jburk

Relax, it was meant as a humorous aside. No, I haven’t been fortunate (or solvent) enough to ride the 168. I had a K162, admittedly a very different beast, one that has to be ridden with deliberation and purpose, but very forgiving for all that. I inquired about a custom 168 (stock is almost 2 cm too wide for me, and I’m on the lighter side at 165-170), and it looked like the bill was going to be upwards of $1700 USD with shipping and duty. Too rich for my blood… If you’ve been able to also ride the Thirst (“effortless” comes to mind when I think about it), I’d be very interested in your opinion on it, perhaps in a PM or a new thread in the carving board forum, I’ve pulled this thread too far OT as it is.

I had the distinct pleasure to demo one of these yesterday. Liked it so much I called Mark to ask how to put a deposit down while driving back home at the end of the day. I’ve had several conversations with Mark Miller about what I was looking for, rider weight and riding style, etc. Then he went and built a demo board very close to those specs, but with a more (or closer to) conventional 19.1 cm waist; we had discussed an 18 or 18.5 cm waist for me since I find my 18.5 cm Donek FC Secret to be still a tad too wide. Guess Mark figured the wider waist demo was more suitable for a general audience. Met @Keenan at MHM parking lot (Mark shipped the board to him, Keenan is either unofficially or officially rep’ing Thirst, I’m not sure which), mounted my bindings centred on the reference stance at my normal stance width, and away we went. This setup turned out to feel like I had already spent several days tweaking width, angles, etc., to get to a point where everything felt dialed in, fairly remarkable given what the day’s weather had in store for us. Conditions were (way) less than ideal for a carving board: 12” of new in the last 24 hours, moderate to high winds. Surface was a mix of ungroomed shin-deep lightweight new mixed with wind-scoured hardpack, sometimes alternating back and forth between the two every 20 yards. And I have to say, this board was so versatile that it handled both of those extremes without complaint. Mark had told me that despite it being a carving board, it would ride well in the powder. What I didn’t expect was that riding it in anything more than ankle-deep would actually be grinning-like-an-idiot fun. I followed Keenan through gullies full of new I wouldn’t normally have gone into, let alone without all the new, and it was like I’d been on that board for an entire season already. Easy board to make friends with. When I got it out on the groomed, it was equally accommodating. Turn initiation was never an issue, didn’t take an iota of deliberation, and yet the board was nice and stable, definitely no sense of it being “hooky” or twitchy. Think both Mark and Keenan have mentioned that this board’s sidecut radii vary differently from conventional wisdom, with the sidecut being tightest under the bindings, and opening up towards the shovel and tail. There’s also a fair bit of decambering going on at both ends. Took it down a short but fairly steep pitch at one point, it likes to finish the turns and hang on all the way across, yet really willing to move on to the next turn whenever asked. One thing that comes to mind was how it seemed really easy to do toeside turns. If anything, my bindings are centered or a tad biased to heelside (no gilmour bias, just maybe a few mm to heelside on the front foot), and yet toesides were always really solid. A few times I got thrown around by the uneven surface right as I was transitioning to toeside and had that “I’m going to have to work to get myself back out of trouble” premonition, and yet the board came back around under me as if I knew what I was doing. The only surprise when encountering hardpack or a bit of ice mid-carve was that there was no surprises; the feel underfoot changed, and the board sounded different, but there was no drama and we just kept on keeping on. As the day progressed and the surface got all chopped, the board started to feel more and more damp. I wouldn’t say it cut through the lumps and piles, nor did it conform to the surface. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it was like riding a boiler plate 4mm lite, you can feel the surface inconsistencies, but they’re not affecting you, but you’re not completely isolated from the surface either. Have I mentioned that the bases on these things must be fast AF? I’ve read a few other reviews of this board that have mentioned how well these glide on the flats, and I have to agree. A few times on the flats I got hit head on by a gust of wind that killed a lot of my speed and I thought I was going to have to unclip and skate, but I managed to just keep gliding, sometimes at less than walking speed, but never coming to a dead stop. Other times I was still picking up speed on what looked to the eye to be flat while other riders were coming to a stop and unbuckling to skate. Can’t wait for Mark to build one of these for me, think it will be my new daily driver.

<thread hijack> I demo’d a Thirst Superconductor yesterday, it may very well make a serious claim to this title. Apologies, back to Kessler vs. Kessler. </thread hijack>

OK, downloaded the .SCAD file from thingiverse and OpenScad from http://www.openscad.org/downloads.html, this is just freaking awesome. Looks like I know what my workbench is going to look like in a few months. The one variable that I can see needing to experiment with by printing a few variants would be the base_depth. I'll most likely be printing up a toe lift kit at around 7 degrees, and running a couple of renders (vs previews) shows me that the default base_depth of 0.5 is too low for this higher angle. 1.5 looks like it might do the trick, 2.0 might be better? I'm highly impressed with the stamping of the parameters into the print, makes everything self-documenting: Has anyone yet printed up a lift kit with the higher angles? If so, let us know what base_depth you had to use.

If you haven’t seen this how-to vid for the install, it’s absolutely worthwhile.

