The new Bont GT3 short track speed skating blade is made with the best Japanese knife steel.

It also benefits from all the technology, research and development put into Bont's new Platinum blade.

This blade uses the same materials as the Platinum apart from the blade steel. The GT3's blade steel is tempered using Bont's 20+ years of short track blade making experience.

Consistency has been the focus of Bont's new GT3 blade.

Machining time is expensive and blade manufacturers grind the steel in batches at high speeds to reduce costs. This results in the steel warping due to the high temperature of the grinding stone grinding the steel.

Bont's aim for the GT3 and the Platinum blades was to make every blade the same so they purchased the best grinding stones from Germany and they slowly grind one set of steel blades at a time. This is an extremely slow process with higher costs but the result is steel that has not warped.

All skaters, not just Olympians, should enjoy perfect blades. However, Bont didn't stop with the grinding, they looked at all other aspects of making the blade and developed a new stronger glue that allowed them to reduce the tube slot width by another 0.1mm. The tube slot needs a certain amount of room for the glue on either side of the blade. The greater the gap, the more chance the steel has to warp while the glue sets. By reducing this gap, Bont improved the consistency of the straightness of the blade after glueing.

Lastly, Bont invested heavily in jigs. Each blade is clamped in 9 locations while it sets and we let the blades set for 14 hours until the glue has fully cured. This means that only make a few sets of blades per day, but each set is perfect.

Aluminium tubes do not like to be bent. They always spring back to the straight position. To solve this problem, Bont has two solutions:

• Bont makes the tube out of aluminium which is more likely to stay bent than other brands of blades.
• Bont cut the slot for the steel blade in the aluminium tube on a slight bend. The tube is straight but the steel blade is already on a slight curve. This curve is slight and you will still need to bend the blade more to get the optimum bend to suit your radius. However, you now only need to bend the aluminium tube a very small amount to get your optimum bend. This small amount of tube bending is not enough to stress the tube and the result is a blade that holds its bend for a much longer period.