kjl

+1 on that (for both softboots and hardboots). Also agree with that (which is why there's so much heel lift/forward lean on the back foot). When you twist your upper body to drive that front knee towards the snow on the heelside turn, you end up tending to lift the back heel (due to the hip twist). Increasing forward lean on the back foot should help combat that and make the heelside turn easier. It doesn't matter that it makes the toeside slightly harder since softbooting toesides are so much easier than the heelsides in the first place (if your back foot is ~30 degrees or less). Maybe I should up my angles to around where you are, John - last time I experimented moving my bindings around I capped out at 39/21. Probably the front foot from 39 to 45 won't feel too different (and will probably help out the heelside a little) but last time I tried it I lost a lot of toeside power from 21 to 30.

Just a thought: if you think the bolt was simply bad and it was not a good bolt "wearing out", maybe you should change the bolt very rarely instead of more often, as it will decrease the number of bolts you use over your lifetime (and decrease the chance that you will run into another bad one).

Oh, I didn't even notice I wrote "sketchy" :) It looks like before you added the cross bolt the bolts holding the heel receiver down would only get ~2 thread turns in the Sidewinder before it encountered open air (the hole for the heel bail) and then ~2 turns on the other end. I thought that looked "sketchy" since it looks like ~3-4 turns in what is the thinnest section of the sidewinder heel block. But with those 3-4 turns PLUS the threads in the cross bolt it should be even stronger than the original bail configuration. Yeah, I have no doubt it is easy to line up the crossbolt on your mod - I was just pondering: if I did this mod myself, I would probably buy 2 crossdowels per binding since I don't have the ability to tap a bolt precisely like you, in which case I would have the problem of wandering crossdowels if I ever removed the heel block. Heh, having seen your boards and your riding, I'm sure whatever you do is overkill for me - I don't put nearly as much power in the board and I weigh probably ~60% of you :)

Ah, they are called cross dowels: Seems like the mod is more accessible for somebody like me if I used some 5/16" cross dowels since I do not have the equipment to tap a bolt like yours precisely (or at all), assuming the cross dowel hole is the right size. Also, it would make it so you would not have to tap any threads in the heel sidewinder heel block either - you could rely solely on the cross dowel...? Would be a pain in the butt to remove and reinstall the heel block, though - the cross dowels would wander around in there and you'd have to line them up again. I guess you don't do that very often, though...

Hey, hey, Bryan, the "ikea" comment wasn't meant as a dig at the quality - just as a descriptor of how (I think) it is going together: The "standard" 90 degree connection on ikea's wooden furniture has 1) a little cylindrical plug which has a threaded hole drilled sideways through the side of the plug. You stick this plug into a little hole in the side of one piece of furniture. Then 2) the real bolt goes in from the side into the threaded hole in the plug. I think they do that so they can get metal threads inside a particle board surface where it would normally not be easy to stick a t-nut or something else. It sounds like you did the same thing? Just trying to figure out exactly how you modded it... I don't know anything about machining or woodworking, so I have no idea what the real name for that connection is called.

Actually, there's a pretty painless way to get up out of powder, even in flats. You lay on your back, relax, and gather up as much snow as you can from all around you with your arms and pile it/pack it into a denser, taller mound under the small of your back. Just extend your arms over your head and pull them around like you're making a snow angel, dragging in lots of snow, and then pack it under you, repeatedly. Takes like 5-10 seconds. Then you'll be surprised how easy it is to push off that mound and stand up.

Seems sketchy to have those bolts going through that part of the sidewinder, no? With all the material missing for the heel-bail right on line with the bolts... That extra "Ikea-style bolt" with threads tapped looks like it helps but it seems like that bolt can't be that much wider than the ones holding the heel receiver on (so drilling it would leave it with really thin edges) Or am I reading it wrong? Anybody know if/when an official bomber sidewinder SI version is coming out? I've heard only good things about the standard sidewinder but I'm not giving up my SI's...

