding to someone else’s foot consumes any of the material’s ability to re-form, and whether a used boot can be successfully re-molded to a new foot. Mechanically it appears possible, but no source addresses it directly.

No manufacturer publishes a boot lifespan in hours or seasons either. Pro shops commonly say regular skaters (2–3 times a week) replace boots every one to three years, and that elite athletes may replace every 6–12 months. Judge by condition, not by a calendar.

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Blades — how much life is actually left

Blades are the better used buy, and the reason is structural: a blade’s failure modes are externally inspectable, while a boot’s main failure — lost support — is largely invisible and depends on your foot.

No blade manufacturer publishes a sharpening limit or a minimum usable height. John Wilson’s site has no technical or care section at all. Every "how many sharpenings" number in circulation comes from sharpeners and forums, not from the makers.

The one genuinely useful gauge is the chrome relief. Blades are chrome plated except for a band along the bottom, roughly a quarter inch, ground off at manufacture so the soft chrome never touches ice. The blade has usable life until you are through that band — and the band is visible in a decent side-on photo. A wide unplated band means plenty of life; a band nearly gone means the blade is finished.

How fast that band disappears depends entirely on who sharpens. A normal four-pass sharpening removes two to three thousandths of an inch, which works out to nearly a hundred sharpenings through a quarter inch. Cross-grinding removes ten to twenty thousandths per session, cutting that to roughly twenty. The commonly repeated "about thirty sharpenings" sits between the two. These figures are not really in conflict; they describe different sharpening practices, which is itself the point.

In practice, for intermediate and advanced blades, the spin rocker flattens before the steel runs out. Profile, not steel, usually ends a blade’s life — so inspect the shape before you measure anything.

Sharpening frequency for context: pro shops commonly cite 20–40 hours of skating between sharpenings, with elite skaters often under 15. Jackson declines to give an hours figure and recommends keeping a log instead.

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Reading a listing — what to ask, and when to walk away

Most bad used purchases are avoidable from the listing alone. Fitters are close to unanimous that buying used sight-unseen is a gamble; these questions narrow it.

Sizing is the trap. Figure skate sizing does not track street shoe size, it differs between brands, and Edea does not use shoe sizing at all — its boots are sized in millimetres at 5mm intervals, and the boot size typically runs about 10mm larger than the measured foot. Edea explicitly declines to publish a street-shoe conversion. A rough cross-brand illustration from one shop: someone in a Jackson 6 is probably a Riedell 5.5.

Because of that, the single most transferable number is the outsole length — measured with a rigid ruler from the tip of the toe to the back edge of the heel. It travels across brands in a way that a size label does not. It still tells you nothing about heel width, volume, or the shape the boot has already taken.

On price: used beginner boots typically sell for 30–50% of retail, and shops offering trade-in credit tend to pay around a third of retail, which brackets the low end of private-sale value. Nobody publishes separate percentages for boots versus blades versus sets. Location moves prices — sellers in large metro areas command more.

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