philw

Interesting stuff. The freeboard thing would appear to emulate what I don't do: skidding. On the other hand if you can hockey-stop it, that might be useful. I'm heading for dollar-land shortly and thought I might pick up a long-skateboard. I wonder: (1) Anyone got any suggestions on how to size those things... how do I pick the right board for my weight? How much flex is good, to replicate carving? (2) How do you dump speed on these things? Can you slide the wheels sideways at all? How do you control that?

I used ski boots for years, after rejecting the early snowboard-specific hard-boots as being too soft. Hell, they even marketed the Burton ones as "Megaflex". That's the opposite of what I wanted. I moved to snowboard boots a bit grudgingly but I found that I couldn't get the boot/ binding interface to lock solid with ski boots. I found that the play in the binding interface was more hassle than putting up with the flex of [later] hard boots. These days I have some Rachlie top-of-the-line snowboard things. They look to me like they're old ski boot lasts with snowboard soles anyway. Now I have Intec step-ins I wouldn't consider ski-boots, at least whilst I can still get snowboard hard-boots. I'm not sure what the minimum-size of the market has to be before they stop making hard boots. When that happens I'll probably have to go back to ski boots. Even the stiffest soft boots don't do what I want.

Interesting. I have a Donek FC1 which is fine, but it has slightly less camber/ kick than I'd like. So not stiffer, but a slightly larger range of movement... any suggestions as to which way I need to go for the next toy?

I don't know, although there seem to be fewer every year. I just got back from some boarding at several resorts in France, and it seemed to me unscientifically: (1) There are fewer boarders there than last year, or in the US/ Canada. (2) 99% of the boarders are novices. That is, they sideslip all turns, can't ride fast, steeps, ice or moguls etc. (3) I saw less than one other hard-booter each day. (4) There didn't appear to be significant park/ pipe interest. That's just what I saw; ymmv. Personally I don't think Burton's "fashion industry" approach is good for the sport. If boarders are trivially burned-off in the pipe and on the piste by their skiing buddies because they're riding floppy gear and taught only sideslipping, then maybe they'll vote with their boards. Still, nothing lasts for ever. To me snowboarding's always been something different. The rest of the world just came, had a look around and decided to sideslip away. Not a problem, so long as I can buy gear to ride.

How are you finding your turns - can you hold toe & heel edges just as well? You might try to set the front boot on minimum forward lean with the back on maximum and see what that feels like.

You're talking about that dive-for-the-snow type of "carving", which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but it's a subset of carving. I carve, but I don't dive. Of course you can carve on soft gear; how do you think they get height in the pipe? I dare say there'll come a day when I can't buy race boots, bindings and boards. I'm not suddenly going to turn into a side-slipper, so on that day you'll be getting passed by me on soft gear too;) That's a very impressive photograph of a snow-diving chappie using soft gear. It would still be a good picture, but not so impressive, if he was using hard gear. We all already know the reason: it's much easier to carve well on hard gear. What more needs to be said? soft chappies What works best - gear, angles etc? What differences in approach are required to drive the floppy stuff? Are you faster on soft gear or hard? How do you stop those soft boots hurting your feet?

I see a lot of what seems to be to be "diving" in some of the videos available on the web. I know it's a deliberate "style" thing for the extreme-carving chappies. To me it just looks weird... like someone is deliberately diving for the snow part way through a perfectly good carve. Each to their own. For me the carve is a fairly smooth and progressive thing; there's no need or room for a sudden dive for the snow. If anything it feels more like the board and my legs are angulated, but my upper body remains pretty quiet, irrespective of toe or heel side. Perhaps I'm just not going fast enough to need whatever that might give you, but then I'm not getting overtaken by divers either... Hmm. I wonder what angle to the snow boards actually make during carves, and are these related to the turn radius and speed, or to turn style? Is there an optimum angle for a turn?

It's been too long since I rode an F2 fofr me to comment on that, but this year I got a Donek FC11 163 as a replacement for a Nitro Scorpion slalom board. The Donek topsheets are soft, but I don't care about that. The quality control and craftmanship is excellent - I've never had a mass-produced board with a base/ edge set-up this good out of the box. Performance wise the thing has the same running length & radius as my old Nitro, but it's got less camber and is stiffer. So it's more of a cruisy carver than a mogul-bashing wild child. When I first rode it I couldn't believe how good the edge hold is. The harder you push the harder it grips. Initially you have to watch this, as combined with the flex pattern it means you need to put a tiny amount of effort into changing edges. That's soon forgotten. Overall I think that the camber and stiffness balance is about the same as the Scorpion - it works fine for my weight (62kgs) and riding style (fast, active). I'm sure either will be fine.. ride 'em first if you can.

