kjl
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Posts posted by kjl
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Hey, who is the US distributor for F2 these days?
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Also think it tends to stick butt out.
I just don't think it's possible to powerfully carve heelside with flat stance angles without sticking your butt out. At high angles, the only reason it doesn't look like you're sticking your butt out is because you're rotated around so it looks like your hip instead, but it's the same thing - that part of your body near your waist is pointing at the snow, and your upper body is angled away from the snow.
I agree that it is "too passive" for advanced riders, but I think most beginner carvers including us hardbooters had to learn how to achieve angulation at some point by learning that correct "pose". I think telling beginner softbooters at super low angles that they need to stick their butt down to the snow is the equivalent to telling hardbooters at high angles to pinch that pencil, rotate towards the nose, or put that back hand near your front boot, etc.
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Hmmm... I disagree,
Heh, you just replied to a 3 year old post :p
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In flat angles like they are riding, you kind of have to straightleg it and stick your butt out to carve heelside. You have no other real choice.
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That is by far the least crappy carving instructional video I think I've ever seen. Too bad they were standing duck, where your heelside is so impaired...
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check here!
What a crazy site. I love it.
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why would reducing your "running surface" reduce your speed?
I think it's just the higher the nose the larger a profile you are showing to the wind, thereby increasing wind resistance. If your board is 19cm wide and the nose lifts up 1cm, you've increased your profile by ~19 square centimeters. Also, by drilling holes in the right place on the nose, you're also probably also decreasing your profile slightly as well as probably doing something to reduce turbulence (dimples on a golf ball?) or some crap like that.
I have no idea what I'm talking about, btw.
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Every new carver has to go through the process of figuring out...
• How far you can lean at a given speed without falling, and
• Exactly how fast or slow you angulate—and to what degree you angulate—throughout the course of a turn to avoid falling
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I don't think there's a single advanced/expert carver on this forum who hasn't spent huge amounts of time on their own...falling, getting up, falling, getting up...thinking hard about what they did wrong...thinking hard about changes to make on the next run...then falling again, getting up, doing it better, then falling again...etc.
Scott, you're killing me. At the risk of sounding like a bad movie cliche, I honestly think you are your own worst enemy, by convincing yourself that certain things are possible or not. Just looking at your posts, you seem intent on putting boundaries and restrictions on yourself: you'll never ride blacks, OK you'll ride blacks but only if they're pristine, you'll never ride fast, are you a hula carver or an ec hero, what are the exact best angles to ride with, etc..
Yes, of course those first few years I had some falls, but it's not like it was hundreds of days of brutal beatdowns. Anybody who can straightline a green run can put the most basic of carves in, by simply straightlining while slightly up on one edge. From there, doing like a 5-10 degree leaned over carve on a green run is not a big deal. And yet, even on a 5-10 degree leaned over carve, the speed and the sidecut and the lean have to be "perfectly matched", and yet it's simply not that hard to just ride by feel and get it together without teetering on the razor edge of flying over the handlebars or falling to the inside of the turn. By definition, such a rider is already "getting the hang of it", and they may not have even fallen once in hardboots, and spent only a day or two at it, not devoted 2 years of pain and suffering trying to master this godawful sport.
If you just go out onto a blue run you're not comfortable with and flop yourself over 70 degrees over and over again hoping you're getting everything right, of course you will end up with weeks of brutal beatings and endless failure. If you pick a green run and gently lean the board back and forth and slowly work your way up to harder and harder terrain and harder carves, I think it's easily possible to become a perfectly good green or green/blue carver in a year without broken teeth. If you are just barely comfortable carving a green/blue run, you can retreat to a green run, and practice and experiment with all sorts of stuff (weight on front leg, weight on back, rotation or not, face the nose or face the bindings, bend knees or not, higher or lower stance angles, faster or slower speed, more or less angulation, etc.), and tell what is working better, all the while having nice, cruisey, glidey fun all over the mountain.
It honestly doesn't have to be hard work and suffering; otherwise nobody would have gotten good at it. Have fun, try stuff out, see what works, and see what doesn't. Play with the mountain.
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Personally, I'd tell anyone just learning to carve, "It's fun and rewarding, but unless you hit the resort every single day your first season or two, it will take you a few years to really begin getting a handle on it."
I disagree.
I think that obviously sidecut, speed, lean, angulation, etc. are all balanced each other, but I think that you are viewing it as something you absolutely need to get right, and if you're a tiny bit too leaned over or a tiny bit too slow or fast or angulated a little bit wrong that you will fail, and this is not the case.
If I hop on a new board that I've never ridden before, and I don't know what the sidecut is, it's not like I have to spend time recalibrating exactly how far I can lean at a given speed or how much to angulate given the speed and lean, etc.. Maybe on the first turn I'll feel a little "whoa!" when it doesn't turn as much as I expect, but I will usually not fail to carve that first turn, and things are pretty natural after a dozen turns or so.