Yeah, the alpine style falls apart when your stance angle drops too low. A lot of people seem to think it's around 45 degrees. I think I can go lower by adding a few degrees of forward lean to my bindings. When carving in softies I think choosing stance angles is all about balancing your desire for a high stance angle for the heelside turn with your desire for a low angle so you can still pressure your toeside edge with your calf/ankle joint. This is the reason I have a ~18 degree splay in my stance - weight goes forwards on the front foot on the heelside where the increased angle really helps out holding the edge, and weight shifts back to the back foot on the toesides, where the flatter angle of the back foot helps hold that edge. Other people may have different solutions, of course. I think John Gilmour rides pretty flat angles (can't remember for sure), while Softbootsailer put 3rd straps on his bindings to mitigate the loss of toeside power at high angles, and then cranked his angles really high.

No, no, we were young and stupid at the time! Glad I didn't get myself a brain injury back then - I was definitely doing some sketchy stuff that I wouldn't think of trying without a helmet now. This particular run was a bad idea - incredibly hard snow (but not quite ice), but very steep.

Heh, with an opening like that you're just asking to have somebody give you crap :) I'd start them centered or a little back. I am paranoid about stuffing the nose on the heelside carve when I'm on a soft turny deck (though the Razor I imagine is pretty stiff for a soft deck), so I'd rather start out back a little bit, especially as the season is getting late and the snow in the late morning and afterwards will soften up (looks like you get the sun baked slush of CA too). Also, when I'm really trying to carve, my weight is usually pretty forwards, so there's no problem with accidentally ending up in the back seat. Angles seems fine - I ride 39/21. You may start losing a little toeside edge-holding power with your back foot at 30 - not sure.

Sick shot: http://frozenbackside.jalbum.net/WCS%202010/slides/e-19.html The asym makes it look like the board is greater than 90 degrees! :D

The only thing I didn't like about them was it was a little bit of a hassle to line up just right on a binding that was already kind of a hassle to take on and off. Aside from that, yeah, they were great. ...not sure if they'll make more or less of a difference than normal since you are relatively new to the hardbooting carving thing. Maybe the chattery heelside washout will be mitigated more with the suspension.

I think when there is powder nobody in my group stops to take pictures :) These are embarassing, but...: Yeah, I'm kind of buttsliding down in that second picture, but in my defense, it was really, really hard snow - there was a sign with a triple black diamond drawn on it and it said "warning, fall WILL result in an uncontrolled slide", and sure enough, my friend who took the picture lost his edge just once and ended up superman sliding all the way down to the traverse line by the moguls you can see way, way down in the distance (you can tell how far away that is from the little dot that is a skier down there). Ah, memories.

Yeah, I randomly stumbled on that video a few weeks ago and really liked it; they're on this dinky little run on this dinky little hill, and they just look like they're having the best time out there. I liked how the girl with the animal ear helmet had those intec cables poking out so far and made it look like her boots had ears like her helmet.

I find that his writing mirrors his engineering: Well thought out at the small scale: complete sentences and the grammar is fine; individual binding components like the t-track and HDPE bumpers make sense. Not very well though out at the large scale: overall posts have no clear organization or even point, and are just random musings and pedantic wandering; individual binding components fit together into a binding that has obvious flaws, and if it worked would not be in service of a coherent goal. I really don't mean this in a super hatey way - I am aware that I possess the same flaws. Once I had this idea that I wanted to write a videogame, so I taught myself Flash, integrated a 3rd party physics engine into it, and then wrote this really cool flight control system so that my little autonomous, AI-controlled flying ships could recover from any trajectory and spin back to a stable hovering state and travel to different locations solely by adjusting thrust from 2 engines. It was totally awesome, and I had fun doing it, but I completely neglected to think about the whole "gameplay" part of it. All I had was a cool automated flight control system and a physics engine. If ARover actually succeeds, he will have a boot with a knob on the bottom that cleanly fits into a track... and nothing else (usable). Maybe that will be enough for him in the same way designing and debugging and perfecting a flight control system was for me, but he's not making a usable binding. You can because you're riding soft boots. Put on some ski boots, place your feet ~21 inches apart or however far apart your stance is, and try to get both soles perfectly flat on the ground. Brutal:

