Buell

My winter home mountain, June Mountain, is so quiet on groomer days there is no need to froth. No one is there, no one is coming!

It is the best method to feel a carve I have found! And probably because of a mild case of OCD. ?

That is the Spark Dyno. Will has been making those for several years. Yes they use Bomber bails. Not sure what Spark will do now, maybe there are enough bails to keep them supplied for now. They are designed to be used on a splitboard puck system and are plenty strong for splitboarding. I have never heard of any issues.

The ideal is a buyer that can pay cash, or at least pay cash for the purchase amount that exceeds the amount they can get from a loan from a financial institution. I believe the Callens had a $50,000 loan from a bank and $200,000 from Fin. That tells me that the Callens could only get $50,000 in financing from sources other than Fin. I assume Fin sold to the best buyer he could find. I don't know how much cash the Callens put down, but if Fin were to accept the lower financeable lump sum, $50,000 + any cash the Callens put down, that probably isn't much and he would not have received the additional $200,000 anyway. Might as well take the risk and hopefully get the business back if things go south. It is just part of selling a small business here in the US. Financing for buying a business is really tight and you cannot get anywhere near the purchase price with unsecured loans. Probably because a lot of purchases of small businesses fail and banks don't want to lose money.

It is common, in the US at least, for the owner (seller) of a small business to carry the note for the buyer. Many times it is the only option for the seller to get a decent price. This is because the buyer can rarely get enough financing from other outside sources like banks. Ideally if the buyer cannot make the payments, the business goes back to the original owner in reasonable condition. Unfortunately for Fin, that obviously did not happen in this case. I have seen this arrangement work out, I have seen the buyer fail and business returned to the original owner successfully, and I have seen a result very similar to this Bomber fiasco where bankruptcy wipes out the debt owed to the original owner. Sometimes you have to take a risk that might not work out.

It is not a big company. The only people I have ever had contact with at Kessler, starting with my first call 9 years ago, is Hansjuerg Kessler himself and another person who coordinated my payment. I am just a freecarver. I would expect racers are his top priority.

Recently it took Hansjuerg a while to get back to me and I have purchased two customs from him in the past. I finally just sent an email through the contact link asking him to confirm if he had gotten my emails. He wrote back and said yes, he was out of town for a couple more weeks. About two weeks ago he wrote with a few questions and I responded. I haven't heard anything else. He will get to it. Email is an imperfect system. Maybe you are getting caught up in spam filters? Maybe try a phone call during his business hours? I assume you have checked, but could Kessler replies be in your spam folder?

He was on vacation for a couple of weeks (at least) and seems to be slowly digging out.

My custom, built for me, 162 SL is pretty beefy. I have to control speed by cutting in the nose. I cannot flex the middle significantly to tighten the turn. Curious what others have to say.

6'4 would have some leverage! Kessler might have a 165 length custom SL or a custom 168?

I did have a 175 SG GS that was one of my favorite boards ever. It would do anything I wanted and had a nice broad range. BWD, it does not surprise me that your 163 SG was great. I just never quite got along with the 157 SL. I ride a custom Kessler 162 SL for my 148 pounds. I wanted a bigger turning board than the stock 156. Based on the 168 I owned, it will be too soft for David if he occasionally finds the 185 a bit soft. The stock 162 SL has a lot more backbone. David, you could contact Hansjuerg Kessler about his boards. He is very friendly and responsive. I have called Kessler before and Hansjuerg actually answered the phone.

The stock Kessler 162 SL or a custom Kessler SL are great options. The stock 162 SL I rode is a lot more board than the 168 that I had. I had a 157 SG SL for a while. It could be amazing to ride but was less forgiving than the Kessler SLs and needed firm snow to work well. In soft groom, it was difficult to ride. I don't know for sure, but the current model 163 SG SL is probably similar. If you deal with softer groom, my experience is that the Kesslers SLs perform well in a broader range of conditions.

As you touched on, I ride hardboots and softboots with a moderate to high amount of forward lean. Riding it is good, standing on the board it feels awkward. My quads would burn like crazy when I first started carving hardboots. It wasn't the set up though, it was the activity. Boot forward flex can also be pretty important. The harder you can push the boots, the stiffer set up you need. As someone just starting out on hardboots, I expect you will want more flex in your boots, if possible.

I thought about adding I ride 53/50 to my post above. Yes, lower or higher angles will make a difference in how different set ups affect your riding

Your goal is to find a balanced stance in carving position where you are best able to switch edges on both toe and heelside, make micro adjustments during the turn, absorb terrain imperfections, and be able to carve easy or aggressive turns. Your riding style and body mechanics will largely determine your personal set up. Some people ride with flat bindings so the only adjustment available to them is the boot cuffs. I have found that I use the binding toe and heel lift (or flat) to control how much pressure I apply to each foot while carving and initiating turns and to make sure my body is in the correct fore/aft position to initiate and then drive through turns. I use the boot forward lean to put my lower legs in the correct place to initiate turns. In other words, when there is no load on the boot, is your lower leg and lower body in the correct location to initiate your turn without awkward upper body movement? You will possibly have to strike a balance with forward lean between heelside initiation and toeside initiation. You will also need to balance the forward lean to work for both mellower carving and aggressive carving.

Thanks Jack. For now I will just sign up for monthly. No need to make you do extra work right now.

