So the story begins back in 2006 when I bought a set of goalie pads and gloves off ebay. In the photo they looked navy blue which is fine, I went to PSU and navy blue and white were our school colors. When they arrived I realized they were purple and not in fact navy blue and I was sort of stuck with them. But not for long as I got run over by a truck and my ankle got torn up so there was no hockey in my future for a while.

Fast forward to last year when I was playing street hockey again with my "Gene Simmons" pads. I sprained my MCL and got sidelined for a month while my knee healed so I decided that the purple pads needed to get transformed into something more palatable (i.e. much less purple).

After much sewing of 1000D cordura and fabrication of UHMW slide plates and wear bars I came up with these babies. The fronts have THICK slide plates on them to protect the surface (they're actually diced up cutting boards). The insides have UHMW slide plates on them so I can actually butterfly and slide in these pads and the outside rolls with the black stripes are made from ABS drain pipe which is velcroed on to the cordura. Essentially any surface that can get ground away by asphalt has sacrificial plastic on it. This picture was taken mid-process so the left pad still has some additional parts to be added (toe guard and thigh board).

Sure they're heavy but so am I, and they're built to last for about two or three years of heavy outdoor use. They survived the first season with only minor repairs (my biggest issue is the fasteners coming loose, I should have loc-tited them in).

I'll never build another set based on the amount of time it took me to make these (technically they are slipcovers over the old pads which are essentially unmodified underneath, they can be returned to their HIDEOUS PURPLE original state in less than an hour).

But mission accomplished, they are much more tigery than before, much more orange and they are much more durable and much less purple. Asphalt does a number on Jenpro so they should have a long service life with any luck. Oh and before anybody asks, I didn't skin the gloves, they are still purple. It was much easier to buy a new orange and black trapper and blocker. If anybody wants to buy a purple TPS blocker and glove, send me a note, they're hardly used and when new they were worth about $300 but I'll let them go for less than that.

Now you see why I wanted the day-glo Rath mask, to match these pads!