Corey

I'll throw my old soft boots into our baggage and then rent a board there. Are rentals at the resorts pretty reasonable? (cost and quality) Thanks for the advice! I never even thought about bringing a soft setup. This will be my wife's first time skiing powder, should be fun for her!

No powstick in my quiver, I'll have to rent/buy something there if it dumps. A tanker/4807/etc. is out of my budget and useless for me once I get home... :( Could I rent a big freestyle board and mount up my TD2s all the way back and have fun in the pow? I could rent a full soft setup, but I quite like the comfort my hardboot setup offers! (413 boots with blue BTS on step in TD2s with soft e-rings)

I own 3 boards and need to pick two to bring to SES. -Oxygen Proton 178 - super fun on wide slopes, scary for me if there are lots of people, narrow runs, or ice. When I'm confident in my abilities and the conditions, this board makes me smile ear-to-ear. -Volkl RT 168 GS - pretty soft/maneuverable for my 215 lbs, fun when there are narrow runs or lots of people -Volkl RT 178 GS - just got this, only had 1 day on it so far. Feels pretty close to the 168 (no kidding! ;)) but likes very slightly wider turns, probably more appropriate for my 215 lbs than the 168 version. When If there are wide blue/black runs with fantastic grooming, I spend most of my days on the Proton. If the snow is questionable at all, the runs narrow/not steep, or there are lots of people then the RT 168 got the nod. I did two runs at Lake Louise last year on the Proton and managed to wander into every mogul field on the way down by accident. :( I happily spent the rest of the weekend on the RT 168. I think I'll bring the Proton and the longer Volkl. What do you think? Will I wish I had the softer/tighter turning 168?

In the Name of the King gets my vote for worst movie. Statham is the lead actor again. The whole theatre was actually laughing during a few of the 'serious' scenes.

Have you called a US Customs office to see what they can tell you? They were quite helpful the few times I had to call them. Good luck with this. UPS Canada will hunt us down for this brokerage charge. I've been charged $40 brokerage fees on $30 items. In Canada we can broker our own goods if we contact UPS in advance of them arriving. Call UPS and ask how you can broker your own stuff, they were surprisingly helpful to me. FedEx's rates are lower but they won't let us broker things ourselves. Canada Post/USPS charges us a flat $5 brokerage fee.

It's possible that I've had my right arm stuck out like that for 20 years of snowboarding! :lol: Amazing what video can tell you... Thanks for the great tips, I'm going to work on keeping my arms down/behind my back and using more inclination next weekend. Manitoba is damn flat, we just find big river valleys to build ski resorts on. ;) This hill is actually just across the border in North Dakota - www.frostfireskiarea.com

Imaginary friend - :lol: That's something I didn't even know I did until I saw this video! I'm going to try the 'ape arms' exercise (arms hanging at sides) someone mentioned in another post next time I go out. Is this related to William Blake's advice in another thread? I have no idea what the last two sentences mean. :o That's interesting about the driving comments, I usually move the board around under me a lot more but I kept losing the edge with any of those movements... Is that technique universal and these conditions highlighted my weaknesses or does ice call for different technique? I'll be at SES this year! I'm practically counting down the days. :D

Below are a couple of short clips from today's fun. Would anyone care to offer advice on things I could do better or drills to try next weekend? :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TZ5i2eL2LQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgX45sMPlhE It was a brutal day! -25C with a cold wind, 1/2" of groomed snow on top of ice with the occasional random soft spot mixed in. I was the only one leaving marks in the snow visible from the chairlift, everyone else was just sliding over top of it! I had a few good falls where I just lost the edge on icy stuff or augered in the soft stuff. :( I'm usually much more confident but the snow scared me into being a bit more cautious - probably a good thing! I'm most confident in the tiny slalom-like pumped carves in the middle of the run, but that's likely because the snow was a bit softer there. I've also been fighting with sketchy heelsides for this season - it just doesn't seem like I can lock the edge in hard enough to really pressure it. Equipment: Volkl RT 168 GS, TD2 step-in bindings with yellow rings, Raichle 413 boots, BTS kit with blue springs. Me: 215 lbs, 5' 11", snowboarding for 20 years, last 4 with hardboots (about 20-25 days total on HB). Hill: Yes, you can see the entire hill from top to bottom in the 2nd clip... 500' vertical, 45 seconds down, 7 minutes up. That's what I get for living in Manitoba!