Hi there - Just a few weeks ago I just had a really brutal bout of exactly the opposite (posterior tibial tendonitis - tendon on the medial side, curls around the bottom of the ankle bump, and hurt like a ***** on every walking step - had a quite difficult time walking even 20 feet). I went to the doctor - for me it was caused by a collapsing arch and rotation of the foot around the long axis, big toe down (er... my foot rolled inwards), stretching that tendon out too much. I tried antiinflammatories, but what fixed it in the short term was a tight neoprene kind of brace to hold the tendon against my ankle so it wouldn't snap back and forth, and in the long term, stuffing huge arch supports in my shoes. I am definitely, definitely not a doctor, but I would guess adding outward cant in your bindings would be a really, really bad idea - the opposite of what you want to do. This is what I needed: medial wedges (arch support): And yours is the opposite, so I'd guess you need lateral wedges: Indeed, http://arthritis-symptom.com/tendonitis/peroneal-tendonitis.htm recommends "A lateral sole wedge is also helpful. A lateral sole wedge is simply a wedge placed under the lateral or outside of the shoe. Lateral sole wedges inhibit the foot from rolling out. They can be placed on orthotics or glued to the outside of the shoe." Again, I am not a doctor, but I would guess that while adding outward cant would be a bad idea, an inward cant might not help as much as you want since your foot roll is still the same inside your boot since the boot is a hard plastic shell. You probably want to actually stick a lateral wedge inside your liners. But first what you should do is not snowboard until it goes away (imo), and minimize walking (and only with wedges in your shoes) until it goes away. I basically had to become a couch potato for a week and a half, and then finally one day I woke up and it was 100% fixed.

Oh, I liked them, too. But not at flat angles. Brutally painful, clumsy, ungainly riding.

I concede your last sentence. He can do whatever he wants with his spare time. I think ARover got off on the wrong foot on these forums and I am carrying some bias into this thread. But I would contend that there is some weirdness with designing a new hardboot snowboard binding, having never ridden hardboots, and asking for feedback. Would you expect to get any reasonable responses in a food connoisseur forum if you asked for help with your lasagna recipe if you've never tasted a lasagna before, and you've got serious, basic, obvious mistakes all throughout your idea (like you don't pre cook your meat and noodles and expect them to steam themselves in the oven)? You don't get kudos for being innovative; you just failed to do your homework first. But I do understand the tinkering spirit. I have spent my fair share of time at home with a soldering iron and a microcontroller programmer trying to make super basic robots, or writing code on my computer for an ultimately worthless but fun project. If his ultimate goal is the tinkering and learning process itself, of running into stumbling blocks, figuring out ways around them, and doing creative problem solving, then what he's doing is perfect for that. But if his goal is to create a better snowboarding experience, he is doing it wrong. I mean, you have to admit, even as a tinkerer (especially as a tinkerer?) that designing a hardboot interface, crazy innovative mechanism or not, without ever having ridden on one is kind of weird. He's not going to know if his idea is even new or not.

It's not that innovation can't happen. But the people who started up FedEx probably used the postal service or UPS at least once in their lives, and were therefore able to find an area or two or five that they could improve on. If you go in completely blind, how can you possibly hope to make a device that is even half as good by any measure as the one put out by Fin, who is a techie nerd with a CNC machine, is an excellent snowboarder, has been getting testing and feedback from world class snowboarders, and has been iterating on and perfecting a product for at least 10 years that I know of? It really is a waste of time. I'm all for the entrepreneurial spirit, but the goal should not be "do something different for the sake of being different" - at that point you're blindly chucking darts at a dartboard. If I want to design a better mousetrap - first step: investigate existing mousetraps, and decide if there is anything wrong with current mousetraps, and if so, what? Case in point: I'll save you some time: Pick up old, used Bomber TD1s for probably $20. Super stiff connection with no flex, complete with urethane bumpers under the plate where it overhangs the disk like you are imagining under your T-track. Put them on a freeride board and ride them at low angles. That is clearly your first step. Actually, that might be your second step, after you ask around to see if anybody else has already tried that. Which I have. Old soft Raichle 423's on TD1s at 39/21 on a 161 Never Summer Premier. And it sucks. It's the worst, and that was with inward canting to make it at least moderately tolerable.