Seconded. I was forced to use nasty floppy things as rentals the other week and this is precisely what I found. Set the angles even moderately steep and the binding backs attack your lower leg. I decided that floppy stuff is intended to be used pretty much somewhere around zero degrees or nothing... that seemed to be much less painful. In a way it was amusing to learn to drive a dross board with flimsy bindings, but not all that amusing. I didn't figure out how to stop the boots hurting my feet - they don't have shells so the strappy things just dig into your feet when you do them up.

(1) I'm not sure about the cant thing, although it may be terminology. If your legs aren't bent then you don't really need any "cant" (side-to-side roll). Instead many people use "lift", specifically something like 1 degree toe lift on the front and 1 degree heel lift on the back. Others ride flat. Search here and you'll find various arguments over what this does and doesn't do. (2) 48 degrees is pretty mellow for on piste, although perhaps it's a place to start. (3) There's no specific reason I can think of why you should be stressing your rear kneecap. It may be style or stance causing that, but it shouldn't happen IMHO. (4) Washing out on the heel-side. You should be able to ride without washing out irrespective of the binding set-up or anything else. Practice... (5) You should be able to get boots to fit so you just forget about them - I wouldn't have anything else. Although I like mine snug, it sounds like yours need some work. It might just be that as a beginner you're doing things with your feet which you shouldn't be, so perhaps it might be worth putting up with it for a few days just to be sure. Then get 'em fixed.

I never detune. If I want a shorter effective edge length I'd use a shorter board. I don't really understand what dulling the edges is supposed to achieve, but it's not sumething I appear to need. I ride 90 degree edges on ice and anything else. The metal seems to work fine and this seems the most efficient and easiest use of it.

I boarded (on piste) with the lead guide at the Whistler place over Xmas, and that sounds pretty good for resort-based daily stuff. The terrain is apparently similar to heli, although obviously you're more limited in where you can go in that you need a safe road for the cat to negotiate. I'm told that the main difference from heli is that it's very slow going up... I guess you'll have fewer down days as you can presumably drive when you can't fly. Can't say I'm hugely tempted... once you've been hauled up a mountain in a helicopter anything else is just too slow. Visa card permitting of course.

I like "slow zones". They're generally where there are lots of people, and although I'm entirely capable of not hitting them, I can't be sure it works the other way. I'm happy to go slow myself as a trade. I'm also happy for novices to have a place to hang out on "slow" runs, rather than get in my way on black mogul fields. That said, I've never had any trouble blasting through slow zones when the slopes are empty. I presume that the ski-patrollers are applying their common sense. I've never had any trouble with any ski patrol people, but I guess they're the same as anyone else. If one yelled at me (other than to get my attention), I'd certainly put some time in to calm them down and understand that such behaviour is rude and unhelpful.

Hmm, I think I have about as much in common with your average side-slipping snowboarder as I do with your average snow-ploughing skier. I choose to ride with whoever is most competent; I don't care what tools they're using. The clever bit with the magazines is that they circumnavigate the fact that most of their punters can't actually ride. Or talk to girls. I presume that the target demographic doesn't want their lack of skills in these areas highlighting. I'd think that the skate-oriented magazines are unlikely to be the source of any changes. It's more likely to come from some back-country or other cross-over publication.

Don't know anything about wide boards, but the Donek stuff is well made and not at all the same type of thing as Burton. I haven't had mine long enough to really know, but you can tell from the feel, construction and ride of the thing that it's not a Burton 30-day fashion board. You can even talk to the guy who makes 'em.

I don't know, but you may be aware that some of the people behind SJ were the early guys behind TWS, but they left TWS for a number of reasons. IMHO TWS isn't what it was, perhaps that and AOL are why. I was boarding with one of the SJ people over Xmas. I think you could get stuff in there if you have the right quality of images.

Mostly I get "woah, is that a race board" and general positive stuff. Don't think anyone's ever been rude. Perhaps I just don't think like a victim;) If anyone asks about the machine, I just say that it's like a normal snowboard only faster. I haven't quite figured out how to say: "and you could ride one too - say 'no' to sideslipping before it's too late".