I think the quickest visual indicator of V1 vs V2 is the number of holes for mounting the side bosses; the V1 had 3, and the V2 had 4, noticed this when I bought a V2 at the end of the 16/17 season, and the plate differed from the manual in a few areas, no big deal, just different... V1: V2:

The wunderbar will help mount the plate, but it’s not necessary. If you’re only going to mount the plate to one board and leave it mounted, you can skip the wunderbar, but expect to take a few passes at getting the lower hardware properly aligned.

Looking at this photo, I'd guess that the blocks have two recesses for the hex bolt, and you shift the blocks inward or outward to switch between S and L; see how the toe piece has that empty cavity? Betting this pic is of a binding set up as a Small. Nice, it means that the base plate doesn't have to have 2 sets of holes drilled, like the newer F2 Ti Race already have.

With the F2, the toe or heel blocks need to be moved to the end of their travel to expose the bolt heads. This also means the you lose the bail spacing, and may have to readjust it once you reassemble to get it back to exactly the same tightness when closing the tie bail. Not that big a deal if you’re doing it on a workbench with a cordless drill, but doing this with a hand tool while on the slope to experiment while riding is a major PITA. With my boot size, the blocks are located where I have to move them through almost all of their travel, it can easily take 10 minutes to make a change. Looks like with the SGs, you unmount the binding, flip it over to expose the bolt heads, remove the bolt, swap out the lift or cant wedge, reassemble and remount, while retaining the toe to heel spacing. I’m pretty much dialed in for toe and heel lift, but was planning on 3D printing some 1* and 1.5* cant wedges. Riding no cant at the moment, but preferred somewhere around 1.5 outward on the front when I ride TD3s. So I know I have at least three more rounds of tweaking in my future. @yamifumi: are the lift kits and cant wedges interchangeable between SG and F2?

Does the SG binding allow for finer cant adjustments than the F2s? F2 cant wedges are 4*, the fact that F2 doesn’t offer smaller wedges for finer adjustments (like 1* or 1.5*) is my only real complaint with them. I know I can go the 3D printing route, but really, how hard would it be for F2?

There's also the SG variant of the F2 binding, I know @yamifumi uses them. Most obvious difference from the F2 original is that all the pozidrive hardware has been replaced by 4mm hex bolts. They do seem pricey, though.

Definitely medical . Keeps me sane. If all I needed was exercise, I could indulge recreationally and then just spend 45 minutes on the backyard trampoline. Something about being out on the hill, dealing with any and all kinds of weather and light, having to read terrain and snow conditions at a glance while moving down the fall line; it's all pretty habit-forming. In a good way. I noticed that what you guys from Idaho think of as poking along is probably more like my idea of fast, so there's the time-dilation effect as well.

If at least the first two describe you, then you might also consider the Pro Tongue liner. They are a tongue & lace-up liner for extra help with heel hold, have a nice wide toe box, and the removable insole lets you swap it out for footbeds, especially nice if you have a high arch or high-volume feet. They work really well in my UPZs, ymmv in the Deeluxes. The official verbiage:

It was foggy with little bit of rain until after lunch. And I still had a blast. @Keenan, Mike, and the crew from Idaho are awesome riders, nice guys too. Thank you, all. Viz did improve after 2pm with the sun making an appearance, right as the snow at the base was starting to get sticky. @Dw3 and I rode until 3:30, ran into Dane on our last run. By that point it was so sticky it was a challenge to make it all the way down to the bottom of Skyliner without coming to a dead stop facing down the fall line. Which was a lot funnier than it sounds.

I did the mods to get the heel pulled back and down to reduce or eliminate heel lift (still had a bit of lift unless I over-tightened the 3rd buckle), and I got that - zero heel lift now. What was an unexpected bonus was how the sensation of my forefoot being squished disappeared. I think you could most likely do this mod in two stages, first move just the strap and see how it works for you. Moving the buckle was a bit more involved. Relocating the strap moves it towards the buckle by 3cm. Each hole in the strap moves the clasp 1.5cm. If you currently have the clasp in the last or second to last hole in strap, you may be able to get away with moving the strap and then moving the clasp 2 holes to get the same buckle-to-clasp distance. I picked the same spot as @SunSurfer for the angle (and it's easy to locate on the shell surface), but I ground down the shell so that the strap fit flush so that I could use the original hardware without worrying about thread depth. I figured that ground down, it would be at least as thick as the shell at the original location. The only tricky bit was setting the tongue bolt in the hole, it's not a regular t-nut: I used a longer M6 bolt with a small stack of washers, threaded it through the shell into the tongue bolt, and tightened it up to set the tongue bolt. I used the conical washer from the strap on the bottom of the washer stack to prevent the shell from dimpling up around the bolt collar (smaller diameter is only slightly larger than the collar on the tongue bolt); that collar is what the strap pivots around, so it needs to protrude cleanly the shell. Take a look at how the collar on the bolt protrudes above the shell when you first remove the strap, you'll get the idea. If anyone wants more detail, we can move this into the Hardboots forum, this is threatening to get too far off-topic from "carving central".