I prefer to not have automatic withdrawals on my accounts. I am happy to pay for a year at a time. I believe in KISS (especially on something like this), so if it is too much to also offer yearly payments, I understand and will sign up for monthly billing. Thanks

Jack, is there a way to pay for a year? Thanks

The stiffness of the production Kesslers might vary from year to year, but they seem pretty consistent. Kesslers are amazingly friendly boards in their way. They are damp, have great edge hold, and all the design aspects work extremely well together. They will let you do things that other boards cannot pull off. What makes Kesslers more difficult to ride is that they do not slow down coming out of turns. They can handle the speed, but you have to be able to deal with it and you have to work harder to control it. The 168 I owned was from about 8 years ago. I consider it the freecarver in the Kessler lline. Both my wife (130 pounds) and I (145 pounds) could ride it fine. It was very forgiving. It seems to have a broad weight range. I felt the 171 was easier to bend for me, but the narrower waist could have made it feel quicker edge to edge with my 25m feet. Ultimately, the 168 was a bit too wide for my wife's (23m) and my little feet. The stock 162 SL from about the same time was too stiff for me. I could get away with riding it if I stayed right over the edge. If I got off the edge just a bit, it would chatter out on me. I just needed more weight. The 171 GS (for light riders) from a year or two later hand flexed really soft, particularly in the nose. I thought it would be too soft for me, but it rode really well and had a lot more backbone than I expected. It was very friendly. I sold it because it was a softer board than I wanted to ride (and I had a 175 SG GS that I loved to ride). Since that time I have been riding a 162 SL (on my second one) built custom for my weight.

I don't always go all the way across the fall line. If I am comfortable with the speed I will often do much more open turns at high speed pumping the board coming out of the apex of turns. I only consistently make C carves across the fall line when I need to control my speed. Otherwise I am just surfing the contours of the run and "1/2 carving" all over the place. Other turns are held extra long. I don't understand the necessity of a distinction between how long a carved turn is held. Carving is carving. One of the best carvers I have ever seen in person could not go fast enough. He almost never finished a turn but if he did, it was heavy. He ripped!

This. Most recreational carvers seek a flow between turns. Racers are told where to go by the position of the gates. The gates are set to distinguish between different riders abilities. Racing involves more complex techniques than freecarving. The ability to carve well is just one of them. Hard boot snowboarders have benefited greatly from technique and equipment developed primarily for racing.

Thank for the review yamifumi. I have not tried the SGs, but they look nice. I assume they are made by F2? It is effectively the same binding with some small tweaks. Is the center disk on the SGs plastic or coated metal? For on the snow adjustments, I actually prefer a pozidrive because it clears snow better. An allen key just presses it deeper into the allen key slot. I carry a small folding pozidrive tool in my pocket that works fine. Both options tend to strip slowly over time but I have a lot of hours on F2s and have never stripped a screw. Looking at your photos yamifumi, I can see it being a pain to adjust F2 cant/lift. Due to my boot size, my toe and heel blocks only need to be moved a little to get to the screws that hold the cant/lift down, so it is a quick procedure. I rarely make any adjustments at this point anyway. You can buy an extra set of cant/lift shims for the F2s.

You can modify the flex of the UPZs by changing the stock springs out to stiffer or softer springs. You just have to buy them from a spring supply company. I have not ridden the DGSS, but I like the stock set up on the UPZs. As a lightweight, I use the red tongues.

I am feeling it for those of you who loved your Bomber bindings. It is certainly a huge loss to have them out of production. I bought a pair of SW to try when they first came out, but sold them. I much prefer the flex pattern of F2s. Bomber bindings are not a good match for my lighter weight and riding style (150 pounds). The SW could definitely be lighter and accommodate smaller boots better. The biggest issue I have with the SWs is the dead spot in the flex. The boots flex forward and the SWs flex laterally. The problem for me with these two distinct options is that I need to shift up and down the long axis of the board which is much closer to a 45 degree angle at my angles of 53/50. If forward and lateral are the only two flex directions available to me, it becomes a two step process. Flex the boot, then the binding or flex the binding and then the boot. I was always bumping up against that dead spot on the SWs. The F2s are softer in the long axis of the board direction (roughly 45 degrees) and allow me get my legs where they need to go in one movement. Perhaps the more evenly flexing TD3, while still stiffer than I want to ride, might have a better flex pattern for riders that are heavy enough to get the flex out of them (I have ridden the TD2s quite a bit, but never the TD3s). The other issue with the SWs is that they beat me up a lot more than F2s when the grooming was imperfect. I expect this is related to the dead spot in the flex issue.

Splitboard.com is a mixture of riders. True, almost none of them have ridden hardboots, but I am constantly amazed how many of them do not modify their AT boots, even for forward ankle flex. While I know some hardbooters might be able to pull that off with good technique, I really wonder how some of the people coming from softboots look with their normal low angles and boots that are hard to flex at the ankles. I have hardbooted since I started snowboarding in 2005, when carving groomers. I prefer softboots for non carving resort riding (I don't do much) and AT boots for splitboarding (I splitboard a lot). My TLTs were modified by just expanding the forward lean slot so I could have some ankle flex. The Phantom bindings are designed to provide lateral flex which becomes very important at the lower angles you ride on a splitboard. I ran 25f/20r for a while and am now down to 21f/12r. Nils, I have been riding the Gignouxs for over a year now and I cannot imagine putting them in softboot bindings? If nothing else, it seems like the bindings would be way too wide for the ultra low profile Gignouxs. Why would you bother carrying heavy, clunky softboot bindings if you are on the Blacks? They definitely do not need a highback. They are almost too stiff on heelside with all that carbon.