SunSurfer

Unless you understand what you're trying to achieve with boot flex the process of altering it has no direction. Boots allow a rider to apply controlled pressure to the edges of the board in order to make it carve. The boots and bindings together allow a degree of motion that allows us to soak up the bumps and ruts a rider encounters while in motion, both carving and skidding. Hard snowboard boots flex primarily forwards and backwards. They are not designed to flex sideways. People ride loosely set-up bail bindings or save up and buy Sidewinders for serious lateral flex. BTS and other spring systems, as well as the inherent rigidity of the plastic in boot shell, cuff, and tongue, plus the liners, all contribute to how much fore and aft motion is possible. How much is desirable depends on which style you are riding, and may differ between front and rear boots. Are you racing, riding binding angles > than 50 degrees or < 50 degrees, riding in Pure Boarding style, or an extreme carver. Your boot flex needs will vary depending on your style. A stiff forward flex allows precise application of pressure in the toe of the boot. A soft forward flex makes it less precise but allows a greater range of knee bend and possibly a lower body position. A stiff rearward flex allows precise application of heel pressure. Finally note that in the original description of how to set up the BTS system Fin has placed a photo showing different coloured springs on the same boot, allowing different flex fore and aft. If you don't know where you are going any road will do. As an example, I ride 65/60 degrees and apply edge pressure from the lateral parts of my boots. I have BTS only on my rear boot with it set very soft to allow lots of rear knee bend to soak up the bumps and allow me a lower body position deep in my turns. My front boot is locked in position allowing precise weighting of either front edge. This set-up is not applicable to someone riding lower angles who weights their edges with the front heel heelside, and the rear toes toeside.

Try setting it up next time with fixed axle at the front, between the ball of your foot and the last bone in your big toe. Set the rear axle so that, if possible, the bindings are equidistant from the plate centre and their nearest axle. This gives a very direct feel under the front foot. For many riders this will mean setting their plate at the maximum interaxle distance their UPM/4X4 inserts can manage. I now have a number of old boards with an extra set of inserts to allow a UPM plate to have a 68cm interaxle distance.

There are distinct differences between riding shallow binding angles < 50 deg, higher angles 50+ deg, Pureboarding style, and extreme carving style. Corey was not taking a Pureboarding clinic. I've been on one of Joerg's clinics and Corey's clinic. Aracan, you are conflating two different styles.

And as your knees get older, and with climate change snow conditions will gradually worsen, you'll appreciate an isolation/isocline plate more and more.

Sitting here in the Southern hemisphere summer, I need a beer after reading your posts, to replace the fluid lost from my jealous salivating!

The inverting of the nut/bolts that hold the toe and heel blocks in place on the SG design, nuts now in the blocks rather than the base plate, is a significant improvement in the ease of adjustability.

Yamifumi, Glad to read you've found a sweet spot. What are the cant/lift disc angles you are running with those binding angles? That will tell your readers precisely what lift and cant combination has worked for you.

Lift tilts a binding around its' short axis. Cant tilts a binding around its' long axis. If the slope of the disc and the long axis of the binding plate on your TD3s are aligned only lift is produced. If the slope of the disc and the long axis of the binding plate are at 90 degrees to each other only canting is produced. In between a wide range of combinations of both cant and lift are produced.

https://youtu.be/GiONqn9R4N0 Both on the same course. Kosir at 00:28 Wild at 01:34 Look for the line of the shoulders and arms, in particular on the heelside turns. The contrast is particularly marked for these two. (Nevin Galmarini is another with a strong heel & toe style. He comments in one of his YouTube videos about how heel and toeside turns are quite different for him. Wild rode with this style at Sochi, both in slalom & GS. (embedding not permitted by YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI-FhmBqy9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDilQWhZxfk His early coach, Monique Pelletier, was teaching him this style, her style, as an 11 yr-old. She is an ex-USA team World Cup racer - but on skis. I suspect that our chosen style will often reflect the route we came to alpine snowboarding. The softbooters will more often be heel & toe. The ex-skiers will more often be out of the sides of their boots. Both styles work, but there are distinct differences in how to setup the boots (particularly flex) & bindings to suit the chosen style. Advice given for one style won't necessarily work for the other style. Understanding which style you ride is crucial for making progress.

Thanks for the thoughtful and thought provoking answer. The analogy to weightlifters is interesting. For riders who weight their edge "heel and toe" the stance for the "clean" part of a clean and jerk is appropriate. For riders who ride out of the sides of their boots, the lunge position used in the final part of the jerk is a more appropriate illustration. To see the difference in rider style in modern racers, compare Vic Wild and Zan Kosir. Kosir is a heel and toe rider, Wild rides out of the sides of his boots, with the difference most obvious on their heelside turns. Jim Callen, from all the videos of him I've seen, is a heel and toe rider.

Jim, I'd be fascinated to read a reasoned philosophy of binding and stance set-up. I've read Jack Michaud's tech piece on Bomber but ultimately been unsatisfied by the reasoning.