There’s also http://www.extremecarving.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13127 and drupi.work@gmail.com He ships Fedex, think it took four days to my door in Portland Oregon after payment. He also had me email him pics to verify correct installation and adjustment. Excellent customer service.

From @DRUPI. PM him if he doesn’t reply to this thread.

I switched to the DGSS setup earlier this year and like it quite a bit. Much more travel than stock, like walk mode with a travel limiter. Great, if that’s what you’re after. One thing to watch out for is if you have the cuffs of your boots adjusted for cant. The metal guide in the system is mounted to the lower shell, and it’s angles don’t change when you cant the cuffs, so the threaded rod mounted to the cuff begins to pass through the guide at an angle as you adjust the cant. I have my cuffs canted one adjustment step (one-step difference between lateral and medial) and it’s still ok, but it might start to bind up at higher canting angles.

While I do like my 16/17 UPZ RC10s with the new-style tongue, even with a molded Intuition liner I've had to be careful not to over-tighten the 3rd buckle. It's been a very fine line between "almost zero heel lift" and feeling a too much pressure on the top and medial side of my arch which leads to a fair bit of discomfort after an hour or so. Then I saw a post in one the MountainSlope .951 threads, where someone mentioned that the UPZs used to put a lot of pressure on the top of their arch, and switching to the .951s with the different angle of the buckle over the arch eliminated that sensation. And around that same time, I saw @SunSurfer's post about eliminating heel lift by relocation the arch buckle. And since the warranty expired on my boots a few weeks ago, I was inspired to take a drill and dremel to my RC10s. To get the arch buckle/strap to pull the heel down and back, I relocated the 3rd buckle back and down as close to the ankle pivot as possible, and move the strap up and as close to the ankle pivot as possible. Drilling the rivets from the buckles was easy, and Dan @ UPZ confirmed that the hardware that ships with a replacement buckle (t-nut, screw, and washer) is the same h/w for the clasps. So I ordered enough clasps to provide h/w for relocating the buckles, and fired up the dremel. I had to grind out a small bit inside the boot to allow the t-nut for the 3rd buckle to sit flush (it was on the edge of the dimple for the original rivet point), but otherwise it was pretty straight-forward. Visually it doesn't look like the 3rd buckle strap has moved much higher on the arch, but it's made a world of difference in the way the boots fit and feel when tightened down. Zero heel lift, and only a sensation of my foot being "firmly held" without it feeling like it's being ever so slightly crushed, even with the 3rd buckle tighter than before. I think the most significant change was moving the medial pivot point for the strap up and back closer to the ankle. Before, I used to feel a lot of pressure on the medial side of the arch, now that is distributed along a flatter section of bone just in front of ankle. Had to add the small "pull tab" on the 3rd buckle, in the new location it sits so flush to the boot when buckled down that I couldn't get it open with gloves on.

I seem to remember that your "I'm done and selling it all" was also posted exactly a year ago, on this most auspicious of days, April 1st... Here's hoping the timing of today's post is just coincidence.

Will there be an opportunity to demo any Thirst boards on Wednesday?

Managed to get a day off, so I’ll be heading down on Tuesday afternoon, riding Wednesday, and heading back to Portland on Wednesday night. Might make it to Bend in time for a late dinner Tuesday. Where to meet up, either after dinner for beer on Tuesday, or Wednesday morning for riding?

Funny. I bought a Kessler 162 for these very same reasons; I wanted a board that would let me know in no uncertain terms when I wasn't spot-on, so I could speed up the learning curve. Turns out, the Kessler will let me do just about anything (haven't gotten back-seated yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time) and not only get away with it, it makes me look 5x better than I am. Granted, it takes more exertion than my other board, but it's like the thing watches out for me and hides my mistakes and poor technique. Until I get tired... Now I'm dying to get hold of an MK for a day and see if anything I've learned on the Kessler transfers over. Probably in for a rude awakening.

I’m very interested in this particular subject. I’ve always felt one of the few drawbacks with the F2s was the lack of fine tuning for canting angles; you can stack alternating cant wedges for smaller increments of lift, but having only 4* increments of cant is a killer. I’ve always wondered why F2 didn’t do 1.5* wedges instead. I’d like to offer to help out with this project. Not currently familiar with 3D printing, but as a s/w developer in the 3D and visual F/X industry, I’m used to dealing with a multitude of unfamiliar file formats, already comfortable with 3D geometry description files, and write technical documentation of complex systems for both domain expert and neophyte audiences. Think I can contribute if I don’t drive @jim_s to distraction with noob questions as I get up to speed.

It’s a classic slippery slope argument, but my spend over the last 2 years for gear and seasons passes has been over $4k, and I think that’s less than at least 1/3 of the users here. If you figure that boots are the single most important aspect to having a enjoyable experience on the snow (nothing ruins a perfect conditions day faster than aching feet) the $500 difference between UPZ or Deelux and .951s (amortized over the 50 to 200 days or more you’ll spend in them) works out to sofa cushion change. If they make my riding better and/or more comfortable, it’s the deal of the century. You’ll most likely keep boots that fit and work for a decade. Custom boards run at least $1k, and you’ll likely buy several of those over the same 10 years. </rant>