SunSurfer

Just came across this for the first time. Looks like it was shot in the mountains around Wanaka in Central Otago in New Zealand. Last scene is early Kawarau Bridge bungee footage.

@dgCarve comments above reflect the current received wisdom about racing technique, but are debatable after the success of Vic Wild at Sochi, and Ester Ledecka at the South Korean Olympics. Comparing the rear knee and pelvis angles of Selena Joerg & Ester L (especially on heelside) in the videos around that time revels that Ester, clearly an accomplished skier as well as snowboarder, is not a typical heel and toe style snowboard racer. What many people don't know about Vic Wild was that his original coach was an ex USA Ski Team member, Monique Anderson (nee Pelletier), and she left her mark on his style. Watch how both Ester and Vic drive the rear knee forward rather than across the board on their heelside turns, a clear mark of the side of the foot being used rather than a heel/toe method. Any further discussion on this will generate a lot of "noise" for you and would be best in a separate thread. It's a topic that has strong opinions on both sides on this board. A couple of key learning progression points for me. 2015: R Knapp led Steeps Clinic: Learning to gently lean onto my downhill edge on a traverse, feel it grip then downweight into the 'stacked" body position, lean into the turn and ride it round. 2018: The thread documents my discovering how to carve a turn using a sense of creating pressure out of the sides of the soles of my feet. It was an evolving discovery over a period of riding in New Zealand in our winter, and then in Colorado in Jan/Feb 2019.

The adjustment of your sole, and your feeling of then having difficulty engaging your inside edge, suggests to me you may be built with your knees closer together than usual. That's useful data in fine tuning your technique. Alpine snowboarding is almost the illegitimate child of skiing and snowboarding. We're riding a snowboard but want to carve like elite level skiers. Those of us who come from a primarily snowboarding background likely feel most comfortable inclining the board and balancing by using heels and toes. Those of us who come from skiing, like you and I, often feel more comfortable incling and balancing using the sides of our feet and boots. Your current binding angles are heading towards the side of boot levels that are almost essential once your averaged binding angle gets to 60 degrees or higher. Averaged binding angles below about 50 degrees usually need the heel/toe technique. In between is a no man's land where both are possible. The different approaches use clearly different techniques and ways of thinking about and practicing those techniques. Advice for one style doesn't necessarily translate to the other style. Nothing stopping anyone being able to use both once they are competent at one or other, but not distinguishing between the styles will likely lead a learner to confusion and slower progress towards clean carves.

A couple of questions that have implications for how you move forward from here. Your profile says you've been snowboarding since 1995 and hardbooting since 2001. You write about your experiences carving as a long time skier and the Harb technique that you've used there. Do you feel more like a) a snowboarder who is moving into carving snowboarding or b) a skier who is moving into carving snowboarding? In relation to the position of your knees when you're riding, I assume your ski boots had the cuffs cant adjusted to allow your boot soles to be flat when in the skiing position. Have you done the same with your hard snowboard boots?

It may be as far as you need to go for now. The Boiler plate, and plates of the same design principle, are particularly helpful in reducing quads muscle fatigue especially after the fresh morning groom is all chopped up by skidding skiers and boarders. Don't get rid of it yet. Many riders in the early stages of acquiring carving skills, and I count my self as having been amongst them, try to compensate for that lack of skill by buying and trying different boards, plates, boots and bindings. As your skills develop all your equipment will perform better. Fastest way to build your skills is to ride with better riders and get well informed feedback. Clinics at SES, in particular Richard Ks sessions, made for big improvements in my skills.

If you're going to Beaver Creek your fastest and most efficient solution may be to track down Richard Knapp who may still work as a snowboard instructor there. Richard has helped many riders here correct flaws in their hard boot technique and make much better turns at Aspen Summit Expression Sessions in the past. He is a very good hard boot rider and an excellent instructor. One thing you haven't told us is how tall you are, or more importantly how long your legs are. An appropriate stance distance will be in proportion to your leg length. Different people of the same height may have substantially different leg lengths. As an example I use a 56cm stance distance, am 182cm tall, but I am 106cm from the top of my greater trochanter (centre of rotation of my hip joint) to the soles of my bare feet. If you don't know how to find your greater trochanter then measure your bare feet to bony pelvis inseam. Mine is 90cm. As someone who has been riding sliding axle design isolation plates from before they were commercially available, and understands them well enough to build my own from scratch, it is highly unlikely that the plate is the cause of your problem. This type of plate makes it a lot harder to skid a turn because it fundamentally makes it harder for the rider to twist the board along its' length and disengage the edge from the groove the carved edge creates in the snow. To me your problem as described suggests a significant technique issue with how you make your heelside turn. That makes finding a really experienced rider, like Richard K above, who can see what you are doing and point you in the right direction essential. You have an equipment setup that many riders would salivate over. Given the right inputs, and allowed to do what it is designed to do, it will carve beautifully. You have to learn how to let it do that.

And the dismount speed? Or were you wanting a push start to your downhill run? Practically it would have to like express lifts with the chair/gondola slowed for entry and exit. Deicing after a storm would be a major problem to get unless you heat the rails which adds substantially to the power consumption. And the more uphill capacity a lift has the more people you have to share your favourite carving run with. Be careful what you wish for.