I think the key thing in your riding to balance all these different variables is to make sure you make sure your body position is always in a place where you can be dynamic. Sure, if you flop into a carve from a cross-over transition with straight legs, maximum twist and angulation in your hips, and you lean over 70 degrees and are just hoping that the board's sidecut, your speed, and your lean is exactly right to hold your carve, you need to have everything dialed perfectly, because you don't have any leeway in your body position to make corrections with. But if you enter a turn with flexed legs, a more neutral body posture, and ride just a little more by feel, it is not that hard to compensate for different flexes in the board, different sidecut, different snow response, etc., just by feel.
From your description of the feeling you have riding (and admittedly I've never seen you ride, so take it with a grain of salt), I think you could drastically improve your riding experience by simply bending your knees more. And relaxing.
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I got comfortable with speed and steepness roughly the same way:
Find a run with a flat (or uphill) runout that she is comfortable with but would not feel comfortable straightlining. Ride it, find a spot on the run where she is comfortable straightlining with the knowledge that the flat runout will slow her down. Maybe it is only 15 or 20 feet from the end of the downhill. Repeat, moving the spot where she straightlines up each time. The flat runout is the key; with it, you can accidentally get going too fast to try to slow down, but be OK with the knowledge that if you can hold it together till the flats, everything will be fine.
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I really don't think that's right Ken.
It's not right, but it's exactly as right/wrong as your formula.
If it is the simplified problem that we were both solving for (carving a perfect circle on perfectly flat snow with no grade in equilibrium - i.e. the carve would be continued forever if there was no friction), then it is exactly right. (Kimo's numbers match mine).
You can draw a right triangle with the points being the point of contact between the edge of the board and the snow (P1), the center of mass of the rider (P3), and the point directly below P3 on the snow (P2). If it is perfect equilibrium, the gravity (vector A, which is along the line P2P3) plus the cetrifugal force (vector B along the line P1P2) is perfectly matched by the force given to the rider from the snow (vector C along P1P3). Since it's a right triangle, you can solve for that force, which is just C=sqrt(A^2+B^2), or if you take the angle at P3, you can just do C=1/cos(angle).
Note that what you were solving for in your equation was just the force needed to counteract the centrifugal force (so you solved for B, and got 1.76Gs). If you look at exactly how much force is necessary to fight centrifugal force and gravity together, which is what the rider feels, you need to do sqrt(1.76*1.76+1*1) which is 2.02G's, which is just 1% off of my numbers, so we actually agree.
The problem with our formulas, as I mentioned before, is that we're not doing, as Kimo calls them, coordinated, level turns - we are descending a slope at a funky angle, which changes things quite a bit, and we are not really at equilibrium - we push and pull our legs and change our angulation and prep for the next turn, all of which changes the g-forces we feel.
All that being said, perhaps we get to 3Gs, but I doubt we get much higher.
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If you go the ideal physics/trig route it should be easier than that:
#G's = 1/cos(angle) where the angle is how far over your center of gravity is leaned (not how far the board is leaned), where 0 is straight up and 90 is flat on the ground.
Standing straight up, 1/cos(0) = 1 G
Leaning over 45 degrees, 1/cos(45) = 1.41 Gs
Leaning over 60 degrees, 1/cos(60) = 2 Gs
3 Gs would be leaned over ~70 degrees.
Although you can get the board almost 90 degrees over, I doubt you can actually get your center of gravity much further over than 70 degrees.
but in reality it doesn't really work out that way; both Jack's and my formula's ignore the slope of the run itself (fewer G's at the start of the turn and more at the end), the fact that carving is dyanamic, and you are not really ever at equilibrium so the forces don't actually have to sum to 0, etc..
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Okay...I'll buy that these pics are illusions (the mechanics certainly support it)...but JK, looking at the 3rd shot of you above, the back edge of your boot cuff still appears impossibly forward-leaning (to the point of being horizontal). I don't think that's an illusion...because even analyzing the angles of the board, body etc. your calf is still flat.
It's just an illusion, and I think you are just having a hard time imagining it in 3D. Trust me - that's what I do for a living. The board is leaned up ~45 degrees away from the camera, the boot is on that plane but rotated ~50 degrees around the surface normal of the board, and the boot is flexed some amount around that very weird axis. If you just grabbed your boot, stuck it in your binding, lifted the board up on edge about 45 degrees and put your head down on the ground so you were looking up at it like in these photos I think you would be able to see that there's nothing totally crazy going on.
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You can
1) not rotate so much, angulate more at the waist and bend the knees a little less
2) rotate with your weight on the front foot and back off the rotation as you transfer your weight to the back foot as you prep for the next turn, as BlueB says
3) thighmaster that back leg in
4) bump up the angles
5) heel lift on the back foot (if not possible because you are on TD1s you could increase the forward lean of your back boot).
