Jonny

It sounds like this one is solved but here's a trick which works well for this and any similar issue where heat but not too much heat is needed. Take one of those microwaveable heating pads (or a cloth bag full of dry uncooked rice) and heat it in the microwave until it's almost too hot to touch but not quite. Then set it on the area to be heated and leave it for a minute or so. The. glue will release but there's never enough heat to damage epoxy or paint.

I cut a couple of small slots in a Lexan scraper, and use the slots for screws to attach it to a piece of 1 by 4 poplar. The wood makes for a secure grip and keeps the scraper from bowing in the middle - just peace of mind since I worry about scraping base away and creating concavity. I have a piece of window-glass in my shop to which I paste a sheet of sandpaper ( I use this system for sharpening chisels) - a couple of passes across the sandpaper and the scraper is sharp. Loosen the screws to slide the Lexan up when it's not in use to protect the blade, and slide it down if the sharpening has worn away the edge.

Thanks for the heads-up! The RC10 are mine. Only one other bidder and they went for $157.50. My AF600 Raichles are still pretty solid but they've never held my foot as they ought and these should work well with some modification.

Welcome, and thanks for undertaking this!

I don't have an opinion on the plates but I'm going with "stalkier" from now on! Makes me feel like I spend a lot of time striding vigorously from place to place. I've been "stocky" far too long!

You have a 1997 Alp: http://www.burtonvault.com/main.php?year=1997&model=Alp It was an excellent all-mountain board for its day, not awful on hard snow but much better in slop and really nimble in trees. I still take my 163 out once in a while if the snow is deep and ungroomed or if I'm showing the roped to a new hardbooter. At your daughter's weight the 5 would be better but the 156 will work too. There's no special reason to distrust the board but with a 20 year old lay-up delamination is always a concern.

My first hardboot board was a Hot Logical - Grey with fluorescent Mondrian-blocks - which I think was a 1988 design. I was on a Cruzer 165 following some guy down Wachusett until he took a left turn and was gone. Finally caught up with him to ask what he was riding - a Hot - and I bought a used one at Madd Mike's the next day. Memory may be failing but I think this was 1989-90. Rode in ski boots and broke the bails on my Emery bindings more or less every ten days.

Well, as soon as you do offer a step-in you'll have a TON of buyers including me. USA may be a lot different than Europe but the average age of a hardbooter here is probably close to 60, and latch-ins are for the young! Many of us have learnt to turn the peculiarities of Bomber and Catek bindings to our advantage, so if you offer a heelpiece which will fit other platforms than your own that would be a plus.

Ledecka is amazing. Single elimination is ridiculous. Red course is clearly faster except for the last four gates where the Blue course is straighter. If you think the NBC announcers are awful you should have heard the idiocy during the live stream of the qualifying rounds - some Brit who I don't think had ever seen a snowboard. Galmarini's board looks to have a much softer mid-section than any other's (or he's just hitting it way harder.)

Yep, that's me - in fact I'm typing this from my office in &^*%$#@ Florida where I teach classical acting all winter. I did get 9 days on snow this year including a couple this past weekend (wearing a T-Shirt on Tuesday!). I remember Jorg on that trail - total sickness - and I remember how I got down it - jump-turns, slarves, sideslips and butt-drags. I also made two fully committed pure hard driving carves one of which nearly blew me off the trail into the trees and the other I sucked around so far that my next turns were switch. My mockery of the 4-turn-at a time Posse is purely affectionate of course and I happily join in when I can - for one thing it's just nice to have someone to ride with and admire. I certainly remember sitting on the side of the trail at Stratton trying to figure out how CMC was getting from one edge to the other so fast without dislocating something.

Sure, for those of us who have been riding hardboots more or less exclusively since 1990 or so, or who are really athletic, your advice and Buell's is excellent - even at my advanced age and girth it's pretty much how I ride except on truly hairy terrain. But this OP is a new carver and since he's coming from soft boots he's undoubtedly used to riding much steeper slopes than a new carver would or should. So how is he going to get the sensation of a full carve on anything more than a super-flat piece of terrain? Sure, he can maybe do three or four fully--finished turns before the speed gets ridiculous and he finishes his J-turn with a full stop, and that's exactly what I see a lot of pretty good riders doing - whenever half a dozen hardbooters get together they make a few hero turns and then sit down and watch everyone else make three or four hero turns. That's not alpinism and it makes me ill. The purpose of my suggestion is to give him a chance to ride a full run without a slarve or stivot or a mid-turn check, and it focuses on the really big difference between carving a softboot board and an alpine board - namely, we commit to the new edge WAY earlier - in fact on the big turns you're advocating we'll commit before we're even perpendicular to the fall line. The little check prior to the turn is followed by a hard edge set on the uphill edge with the board pointing across the hill or even uphill a little, which in turn is followed by a full transition onto the new inside edge. If you've risen up to set that initial edge you can drop straight down and cross-through to the new edge, and if you've compressed you'll up unweight instead, but you're getting the full hardboot experience - a carve from 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock at a speed you can maintain, on any slope, all the way down the hill, without the SES/ECES poser's pause. As he gets more confident he'll eliminate the check until it's essentially gone, but in the meantime he's riding the whole mountain.

