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SnoJH

Suggestions for Street pads

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So my old pads are slowly dying, and I can start seeing the inside. Anyone have any suggestions for good street goalie pads? I'm not looking for those cheap ones at Canadian tire.

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Both wouldn't be bad for me.

I like both versions, though a good pair for floor hockey would be useful as I'm a junior high teacher.

So what are the best SH and FH pads?

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When I played street hockey as a kid, we had some cheap pair of Franklin pads, but most important is they were covered in hard plastic so you can slide on the rough ground. IDK what pads there are nowadays but for street, you want to have hard plastic on the pads. As for floor, I am not sure probably one of those 1K Reebok pads that are meant to stop balls and are cheap.

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Maybe head to your local used sporting goods store and find an old pair of cheap ice pads? Those are built better and can last longer.

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No matter what you buy, concrete will tear up any pad you buy. SO long as you put hard plastic where the pad will slide and make contact with the road (sides, front), it will be fine. Chances are you wont be playing the butterfly in the road so anything that protects your legs should suffice

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I know, but ice pads are built better and will last longer.

We have a set of really old Franklin ice hockey pads and the leather has held up really well, we're hard on our goalie gear because we play on a lot of different surfaces, and they have been going for a couple years with lots of use. I think we picked them up at a used sports store, trading in a couple old pairs of skates or something. For the monkey suit we have a ball hockey one, RBK 2k I think, it was around 50 bucks and does the trick.

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Gravel is bad, but asphalt annihilates textiles, just like skin: for experimental confirmation, run down a rough road and then do a knee-slide-to-corner-flag football celebration -- goodbye knees.

If you're playing on a rough surface like asphalt, which is specifically design to facilitate braking, nothing will really survive or slide properly. You may as well just get 14"-wide, Jon Carey-style pads and make standing kick-saves for fun.

If you're playing on a smoother surface (polished concrete gym floors are the best), you can get very good results from textiles and superb results from plastic slide-plates on the medial (inside) surfaces of the pad, and especially the medial edge (and binding) of the boot. You're also going to be dealing with more friction than on ice, but you can make it work.

While lower weight nylons (420D, 600D) sometimes work better, Cordura Nylon is the best compromise between durability and sliding you'll find. In fact, snow build-up and 'stickiness' on the ice aside, Cordura is a vastly more durable material than most of the synthetic leathers used in goalie equipment. If money is no object, have custom pads made with a full Cordura shell; this will also result in an unbelievably light pad. Eagle did this a bit, and Battram still does it, but there's really no reason any company couldn't do it. If you're looking to retrofit a pair of existing pads for permanent off-ice use, you can cover the medial gusset and knee/calf-wings with it. To use the same pads off-ice as on-ice, and alternate between uses, you can make a full or partial pad-cover. The full version is like a big pad-sock (or condom), but these generally don't work quite as well on modern pads with big knee/calf-wings. The partial version is a a sling that simply covers the medial surfaces of the pad; you can also build these as three pieces (covering the knee-wing, calf-wing, and a long one for the medial gusset) that velcro together.

That said, the best off-ice results are almost universally achieved by adding plastic 'slide plates' to the medial surfaces. You can use almost anything - some people have had really good results by cutting up $5 'crazy carpets' (for sliding down snowy hills and killing yourself), but you can use any high-density polytheylene (HDPE), and ideally UHMWPE, which is incredibly smooth and self-lubricating. Some guys have had success wrapping very thin plastics around curved surfaces (eg. Reebok/Lefebvre medial rolls), but generally, this works best with flat-gusset pads. You can use pretty well any mechanical system to attach the slide-plates. Some people have had good results with sewing synthetic leather tabs into the pad and lacing in the slide-plates with 3mm cord or skate lace; others prefer Velcro, although that generally only works as a permanent solution, since good adhesive velcro strips will screw your pad for on-ice use. I had my best results by just replacing the outer hard knee-wing with a 1/8" slab of UHMWPE.

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