I think I do #1 and #2 mostly subconsciously now (and I did #5: put 3 degrees heel lift on the back foot), and I try to do #3 if it's steep and snow is hard and I really need to bring the A game... ok, the B+ game.
#4 has helped my heelside in the past but lessens my overall fluidity, flow, fun, etc..
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Not my fault if video evidence is not good enough for you :)
I went to the same spot that the video was taken at Buttermilk with Joerg and 3 of the pureboarding guys (and gal), including I think 2 who had never done 360 carves before, or maybe all 3 hadn't, and they all did it cleanly on the first try. I failed, but it seemed like it was not a big deal to them at all. I'll blame it on the long sidecut of my board :)
Yes, on the way back, perpendicular to the fall line at the topmost section of the circle (after 270 degrees), their boards are not leaned over a great deal (since the slope of the run lessens the angle, but you can tell for sure they are riding the sidecut around.
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Okay, I'm getting the feeding thing over and over. I'll put a lot of focus there.
What about the rotation? When, where, and how much? Is it possible to over-rotate on the healside? Progressive or static rotation (keep rotating throughout the turn or just enough to start it and then "hold the position")?
I think the feeding thing is overemphasized, but that's just my opinion. I mean, I look at video of myself, and apparently I do it too, as my nose is often airborne when I make my edge change, but I never think about it. I think it just happens. Again, just my experience; I have no idea if that happens to other people.
Yes, you can overrotate on the heelside if your angles are not super high. At 55/55, you may notice that as you rotate very far, the board will twist torsionally and the edge angle near the back foot will go down, resulting in the tail letting go. You can fight it by driving that back knee towards the snow (using your thighmaster muscle), but it is hard.
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I'm pretty sure Tom already won this thread with his post a billion pages ago.
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Wait,What.........R2D2 had C3PO, so the kenchine has to have someone er, something!!!
Its name is Coiler Stubby. Coilerdyne Systems Model 173x19.5. Fiberglass and titanal over hyperwood chassis. Very tough. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until there is no more snow.
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Machines don't have friends
I know now why you cry, but it is something I can never do.
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Well first day first lift both Johnasmo and I started out with the fool thing... First chair of the morning, 4 carvers in front of us, 4 person chair. We jumped in the mix (no room for 6) John ended up on the first chair and Mello Yello and I ended up on the next chair(maybe it was Helmut Karvlow). But by the end of that first ride up I had 1 new friend and Johnasmo had 3.
Heh, that was pretty awesome. The liftie was not amused. At all. And then decided to bitch at me for some reason! At least I still got the first chair, and snaked all you all for first tracks, since you decided to wait for your... what do you humans call it again? Oh, "friends". :D
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5'6", so I think that is not actually a super narrow stance. On the narrow side, but not totally crazy :)
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It's center to center.
That's pretty wide but it seems like that's the trend these days anyways.
This year I myself widened my stance by an entire inch, up to a whopping 17.5" :)
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You can't pressure the nose with free heels.
Well, you can put more pressure on the front foot than the back, but you're right, you can't exert a torquing force around the front foot around the short axis of the board to push the nose in, but I wonder how much that matters.
All I know is I would be terrified of flying over the front of the board when trying to pressure the nose.
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Your stance angles significantly impact the mechanics of your carve in relation to your body position.
At flat angles, (0/0), bending your knees puts your butt over the heelside edge of the board without increasing edge angle, making your heelside carve wash out unless you compensate by either bending way forwards at the waist (sit on the toilet cowboy style) or not bending your knees very much. On the flip side, bending your knees with flat angles makes the toeside carve much stronger.
At very high angles, bending your knees puts your butt over tail instead of over the side, so that bending your knees does not negatively impact your heelside edge. In addition, it makes it so that rotating your hips towards the nose will drive your knees towards the snow and improve the heelside more. On the flip side, it makes it so that bending your knees will not improve your toeside edge angle as much.
In addition, very high angles make me feel less mobile in the hips.
In my opinion, your stance angles should be chosen to maximize and equalize the performance, ease, and comfort of your heelside turn and toeside turn, and then pick board widths based on that.
For me, I've found that angles roughly around 60/55 are perfect, making the heelside very reliable while being low enough that I can make comfortable toeside carves by just bending the knees a bit. For my shell size, that dictates a board around 19 or 19.5 cm wide.
You can ride a wide board with high angles, but you are increasing the leverage the snow has on the board (the snow has a longer lever arm to push the board with), but your body mechanics are the same to make the carve. In practice (for me anyways), this means that I can carve it just as well, except I end up with bruises all over my calves and shins from the extra pressure from the boot cuff, and the less-mobile hips from the high angles means I don't have the dexterity I would like if I take it off-piste.
Broken boot repairable?
in Carving Central
Posted
Hard to see what's going on; can you post a closer/clearer photo, or describe what's happening in there?