As others above have already hinted, there are quite different and distinct ways of carving a snowboard. Side of the feet, forward facing stance. Heel and toe, sideward facing stance most obvious on heelside. Pureboarding style, a heel/toe variant. Extreme carve, rotational style with sideways body more obvious on toeside. The most effective technique for each is distinctly different for each. All are accepted ways of riding a carving board. Different people prefer different styles. It helps to know which style you ride when seeking advice about how to improve. The same could be said for those giving advice. Not a criticism of any of the advice given so far. More of a larger view observation. I'd have picked Nevin Galmarini rather than Sigi as a more across the board, heel and toe, top level racer.

One of the key tips Joerg Engli gives in his Pureboarding clinics, a style which uses relatively across board bindings especially the rear binding, is this - Heelside: put more weight on your front heel. Toeside: put more weight on your rear toes. When I've tried this with binding angles like you are using I find it easy to get the toeside to bite and whip round the turn.

On Highway 89 @ Captain's Basin, Cardrona. I saw the Chinese Junior alpine snowboard team doing the same thing, prior to the Junior World champs at Cardrona. Or try it this way - http://beckmannag.com/hardboot-snowboarding/video-clips/bamboo

Boarder odour. Alpine boarders seem to be be particularly "high" in it. Skwalers are clearly completely off the skwale.

With the low back pain and getting older it's definitely time for body maintenance work. I see you're using TD3 step ins already. In particular work on making sure your hamstring muscles are sufficiently loose to allow you to tilt your pelvis forward when you bend at the waist and relieve the strain on your lower back. I can recommend the stretch I wrote about in Dan's recent thread on his back pain from personal experience of the same problems. I use the stretch most days. I am 61 and have had tight hamstrings, low back pain and a bout of lumbar disc prolapse, confirmed on MRI, nerve root compression. Doing the stretches makes bouts of back pain rare and short. Not doing it, a week off work 2 years ago, opioids and muscle relaxant meds before things settled.

Fiends was a mistale? Or maybe not.

Top level racers seem to mostly prefer F2 bail bindings. There are a few Intec step in users, but only a few. F2 have limited options available for adjusting lift and canting unless you are prepared to 3D print or otherwise craft your own wedges. A strength of the TD design is the ability to produce fine adjustment in particular of canting without having to build new parts, and to be able to adjust during a day's riding if you wish to try different settings. TDs are also very strong, but not unbreakable. F2s plastic parts are a little more likely to fail. Finally the toe bail on F2 stepins fits the nose of UPZ boots better that the TD3 stepins toe bail. I have stepins versions of both and ride both depending upon circumstances. I also built custom wedges for my F2s to get 6 degree lift.

This is probably the video referred to above.

If you've not seen Norm & Diana ride, here they are from the SES 2012 session. Norm appears at about 5:06, the moustache is the giveaway! Diana is in the white helmet/ponytail and black & white jacket.

I've ridden hinge front, slider rear, for a long time. The plate allows the board to flex freely underneath, that is its' reason for being there. Hinge under the front foot gives you the most solid feeling under that foot.

Can we assume Riceball brought his current camera?

Fin had some problems with getting a suitable fabricator for the Intec/Fintec SW heel units. I was sent a prototype to trial in the Southern Hemisphere winter. The steel was too soft and I bent the heel unit out of shape and had premature release on my first real run with them. Fin was horrified and very apologetic but no harm was done. Took quite a while to solve this.

So does he move the rear binding to account for that offset boot marking as well? That would seem logical to me.

@slapos What was his reasoning? How did the shift benefit his technique of riding? Only then can anyone judge whether the reason(s) applies to them

You're more authority than anecdote. Liners have a limited number of times they can be re-shaped. One of the factors that will limit that is foam cell collapse. It's an expensive experiment to see what happens if you allow the liner to evenly heat right through to higher temperatures. https://www.metrofoam.com.au/documents/pe-eva-data.pdf (Ultralon Data Sheet) Page 2 excerpt- - "Ultralon foam has a fine cell structure. Each cell is a bubble of gas confined by the cell wall. Heating the material pressurizes that gas and this causes the gas to permeate through the cell walls. Therefore the sheet size decreases when cooled by the volume of gas that is lost.The foam may undergo expansion and contraction in transit if exposed to extremes of heat. Closed Cell Foam Shrinkage. Closed cell foams change in dimension when heated for a period of time. The degree of change and its permanence is dependant on the following factors : Temperature.Polyolefin foams subjected to temperatures up to 60 C (for E.V.A.) and 70 C (for P.E.) have negligible shrinkage. At higher temperatures the degree of change becomes unpredictable." My aim is not to win an argument. Everyone who home molds their liners benefits from the most accurate information about how and why to do it. The discussion has produced links to a range of information sources. That's a good outcome.

In medicine we've moved on from anecdote and authority based medicine, to evidence based medicine. Let's look at the evidence. Intuition liners, and many others, are made of an Ultralon brand EVA foam. https://blisterreview.com/gear-reviews/intuition-liners https://www.ultralonfoam.com/products/ski-snowboard Ultralon foam specification sheets. Note the line on Service temperature. http://www.prfloors.com/PDF/Ultralon spec explained.pdf The melting point of EVA copolymer is 75 degrees C https://www.chemicalbook.com/ChemicalProductProperty_EN_CB0356004.htm

Most of us have skidded the same path in the past. Remember to have fun.

More importantly, your oven may vary.