Made it up to Meadows Thursday evening to test out my "new to me" set-up in somewhat decent snow. 'John Deere' supplied me with some Deeluxe Indys and 'oldsnowboards.com' sold me some TD3's and BTS. I was going to use my old Mistral Sonic 167, BUT oldsnowboards.com wouldn't/couldn't let me commit such a heinous crime and insisted I take one his, shall I say, many extra carving boards (Donek (172?)) to demo. I figured he is either insane, to let me take it having just met him an hour before, or a very shrewd businessman, knowing that I would not return the board to him, but bring cash instead. He must be shrewd, because I will be bringing him the cash.
Back to the mountain. I was there on Friday evening for our company's ski (drinking) trip. Horrible snow for carving, but I was able to get a bunch of good turns in and tune in a few boot/binding things before getting to the real reason for the trip.
Thursday evening was much better snow. I was on new boot-bindings-board and it took me a few runs to get any kind of feel and confidence. Then it became very apparent that I should have got modern gear years ago. First of all the boots are a near perfect fit, and with the BTS adjusted properly, grabs my shin better than I thought possible. The boot-binding interface is way, way stronger and more linear feeling than my old burtons. The board seems to carve a slightly smaller radius (at any given lean angle) than the Mistral.
Overall impression of new set-up vs. old? Extremely more confidence inspiring! The old gear always felt that it wanted to come out of the carve if you didn't keep a huge amount of muscle and concentration up. And, that rolling into the carve, the carve wouldn't always start when I would expect it to. And my feet don't hurt. And it takes less effort.
BTW, my son followed me for a run with a helmet cam and got some very shaky video. I will try to post it this afternoon. I am looking forward to getting some advice and being told what I am doing wrong.
Thanks for listening to me ramble and I hope to meet you carvers soon...