From your post you've begun at a point that is halfway through the process. Unless the foundations of your stance are straight and sound the rest will be problematic. Begin with your boots. The soles should be flat on the floor when your legs & feet are straight below your hips. This is about the same distance apart as your feet would be if you were on skis and gliding straight down the fall line on a beginner slope. You will probably need to adjust the boot cuff canting to achieve this. Now measure the distance apart the midline of your boots are in that same position. Take up the position and measure it a number of times, average the results. Now set your TD3 bindings, centred on the inserts on your board, at twice that boot centre line distance. Set your front 3 degree cant disc at 60 degrees and the binding plate at 60 degrees. Your front foot needs no canting. The body geometry reason for this I've set out in my last post in the Cant and Lift thread started recently by McCarver. Set your rear cant disc at 65 degrees and the binding plate to 49 degrees. This will give you the appropriate inward cant for your rear foot. This is the process I've used for myself, adjusted for your preferred stance angles.

Unlikely to see snowboarders with upper body motion like TL until they move their centre of mass around like he does. GS skiers clearly weight their edges by alternating weight from front heel and rear toe, just like the mainstream snowboarder. ;-) Seriously now, contrast the upper body position and motion of Vic Wild and Zan Kosir, both very good current racers. Wild keeps his body facing down the fall line both heel and toeside. On Kosir's heelside his body very clearly faces across the board and somewhere closer to Wild's position on toeside. Intriguingly, the YouTube video of Vic Wild as an 11yr old shows the style of his formative coach, Monique Pelletier, with the same facing forward, hands forward, shoulders across the board stance that Vic continues to use. Monique is an ex World Cup alpine racer - on skis.

Maybe the rider is not quite as flexible as he once was. :-)

Queequeg, I agree absolutely. Stance is so much more than just stance distance.

Or by slightly increasing the amount of inward canting on the rear foot.

The perception of "width" has a lot to do with the tension your muscles around your hips and knees are under. As the binding angles swing from across the board to along the board, the relative position of pelvis and feet changes, from feet side beside but a long way apart (0 degrees) to one foot in front of the other but now tucked in under the pelvis. I wrote about how this changes the appropriate binding set up in the Cant/ lift thread that was recently discussed.

Stance distance = distance between centre point of each binding. Changing binding angles changes almost everything APART FROM stance distance. In particular it changes the relationship of your hip joints and feet. Thought or actual experiment: TD3 cant discs at your personal stance distance on snowboard. Now rotate binding plates from 0 degrees to 90 degrees. You've just gone from duckfoot to skwal and everywhere in between. Your stance distance has remained unchanged.

https://vimeo.com/10029545 Vimeo not allowing this to be embedded when this post made. Taking settings off the end makes the link work.

I would also recommend working your way through Erik Beckmann's website. His thoughts on boot setup were enormously helpful to me. I've attached to this post my own mental framework for thinking about the interplay between rider size, binding angles, stance and stance distances, heel & toe lift, and canting. It's a kind of unified theory that covers alpine snowboarders, skwallers, "softies" style riders, and monoskiers. Also attached is a spreadsheet for working out binding angles for a given riders size and C-to-C stance distance that should need no canting. I will now put on my asbestos riding suit and wait my learned fellow riders responses. :) 2016-11-26 A framework for hardboot stance and binding setup.pdf Heel Toe Rise Angle Calculator.pdf (I'm working on "Butts, Boots and Bindings", looking at the interplay between edge pressure technique, boot flex and what we want our bindings to do.)

I found these on line and downloaded them. Now I can't find where I found them so I've uploaded them to my YouTube channel. Ten years on some of these faces and riding styles may be a little different. How many of these riders will be at ATC 2017? If you know where the originals are, or were the original author, please post. The original files were called ses_copper_bowl.wmv & ses_pow_ryth.wmv During an enforced layoff due to recent surgery I've been collating all the SES/ATC videos I can find on YouTube into playlists. Other similar playlists exist, for example, on Johnasmo's & FineLineClub's channels.

How do I determine cant and lift? Or did you mean how to decide what canting and lifting to use? That's a different thing all together. There are articles written about how to decide that on the Bomber site, I think with Jack Michaud's name attached. I've got my own theory about what is likely to be a good starting point, based on anatomy & geometry, which I've alluded to above. In the end you want to be in a comfortable balanced stance as you make a straight line glide down a slope, ready and able to move your weight over either edge to initiate turns in either direction. As Pokkis suggests above, unless you're on a stiff full isolation plate, your effective angles of rear heel and front toe lift and inward canting, relative to your hip and knee joints, will increase as the board bends in the turns. The more the board bends the greater the change.

To try and answer McKarver's original questions, and drag this thread back into line. Can I change the cant and toe/heel lift, without using the stackable shims....? You have to use some sort of wedge, but you are not limited to the ones F2 provides. How do I determine lift and cant? I make my own wedges and mesasure the result as illustrated. The Clinometer is one of many free apps that will measure levels/slopes for you. The Intec boot heel sits about 2mm above the Intec base plate. The Intec heel & toe wedges are made of exterior ply and coated in epoxy resin. These have been in use for several seasons now. The Snowpro toe lift wedge is made of HDPE kitchen chopping board. The cant wedges used to flatten out the built in SnowPro canting are made from 1mm thick layers of differing width HDPE to create a wedge shape.

Canadian & US warships and their helicopters helping out in Kaikoura. In the neighbourhood for the NZ navy's 75th anniversary. Troubles bring out your friends. Thanks.