Is it beneficial to apply this same pressure even on a 'hero' snow day? I definitely had a lot of time to spend on technique, and the frequent slams helped to focus on what wasn't working. :lol:

Conditions were pretty harsh at a local ski hill yesterday - rock hard grooming that quickly polished to man-made yellow ice in spots at around -22C (-8F). Quite hard to set an edge with any confidence. After trying a bunch of stuff I've read on here, I ended up going towards a low/compressed style with high edge pressure. Any sloppyness resulted in me losing the edge and sliding out or going down. The breakthrough came as pure chance: I drove the board into the snow. Not pushing down onto the top of the board, but rather pushing the sidewall into the snow, like using a knife to cut cheese or trying to scrape mud off the bottom of your shoe. Whoa! Now I know you can't actually push the sidewall into the snow with any reasonable force while making a turn, but the mere attempt to do this made a huge difference. I was laying out turns that I didn't think were possible just minutes before. :D It drew a lot of attention at this small hill - I got a LOT of comments! One time getting off the lift a group of boarders exclaimed "there he is!" and asked me a bunch of questions about alpine boarding and the setup I was using. They couldn't see my ear-to-ear smile through my facemask... :D --- Later in the afternoon one (of two) chair lifts stopped working. My wife and I were just 3 groups from getting on the chair. Lucky timing for us! We got to watch the process to get people off chairs, that looks a little sketchy! Maybe it was just the process at the small town Manitoba resort that was sketchy. ;) The line ups got ridiculous very quickly for the one remaining chair so we just left. I don't even want to think about how long the people were stuck on that chairlift... :(

I have the 168 version of this board, I'm 215-ish and 5'11". It's very 'playful', easy to bend to varying radii depending on what I want. My only complaint was that it gets a little out of it's element when going very fast. I also have an Oxygen Proton 178 that's no fun at slow speeds but it is a blast at higher speeds. I rode the 168 exclusively on my last trip to Lake Louise - it's my primary choice until I find a wide/steep/unpopulated run that I'm comfortable letting the 178 Proton loose on. I did just buy the other 178 RT that was up for sale, I'm hoping it fills the slight gap between my 168 RT and the Proton. In other words, it'll be fine for your weight.

My thoughts on the matter as a relative rookie... I can only use a car analogy: If you really love driving cars on a road course, there's no denying that a high-end Porsche/Ferrari/Lotus/etc. is going to be an awesome machine and be wickedly fun to drive. But, you can still go out there and have fun turning laps in an 80's Civic, a 2000 Mustang, or a 2008 S2000. The Porsches (and the like) would be more fun and faster but only you can pick where the sliding scale between your budget and desired performance cross. The only pieces of carving equipment I've bought at full retail are a set of TD2s, Intec heels, a BTS kit, and some Intuition liners. Everything else has been used or NOS because that'll all the budget I've chosen to spend. Ok, I'm also going to be ordering a 2nd board kit soon. ;) I am blowing much of this season's budget going to go to SES as it looks like a real blast and I'll get to try out a bunch of newer boards - hopefully including metal. Maybe I'll be swayed to finally buy a new board!

I agree that there's a resurgence, but I think it's already started. Carving will never grow to be huge due to the skill required and a fairly sizeable initial investment, but it's noticeably changed since I abandoned soft boots just 3-ish years ago. Re: Skateboarding - Try a longboard. I had a ton of fun on a Loaded Vanguard this summer just pumping around local streets and bike paths. I hadn't touched a skateboard for 10+ years prior to this experience.

