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| WEAR, TEAR, and REPAIR
Here we will discuss typical wear and tear on your equipment and how/whether or not to repair it.
Slider gear longevity varies widely by user, technique and terrain conditions |
| Knee Pads
You will wear through kneepads the fastest of all your gear. The plastic Caps will be contacting the pavement every slide. You will be putting your fall weight on them with momentum. The pavement, no matter how smooth will chew them up. This is not a design flaw or reason to find new materials in fact this wearing actually makes sliding possible. Understanding this is important to safe and responsible sliding.
All that said, slider knee pads can be worn after an initial hole has formed. When a weakness forms in the pad and starts to form a hole, the cap can still be used as wear will continue to occur at the edge of the hole. As a hole forms your weight will cause the foam pad underneath to push into the hole on the cap. When this occurs the pad will be ground down. A quarter sized hole is a good sign that you should have a new pad ready, but can still be slid on. Pads with larger holes should be replaced soon. I have slid on pads with holes as big as half my palm, but I do not recommend it for safe sliding. Holes that big remove much padding from your knee pad and greatly degrades performance. Trust Us, you do not want to feels sharp rock (or piece of glass) penetrate thinned padding and lodge into your kneecap while performing.
Please retire worn pads before they become dangerous.
Of note, there is one other way that pads become unusable: material failure. Depending on technique and garment, the straps or the cloth shell of your kneepads can wear out and tear. This can happen before a cap is fully worn through. When that happens I recommend retiring the pad and cannibalizing the cap as a refit in an emergency. Some people will try to restitch the tear, but I would suggest only using re-stitched pads in practice situations. A worn and torn shell is likely to re-tear and doing so during a performance is not only embarrassing but also dangerous.
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|  | Boots
Boots tend to wear in predictable ways. First and most obviously the leather over the steel toes will wear off. This is not only normal but actually desired. The exposed steel slides over the ground better than leather and also creates spanks as it hits imperfections in the pavement. The next thing that will happen is the laces will wear through or snap. You will want to replace them with zip ties (aka, cable ties, plastic cuffs, etc.) or leather lacing. These fixes will also wear through but leather wears slower and cable ties are easy and cheap to replace.
After these standard wear patterns, a number of other things can happen. Depending on sliding technique the leather around the toe can wear out so much that the steel toe can fall out. We usually glue the steel back in with the same flexible slue we use for gluing fingertips on to gloves (Shoe Goo, E-6000, or Goop). We usually couple that with glued on leather pieces to the most worn areas. The same leather patches can be glued onto areas of extreme wear.
Most wear to a set of boots will be to the top and sides, but the soles of boots wear out and breakdown as well. Usually you will deal with worn tread, but sometimes other failures crop up. The act of sliding can catch the front edge of the sole and peel it loose from a boot. This can be fixed by gluing and clamping a boot overnight, using Shoe Goo, E-6000, or Goop. A better fix can be done by some cobblers (shoe makers and repairers) and entails restitching the sole. Similar fixes can be used if a sole gives loose in the center due to stress and flex. A sole may also crack and split under the stress of sliding. It the pieces of the sole stay affixed to the boot it should still be okay, but care should be taken to examine the boots at the end of each night to see if repairs should be made.
The last kind of wear happens to the steel toes of your sliding boots. Over time you will wear a hole through the steel. For Some Sliders this can happen every weekend and I’ve seen one slider burn through steel in one night. This Happens on real rough pavement.
Most likely a reasonable slider on moderate pavement can make a set of boots last a whole season (sometimes two). When a steel toe wears out, There are really only two options: find a replacement or cover up cap or get new boots. You do not want to be sliding with your toes exposed to the pavement. Replacement caps are difficult to come by unless you know a blacksmith to custom make them so most sliders I know just get new boots.
We are looking into sourcing of replacement caps, but variances in boot cap sizes is hindering finding a one size fits all solution.
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| Gloves and Fingertips
Gloves and fingertips can wear out and/or fail in a number of ways. Again this is a variable based on a number of factors, like slider technique and pavement but not excluding weather conditions, material choices, or any number of factors. The most common failures include:
Glue failure
Torn leather
Worn fingertips.
Glue failure is not usually the fault of the glue. It is instead usually caused by a fingertip's or washer's edge catching a pavement edge (or a rock, fencing, netting, etc.). When the edge of a tip or washer hits a pavement crack or edge at just the right angle and speed it can tear the piece off the glove.
With the flexible glues we use and recommend, we prevent this most of the time. When a tip or washer rips off it will usually take a thin layer of leather with it, As long as only a thin layer is removed the finger tip can be remounted and the gloves salvaged. Follow instructions in the fingertip instructions side bar. If the tip or washer rips a hole in the glove when it is removed, we recommend retiring the glove and making/buying a new glove.
Wear Spots and tears in the leather are the next most common problem with slider gloves. Rough pavement. inexact technique, and failure to properly position washers can lead to failures in even the toughest leather gloves. Small tears can be stitched together using appropriate leather tools or patched with leather and flexible waterproof (sweatproof) glue (Shoe Goo, E-6000, or Goop). Gloves with large or recurring tears should be retired before becoming unsafe.
Finally we come to worn out fingertips. Although made of strong metal the fingertips on slider gloves do wear out, constant grinding on the pavement not only wears at the metal but the friction also causes heat that contributes to deformation and breakdown. The first signs of wear are ground down tips. The next stage of wear is pitting. The tip will develop a divot that bowls in towards your finger. And finally there is breakthrough where the tip has ground all the way through. As with pads, a small hole is not dangerous but as it gets bigger the leather tip of the glove will begin to wear. Unless you like making new gloves, I recommend replacing fingertips before holes get big enough to wear the leather underneath. | |
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