StevieG

Here's a good quad-burner and cardio exercise for those with access to a gym - 20-30 minutes on an elliptical trainer, but every couple of minutes, do 60 seconds in a squat position. Just drop your ass, upper leg parallel to the floor at the highest position of each stroke, and let it burn. If you can maintain this position for much more than a minute at a time, you are a beast. Sounds dumb, looks dumber, but really works.

Count me in. Plate demos would be sweet. Gates and instruction too?

I was never much of a skier, but skied infrequently for maybe 5 years before I picked up snowboarding about 27 years ago, and I haven't skied or been interested in skiing since. But a good part of that attitude stems from injury concerns - I've always suscribed to the theory that severe knee injuries are much more likely on skis than on a board. At 42 yrs old and with bad knees anyway, I'm just not interested in a sport where each knee can be torqued independently by a lever nearly a meter long in each direction (fore and aft). Having each foot locked into position relative to the other on a board makes it much more difficult to torque a knee, so it seems to me that boarding is just much safer from a catastrphic-injury point of view. It's just anecdotal, but it seems nearly every middle-aged lifelong skiier I know has a story about reconstructive knee surgery at some point in their past. And I know several people who don't ski any more after knee injuries. I tell them to try boarding. Does the risk of injury factor into anyone else's decision to ski or not to ski?

The side-to-side gap is normal. If the binding is adjusted properly with the forward pins of the heels resting on the ramp of the heel receiver, you will not get any side-to-side movement when you are actually in the binding. The main pins of the heels should be set towards the back of the holes in the heel receiver, hard to tell in the pics but I think you have that right too. Looks good.

You've got to be kidding me. In your very first post in this thread you wrote "I used to have a hard boot set up and I sold it. Why? It killed me to stray so far from what snowboarding is." So you come to a hardboot forum, make the outrageously elitist claim that hardbooting "strays from what snowboarding is", and then go on to call the hardbooters elitists? Pot-kettle-black much? Hardbooters as a group are far more accepting of softbooters than you seem to be of hardbooters. Hell, there have been several threads on this forum the past few days in praise of the SBXers! And no claims that softbooters aren't "real" snowboarders. Your flaw was that you took the negative reactions to your first post as some sort of categorical slam against softbooters. It was no such thing, and you'll find very little if any of that attitude here. It was a slam against you being a jackass. Nothing more. And your little lecture a few posts ago about the proper use of race boards - sorry, but you simply don't know what you're talking about. PGS racers get way up on edge, and if you had bothered to watch a PGS race in the past few years you'd know that.

The component of style that most hardbooters appreciate is the style of your turns. Aka carving technique. We appreciate a rider's precision at speed, level of aggression, fluidity in their carves. Style of the sort that prompts us to offer up compliments like "nice turns!" as opposed to "nice pants!". By this definition, personally I can appreciate the style of maybe 9 out of 10 hardbooters, and 1 out of 10 softbooters. The "what you are wearing" component of style is fashion. They are not two very different things, they are the exact same thing. And if you support the "baggy clothes" rule in BX, then you care about fashion. Sorry if you consider that a bad word and don't like it applied to you, but it is what it is.

I understand not wanting to go backwards to aluminum heel receivers. And with the new hardened steel heel receiver, I can see how it would be difficult to bend the receiver to have the SW pivot. But couldn't you machine an aluminum base for the heel receiver (with SW pivot), which accepts 2 bolt-on steel pieces for the actual heel receiver? I'm sure this approach would present it's own challenges, but may be simpler overall. I'm picturing an aluminum base similar to the TD1/TD2 stepin heel receiver (including the vertical flanges, but shortened), except with a SW pivot on the bottom, and made 1 cm wider to accept two 0.5 cm thick steel intec receiver plates that bolt to the insides of the shortened vertical aluminum flanges. So the intec heel pins would slide on and engage with a steel surface, but the bulk of the heel receiver would be aluminum to ease manufacturing of the SW mechanism. Seems you could start with the current non-stepin SW heel block design and just widen it and add vertical aluminum flanges to accept the bolt-on steel receivers. Just thinking out loud here. But really want a step-in version. Can it be ready next week? ;)

Thanks for all the advice. I'll make a call to Ski Center and get an appointment with Brian Eardley. I'm thinking that custom footbeds will serve me well - lately I've been getting intense arch pain the first hour or so of riding each day (in the old SB 225's I'm replacing). Can't comment on the boots yet, will be another month at least before they hit the slopes.

I just received a new pair of Track 325T’s from bomberonline and need to get the liners molded. Don't want to go the DIY molding route. I live in northern Virginia. From what I understand, Kneissl and Deeluxe are the boot brands that use Thermoflex liners, and (not surprisingly) I cannot find a dealer for these brands anywhere nearby. Are there any other brands that use these or similar liners, to help me find a local dealer that will have an oven and molding expertise? Or better yet, any mid-Atlantic carvers know of a good bootfitter who can mold thermoflex liners in the Northern VA/DC/MD area?

First hardboot setup was December '92: '93 Burton M6 asym, Burton Variplate bindings, and Burton Megaflex boots. Never rode softies again. Followed the M6 two years later with a Hooger X-Act 158, damn I loved that board. First board of any sort was fall 1983 - a DIY wood laminate board built in my basement, copying the Burton Performer - three 1/8" thick plywood layers glued together in a jig to get a convex base, 3 fins cut from aluminum angle stock, rubber strap bindings made from bicycle inner tubes. The next year I bought a Burton Performer Elite.

What works for me - an elliptical crosstrainer done in a squat position (upper legs close to horizontal). Incredible quad burn, do it for 20-30 minutes with varying degrees of squat to build endurance and leg strength. Might sound easy, but your first time out you probably won't be able to do more than a few minutes.