Skidding at some point is essential for speed control, no matter how much you complete the turn. At the same time, you don't want to spoil the majesty of a fully committed, fully carved turn. So don't skid during the turn, skid FIRST. A little release of the edge as you come across the hill will allow you to dive into the turn with full commitment. It's the equivalent of an "abstem" in skiing - the board just turns uphill slightly in a little skid, to set up the carve at a happy speed.

Thanks Eric but today was probably my last of the season - headed back down to my job in Florida... Nice session today though at Catamount in the Berkshires. The rain had softened everything up but there wasn't much slush - tight frozen layer right under the loose stuff. I haven't yet found a surface that the Proteus won't hold on. Wish I could say the same for my knees.

I rode the same 2002 Coiler 180 until the tail had more bevel than an old Cruzer, but there were many times I wished I had something with more float and a few times when I wished I had something even stouter than that Coiler, with a longer sidecut. I did use an old Oxygen SL for really icy days. Now I'm down to one board again - a Proteus 180, which is stouter and longer-turning than the Coiler - but I'm starting to be curious about a carving-oriented soft boot board, and like any sane carver I'm curious about an MK. The truth is I no longer get enough days on snow to justify more than one board (I do have two pairs of skis - SL and GS) but if I ever get out of Florida I'll build a little quiver again

The Beast for base bevel. I have a really nice all-metal Red side bevel tool which is adjustable but Side of Beast looks excellent also.

Always on my own. However I HAVE ridden Crystal about 17 years ago - super foggy and pretty icy - alone then too!

Not sure how PSR's Nastar 'cap is relevant - fast is fast and he makes a good point about using a base of questionable flatness as a reference. Oh, and he's pretty fast. He was nice enough to help me out briefly with some turning issues on hard snow some years ago and was basically just riding in front of me turn for turn so he could do real-time coaching. I was moving right along and obviously so was he, but he was riding switch. FWIW My Coiler Racecarve was set up at 0.5/3° by Mike D and that worked well. My current Proteus seems to have all the crunch I need at 1/2° Nastar is an excellent measure of speed through a Nastar course. When I was working at Mt Snow in the '70s the head of the Ski School was the National Pacesetter. He wasn't close to being the fastest freeskier.

When the natural snow cover is good Mt Snow is actually tough to beat for carving. Fallen Timbers doesn't usually bump up and has some pitch, Ridge and Sundance have an intoxicating rolling profile and Snowdance is almost 200 yards wide! The Carinthia terrain parks are too big for me but they're fun to look at and there's often a boarder cross course open too. When the hill is relying on snowmaking the snow can be very good but the terrain is more limited. I love the way Okemo grooms and I love the fact that at Stratton I may not be the only hardbooter on the hill. Killington is just a no-go for me and it's not because I don't know the hill. It's because there are so many bad skiers making 11s without any regard for where other skiers are turning, much less for the kind of turns we make on a board. It's just too freakin dangerous. I take the point about the Jersey girls and it's accurate but if head-turning women were the standard I think I'd go north to Tremblant (a lot of people on hard boots there too!). I love Stowe but I only ever ski there - I like the trees and don't have the skill to chase Stowe-level pitch off-piste on a board. Bromley I love but to me is a soft-boot hill because it gets so slushy if there's any sun out at all.

I rode this setup or one just like it about 20 years ago on a dual-base DH board they had in the shop at the base of the Waterville Valley mountain road (On the right after you get off i93 - can't remember the name of the shop but they let me borrow the board). It's hard to say exactly what the X-Wings did because a 195cm board with hardly any sidecut was well out of my comfort zone on anything but the flattest terrain, but the whole assembly was very very damp, very heavy, and really didn't care how fast I was going it would remain stable all the way across the hill and back. Like most DH setups it didn't really do anything until I hit 40MPH and wasn't really loading until considerably faster than that. I gave it back to the shop even though the price was very low because I just couldn't see a use for a board I couldn't ride if there were anyone at all else on the hill.... I'd be curious to try it on an Undertaker or Tanker...

Actually, the Proteus is a riot in bumps as long as they're not so steep that you need to be checking speed a lot. You ride it about how you'd handle bumps on GS skis - super loose knees and hips, lots of pumping off the sides of the moguls and careful not to hit any bump straight on because the aluminum layer can take a permanent bend. I agree with your overall assessment of the board, btw - mine's a 180 and it's a total blast for the two hours my legs can take it, after that I'm back on skis.