It seems like you should at least ride hardboots not to see if you will enjoy it, but so that you have some idea of what you want the binding to do. Do you want it stiff? Flexible? Heavy? Light? High off the board or right on the board? Lateral stiffness more or less important than toe-heel stiffness? You can't possibly have any idea, having never ridden hardboots. It's like you're trying to make a car with superior road feel by looking at pictures of shocks, but having never actually sat in a car before. I don't get it. It seems weird that you are trying to make a binding as stiff as possible when every hard binding is currently trying to find as many ways of getting more controlled flex and give as possible. It also seems weird that you're putting the t-track on the toe->heel line when the majority of the forces in alpine riding are lateral to the boot. You're going to bend the t-channel out on your first heelside turn and then the smooth slidey isn't going to slide anymore. If you make bindings as stiff as possible with no lift or cant, do you even know if you'll be able to get your boots in there without breaking your knees? The only people I know who ride with no cant or lift ride soft, loosey goosey bindings. I know when I set mine up with no cant or lift I can barely stand on my board in my living room... Sorry to bag so hard on you. It just seems like the obvious first step in designing anything is to at least test the years/decades worth of existing product progression to see what worked and what doesn't work, or what they might have tried a long time ago and realized didn't work. Otherwise, you're giving yourself a negative decade head start.

Do you mean you first lose your edge, slipping out of your carved track, and at some point the edge grabs again and you highside downhill? This could simply be because holding your toe edge in softies is dependent on your calf muscle being able to keep your tippy toes pushed down into the snow, and when the G-force builds up or you hit a bump, your ankle gives and you lose your edge angle. The fix in this case is to just drive the edge in harder with all the available joints in your body: 1) push with your toes as hard as possible (try to stand on tip toes) 2) bend your knees more (drives the shin into the tongue/laces of the boot, increasing edge angle) 3) shove hip into snow (lean torso away from snow) - does the same thing. 4) don't reach for the snow. I find in softies moreso than in hardboots that the carve is easier held on the toeside by weighting the back foot, not the front.

It's not my fault, I swear! I'm pretty sure all the real people here agree that it's the worst thing of all time. I'm so, so, so sorry :) Not FastPlay specifically, but vaguely apropos... though I highly discourage you from taking that last line to heart and stealing. After all, I may need to buy some Sidewinders when the step-in version comes out :D

I think you're talking about that tax on cassette tapes that went to the recording labels to help offset the cost of piracy that was supposedly happening with those tapes. Bunch o' crap :) Yeah, iTunes is the "proof" that people will pay money for something they can get for free if there is some added value, in this case, ease of finding the music, convenience of maintaining/organizing the music library, etc. Same with netflix. Sure, I could go torrent some movie, but the elimination of the hassle by using netflix instant or something is certainly worth the price. What people really, really hate is when people who want to do the right thing and purchase something legally are subject to verification/rights hassles (so in effect, they are being punished for paying for the product). See: http://www.bradcolbow.com/archive.php/?p=205 In the past, I have been known to purchase software legally, never open the box, and run a cracked version instead. Purchased product stays in cellophane in a box somewhere. And, before iTunes came along, I would sometimes buy CDs and then napster them to my computer, since it was significantly faster and easier to do that than rip my own CD's. CD's went into a big box, also in cellophane. The movie industry has been changing because of piracy, a little. They are shortening the window between release in the theater and release on DVD/BluRay. And I'm sure it's one of the reasons they are pushing 3D, because nobody has 3D at home, so to see Avatar "as it was meant to be seen" you have to go to the theater. Wow, epic thread wander. I blame myself.

Oh yeah, I rode boots like that for a little while ago, like 12-13 years ago maybe. If I remember right, they did not have a huge amount of lateral stability (because the connection points were toe/heel), so you could waggle the boot left/right. I could be wrong... it was a while go. But in any case it should not be a huge deal. I agree with Corey - a 155 freestyle board will have a super tight turning radius. You should probably take it to a green (actually, if you are new to carving in general, regardless of gear, you should move to a green), and practice the norm exercise. If you get going too fast, you should probably just scrub the speed and reset, rather than trying to keep it together at a higher speed. Take a look at the video Pat posted and watch for Bob, in the softboots - he rides like you want to ride - always carving, on a freeride board in softies; slow, rounded turns. Graceful, relaxed riding, not super powerful cranking, high-G turns, which your setup would have a hard time coping with.

No, no - I hate both of them equally. I think I meant that I'm OK with companies charging whatever they want for them. If record companies want to charge $15 for an hour's worth of music on old technology with antiquated, obsolete distribution methods and drive themselves into obsolescence in the face of the onslaught of digital distribution, which they could have owned and had work with them if they had had any inkling of foresight, that is fine with me.