Or as a pipe toool, to judge by the way skiers perform. But it's still interesting that you can apparently race softies in some conditions... I'd say that the boarder-x courses are specifically designed to allow that, nothing more. It's an interesting response to poor equipment... get 'em interested in something which doesn't require good gear. But of course I'm biased.

I think it might be better to avoid using terms like "natural" here; sounds a bit loaded to me. One could argue that it's "natural" to look where you're going; it's certainly unnatural to snowboard.;) "Neutral" might be better. It's all interesting stuff, but I'm wary that some of this sounds a bit dogmatic. There are many styles, and as someone above says, it's a matter of opinion which works best for an "expert" individual. For sure someone riding at 45 degrees parallel will need a different stance from those of us at 60 parallel. I don't really think about where I'm facing, other than it's vaguely in the direction of the pointy end of the board. The pictures I have would suggest I'm somewhere between 60 & 90 degrees, but I expect it varies a little depending on precisely what is happening with the edge. I suppose I'd consider that more of an effect than a cause. I'll think about it next time I'm out. Maths-wise, there's some basic stuff in the files here from JM and Iain D. But I think you'd find the equations for such a complex dynamic system rather difficult to write down; interpreting them would be even more difficult. Better to get out and ride...:D

Well the culture here, Europe, has always been a bit different. We never had the "bad-ass" marketing thing, so we weren't banned from anywhere, and you always had mixed groups of boarders and skiers. I think that was just marketing, plus we had a lot of mono-skiing and other stuff around too. There are still many more people on hard gear in Europe than in North America, and it's easier to buy the gear. However I think the soft culture is winning out... although I find French kids dressed up in LA street clothes a rather strange concept, they all wanna be like you. I guess they have Hollywood's images in mind, rather than the obeseity statistics;) Perhaps not surprisingly, the UK has a more North American outlook than the mainland on this. In the last few years I've never met another UK hard-booter. The locals think it's a different sport; the snowboard "instructors" teach sideslipping. Most boarders here are the functional equivalent of snow-plough skiers. What goes around comes around. I think we're screwed for this generation, but sooner or later someone will rediscover competence on a board. Or they'll all go back to skiing. Sideslipping just doesn't look that much fun, however hard you market it.

Yes, I understand that. You perhaps missed the fact that I didn't use the word "exactly", precisely because if the two were exactly the same, they'd be the same. I'm sorry that what I did was incorrect and impossible..

As I said, I already use toe & heel lifts, although I used to achieve the same effect entirely through boot lean. My question was about cants, for people with standard leg geometry. Clearly at the sort of angles we're riding canting makes no difference to stance width, so what's it for? Just wondering; I've no desire to bend my legs that way myself.

I found that with a narrow stance (which I like), that you can trade toe/heel lift with boot lean. I used to ride flat, but these days I go for a degree of lift in the "traditional" places, plus I have the boots maximally tilted. That is, I have the front boot as upright as possible so I can push on it, and the back one with as much forward-lean as I can get. My boots are standard Raichle jobbies, stiff cuffs. Some powder boards (especially Solomon and some more recent Burtons but not the Fish) have very wide stances, presumably to accommodate the required baggy pants with low-hanging crotch. Those are difficult to ride for those of us with sensibly-sized legs... more toe and heel lift is a partial solution to that. I never tried canting as my legs/ feet are all plugged in reasonably straight. Would there be any reason to use canting with high angles other than to correct orthopaedic problems?

... and duct taped up as they break and flop open otherwise. Obviously personal preference, but I don't like to have any play between my leg action and the board, if you see what I mean. I have tried unlocked (by accident, years ago), but I didn't like the flex.

Nonsense. You made a clear personal insult: you can't squirm away from it like it's nothing to do with you. Your obvious lack of basis makes your rudeness hard to comprehend; I hope you are able to improve your manners in time. I do both skate and surf, but I still disagree with your view. Your difficulties in expressing a coherent rationale are nothing to do with the sporting abilities of your audience. Speed down a powder run: agreed, it's only one measure, although better boarders tend to go faster, in my experience. My point was simply that better equipment allows you to go faster: it's not compulsory. Indeed, I think that soft gear actually restricts the ability of most borders to short-swing, precisely because of that control-lag. Whatever, each to their own.