Even though it's such a beast on ice, Proteus is actually blast in soft snow and crud - partly the narrow outline and partly the ridiculous amount of rebound - but as long as you've got the thing tipped up on edge the extra width of the Swoard Pro doesn't seem like a liability and it's definitely more oriented toward lying down on the snow. The Proteus seems to me to reward a more east-coast style of angulation and unless you go with a custom width you'll be riding higher angles than most EC riders like. My size 27 Raichles can be ridden at 57/54 but just barely. I haven't been on Squaw since the '70s so I'm not familiar with how it sets up these days but in 1976 I didn't see a glimmer of ice anywhere except on the racecourse so maybe the more EC-oriented boards would be the call?

Racing technique is really different from EC or even Ice-Coast riding and so it needs different gear. Most of us are totally obsessed with getting as much carve as possible and so we'll commit to the new edge when the board is perpendicular to the fall line or even earlier, which requires either thighs like tree trunks or a slightly softer boot which allows you to pull the board UNDER you without disturbing contact with the snow by matching the flex increase at hips, knees and ankles. It's gorgeous but it's relatively slow because we're sliding along nearly half-circles. The pressure is coming on to the edge relatively gradually because the direction change at edge change is mild. Racers will jump and jam their boards to near the fall line or even past it before truly engaging the edge, which must then engage right away or they'll miss the next gate. This means that their boots have to be very stiff in forward flex and almost completely rigid backwards and sideways or the edge won't engage quickly enough - the flex in the boot will absorb the commitment to the edge. It's ugly but it's much faster because the path is so much shorter. They're truly carving for less than a quarter circle. 225s are a reasonable freeriding boot for most people - at 230lb I'd find them very soft but I ride 325s and AF600 (similar to Suzuka I think) pretty happily, even on long., stiff boards. If I were racing I'd probably be happiest in soft ski boots - something around 110-120 flex (by comparison - for ski racing I ski in boots around 160 and free-ski in 130s).

I'm on the Proteus 180 and initially noticed something similar. I wasn't skidding but about 2/3 of the way through a toe-side turn the track got just a little wider. No sketch - I could still see the hard line where the edge was carving, but the track widened slightly, so clearly the whole board wasn't going through the same spot. I did a little binding tweakage but it didn't help so I went back to what I had been using, just a little wider. After thinking it over I decided that the nose of the board was getting deflected upward relative to the path, probably due to my weight driving forward toward the nose for too long. The whole issue went away when I deliberately stepped forward onto the front foot to start the turn but then let the board work its way back under my body (feels like I'm back-footed but I'm not - really just centered) through the finish of the turn. Now the big issue is just how to deal with all the speed I've got coming out of the turn - if I don't do a little check just before every third or fourth turn my legs give out from all the Gs... Before doing much else if I were you I'd definitely check the board for flat and for edge bevels. I'm at 1° base, 2° side with no de-tune which feels about right for hard snow.

I was there last week. Decent but not stellar then, but it's been really cold so they've probably got a lot more covered than they had, and covered better. When I was there it was still a little scratchy and a fair amount of death cookies from the thaw/freeze. The steep pitches weren't open but they are now so that makes me imagine they've been working hard. Okemo is nearly 100% open, Bousquet just under half, so there's a north/south thing going on.

Well it does seem as though the Proteus is happier to just cruise than the MK but I wouldn't call it any kind of a step-child. I bought mine to be a one-board quiver and that's pretty much what it is. They're just different concepts. I'm still learning the ropes with mine but it's for sure easy to just make smooth, big banking turns with little leg drive but utter confidence, you'll just be going 40mph+ by the fourth turn because the thing will not sketch unless you insist on it. It's a little like going for a cruise on real-deal GS skis - they'll do it but you'll accelerate until you check hard. It's not QUITE as stable at really high speeds as a true race board but it's a lot quieter than any 161 I've ever been on. At the higher energy end of the spectrum, it'll take every amount of leg drive you want to throw at it and just turn tighter. It'll do an EC type turn but for me at least the modified "gunslinger" seems to give the most versatility in terms of altering radius mid-turn. It's hard to compare it with anything else - the edge grip is phenomenal but it is also easy going in slop. Compared with my old main board - a Coiler Racecarve with an 11.5m radius - the Proteus 180 is much grippier (I've not yet hit any ice it wouldn't hold on, although I haven't yet had it on any really steep terrain), much happier to be just tipped up on edge because it'll start turning right away, and substantially less nimble at slow speeds - that Coiler would make ridiculously tight pumping push-pull turns, just as tight as my 160 SL board. I'm assuming that the Proteus will be faster in GS gates but I'm not strong enough bully it through a slalom course, which I often did on the Coiler. It's not just a matter of stiffness because the Coiler was built for me at 220lb and the Proteus is bone-stock.