Lace ‘Em Up
By Benjamen Johnson
Bent nail through a dowel, you better look out — Sport Mate is selling a product to replace you. If you’ve ever gone rollerblading or ice skating, you may have used a homemade lace puller to get your laces tight, but who wants to carry around a bent nail in their pocket?
The Lace Puller is a pulling hook that folds into an aluminum carabiner clip for storage. It comes in either red or blue and retails for $6. If you can’t find it locally, you’ll probably pay as much again for shipping.
Lace Puller [Sport Mate]
Street Pricing [Google]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]
June 12th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
This is actually kind of a crowded market. There are a bunch of different skate lace pullers out there. Hockeymonkey.com lists at least 3 (including this one).
My personal favorite, however, is a tool that’s actually used to pull springs on motorcycles. They’re about 8″ long and have t-shaped handles, so it’s much easier to reach your laces when you’re fully geared up and realize one of your skates is loose. Google search “Motorcycle spring hook” turns up a few.
June 12th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
@Joe:
Motorcycle Spring Hook at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Motion-Pro-Spring-Hook-Tool/dp/B001DDH16Y
Nice! I’ll have to try this.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
You know, there’s one other option too… and you probably already have one.
Many Victorinox swiss army knives have a hook on the back-side.
The smallest Victorinox model with this feature is the Climber, and it can be had for about $10-15. So, you get your lace hook AND a swiss army knife to boot!
June 12th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
@Benjamen - yeah, that’s exactly what I have, but shop around, I mine was under $10.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:04 am
I could see people needing something like this for snowboarding boots.