Sold and enroute via UPS. Thanks for the easy transaction Marco!

Email sent!

Don't give up yet! There were (and still are!) lots of people riding Burton boots in TD1s. As Derf mentioned, there are wider shoulder bolts and bails available from Bomber for AT boots. But first: where are the bails contacting the boot? Of course, the more money you spend on fixing this problem the less you have to buy more modern boots... Been there, done that, ended up with some NOS Deeluxe 413s and never looked back.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? In this quick sketch the blue/green point is the contact point between the toe clip and the boot. It absolutely has to be to the left of the red line as shown in that picture. But, you have to view the boot straight from the side, not slightly from the rear as this picture is. Good luck!

Check for clearance between the front bail and the boot. You should be able to pass at least a business card between them along the full length of the bail to the shoulder bolts when fully clamped up. That's what Fin was getting at. :) If there's contact, the bail may not be allowed to move enough to get a safe connection. Another option is that the toe clip may not be going over center before the top portion hits the boot. I found with my old Burton boots that I had to have the screws (that you are missing) all the way out to ensure that it went over center. If you draw a line from the shoulder bolts to the point where the bail passes through the center of the toe clip, the point where it contacts the boot MUST be forward (away from the heel) of that line. That's what 'over center' means. Not over center = going to release when bumped. If it's not over center, I don't know what options there are other than bending the toe clip so that the L-shape is more open. This is a last resort! Now: L After bending: L

There are definitely metal sheets in my Proton 178, I can see them in the tail cutout. I've asked about this before, apparently it's quite primitive compared to the current metal boards.

The 'run and slide' test doesn't work for me, I can slide either way but definitely prefer right foot forward. Go for it, it'll be a fun (although frustrating at first) way to spend a day. I learned to ride switch many years ago by spending a whole day riding backwards - including riding up the T-bar with what used to be my front foot out. Expect to crash lots. ;)

I'd had a similar issue and found I had too much weight on the front foot and bending at the waist. A tip that helped me to stop bending at the waist was imagining holding a bag of something in your trailing hand. Work hard to keep that bag off the snow even in deep turns. It feels like you have your inside shoulder stupidly high but you don't - you'll be more like the photos D-Sub posted.

Oval track racing looks like it would be really fun to do, my budget won't allow for it though. I live for autocross in the summer. Many years spent in Miatas, but I spent the past season driving a 500 hp Camaro. In-car video: This car is insane - it took me quite a while not to have my brain go into panic mode when I was able to hit full throttle. Spectacular diff failure: We knew the diff was going to go, but the year-end championship was on the line so the car owner told me to go for it. Won the championship by 1 point out of 9000 even though this whole race day was scrubbed! I also ice raced a CRX in the rubber to ice class. It's fantastic fun but I'd honestly rather spend my time and money snowboarding. I have ice race videos up on YouTube but they're 10 minutes long and frankly a little boring. Next summer I'll be autocrossing my Honda S2000 in A Stock and travelling to some big US events including Nationals in Topeka. Picture: http://i12.tinypic.com/879kcv5.jpg

I haven't laughed this hard on a chairlift before... Was watching a fairly new snowboarder making it down a run under the chair. He went off the groomed area to a bit of soft stuff off to the side. It was 1' of powder with about 1" of man-made styrofoam on top. The nose submarined quite hard and his board came to a dead stop. He did a 3/4 front flip and landed flat on his back with his arms flailing out sideways - no injury other than to his pride. There was about a 5' gap between his track and the most perfect snow angel I've ever seen at a ski hill! :lol:

I just remembered something: Try to find a Protec helmet. They only touched the sides of my fairly round head, there was TONS of room front to back. The Giro I chose was very suitable for my head shape.

I bent the bail ever so slightly so that it was bowed outwards. Then the added friction against the bolt heads holds the bail in whatever position it was last in. Then just position it roughly with your foot just before stepping in. Crude, but effective! You don't need to bend the bail very much at all to do this. Bending inwards will achieve the same thing.