jburk

Thanks for the update. Which heated gear bag did you end up with? I’ve read that some have longevity issues, let us know how it works out in the long run. My Intuitions might be done by the end of this season, so this thread will be highly relevant to me next summer.

He posted a pic of a box of power plates headed for the anodizer last Thursday on FB:

Last year I picked up a (barely) used custom Kessler 162, and got the specs directly from HK via email. He listed the sidecut as “7-14,14-9”, which I interpreted as “two separate spiral curves, 7m in the nose increasing to 14 in the middle, then another spiral starting at 14 mid-board and tightening up to 9 at the tail”. Makes sense if you think of it as two spirals joined in the middle. Magic, any way you slice it.

I should add, if you have to twist the axle with your fingers to get it to seat all the way, you should check alignment; it should go in easier than that. Like @SunSurfer says, when in doubt, reassemble. You’ll get better at it each time you do it.

If you can seat the axle with just a bit of force by pushing it in with your finger, you should be good to go, but if you would have to apply even the slightest bit of persuasion with a hammer, you should check the fit of the axles in the side bosses, and if that’s good, loosen the bases, get out the wunderbar, and realign the bases. Misalignment can come from either the side bosses or the base.

Measured with the boot in the front binding and the binding mounted at your regular angle. I put a piece of masking tape on the edge of the board near the binding centre, then laid a ruler across the board at binding center and marked the tape. I put another length of tape up around where I thought the point would be where my big toe connects to my foot. Then I put my boot on and stepped into the binding, and marked the second piece of tape where I guessed my big toe was; guess is as good as it gets unless your boots are transparent. Now you have 2 marks that you can measure between. I’ve seen in other threads that you run really steep angles, so it wouldn’t surprise me if your marks are 8-10 cm apart. With a 52 cm stance width then add 16-20, that’s going to exceed the BP’s max axles spacing of 62 cm by quite a bit. With your front foot properly over the axle, some of the weight on your back foot may end up behind the rear axle. Move the side bosses on the plate to the outermost position to give you the BP’s max axle spacing of 62 cm. Mount the bases centered on the board with the outermost set of pins on the wunderbar to match the side boss & axle spacing Then mount the front binding behind the front axle by the offset distance you measured between the 2 marks on the masking tape earlier. This should put the base of the front foot's big toe over the axle. Then mount the rear binding at your normal stance width. If the rear bindings center looks like it’s very close to or behind the rear axle, you might end up with too much weight behind the rear axle, which can negate a lot of the benefit if the plate on heelsides, and put a lot of strain on the tail of the plate. If you think this is a possibility, you might consider angles in the high 50’s. But if you change angles, you’ll have to remeasure the offset and remont the front then back bindings again. High angles, big boots, and a wide stance require a lot of axle spacing to keep all your weight between the axles.

I shoot myself in the foot on a regular basis when I shoot my mouth off.

Let me tell you what worked for me mounting a BP v2 4mm Lite plate. This is the TLDR summary of a very long and informative back and forth with @SunSurfer, and had me at a workable setup right out of the gate. You want to start by finding the distance between binding center and the first bone of your front foot’s big toe; lets call this the “offset”. For me with my boot size at my angles, this was 4.5 cm, your mileage will vary. Add twice this distance to your stance width to get the minimum axle spacing. With a 50cm stance, that means 50 + (4.5 * 2) = 59. If you can’t set the plate so that the axles are this far apart, go to the next wider setting, don’t go narrower. Mount the plate centered on the board at this axle spacing. Mount the front binding so that the binding center is the offset (for me, that was 4.5cm) behind the axle. This will place the base of you big toe over the front axle. Make sure you’re either over or slightly behind the axle, you don’t want to be in front of it. Mount the rear binding at your normal stance width from the front. Keep your regular cant and lift, don’t change too many things at once. You can follow conventional wisdom and mount the fixed axle at the rear, or try sunsurfer’s suggestion of mounting the fixed axle up front for a more direct feel; this is probably a good way to start if this is your first time riding a plate, it reduces the “disconnected” sensation. I went fixed up front to start with, then swapped it to floating up front after 10 days or so.

I can't speak to the differences between the Track700 and UPZ sizing, and I've only ever owned (and am still riding in) a pair of 2017 RC10s. But what I can help you with is that even with a size mp26 RC10, I could not get centered between the edges with a TD3 stepin. The UPZ boot sole length is significantly shorter than the same size boot from other manufacturers due to the way that UPZ tucks the heel in underneath the foot. With an mp26 RC10 and TD3 stepins, I was only able to get within about 1cm away from being centered (no heel or toe bias), just ran out of travel in the toe or heel block adjustments. I'd imagine the situation would be even less optimal with the sizes smaller than 26. I think the situation is a bit better with the TD3 standards, I understand that you can flip the toe block and reverse the bail, but I've never tried that trick myself.

Got an email from @forrest this morning saying the site had updated stock info, these look like they're in stock now, you can even add them to the cart...

because I'm addicted to turning as hard and as often as I can because I don't need to wait for a powder day to ride because I can have fun riding even when it hasn't snowed for 2 weeks because riding inbounds takes a lot less effort than hiking to find untracked because riding inbounds makes the most of my limited riding time because I'm a tech weenie and like fiddling with all the gear and minute adjustments because no matter how much I ride, there's always room for improvement because if I don't give it all of my attention, I'm immediately reminded that I need to in order to ride decently; no halfway measures or sight-seeing allowed because it always seemed to me to be the best of both worlds from "technical" skiing and softboot snowboarding because when I used to skateboard, I was never into tricks; my favourite thing was controlling speed on hills too steep and long to ride straight down by carving from side to side without skidding, turning uphill to bleed speed. Sound familiar? And the trees on the edge of the ski slopes seem to approach a lot slower than the cars parked on the side of the road ?

Maybe this board for sale in the classifieds?

The upper face of the plate is smooth, so the recesses must only be as deep as the locating pins are high, but it does seem like a lot of material gets removed for this. Wonder how the engineering works out, and what the destructive testing showed?

Parallax error is a bitch. I think I've read that the upper plate is 5mm thick, this thickness could be used to reduce parallax. If they cut a small V-shaped notch at the end of the alignment mark, then you could sight down the notch, when the degree markings on the base line up with the bottom of the V while sighting down the notch, you've reduced parallax to a minimum, which should be accurate enough.

I'm guilty of trolling through the ALC FB page, and noticed that the cant disks have raised locating pins (for lack of a better word) that mate with corresponding holes in the lower base (which looks to be held in place by the bracket for the 4x4 insert screws), and also mate with corresponding holes in the bottom of the upper plate.

It can keep the BOL bag the board shipped in company. I had gotten that from another seller on the old BOL site for just the shipping costs IIRC, so it seemed right to pass it along, I don’t need it as both my Thirst boards shipped in their own baby blanket case.

Wait. There was a scraper? LOL and damn! You can thank Mark at Thirst Snowboards @BLOODTYPEZX10R for that, he includes a scraper with every board he ships, and I re-used the box my new SF came in for your board. I must have missed the scraper when I unpacked my SF, tore into the packaging like a kid at Xmas on a sugar cookie high. Good thing it's the second Thirst I've bought, I'm using the scraper that shipped with my SuperConductor in May.

It did indeed sell at my asking price, so I've donated $25 as promised. Thanks, Jack, for keeping this board running, glad to help cover the operating costs!

Board is sold. Thank you, Wolf, and congratulations. I think you're going to love it.

That's exactly what it is. I was going to order a MetalFC, but then we got talking about the Secret vs the metal Rev boards, and he basically built a Secret with the MetalFC / Freecarve geometry, and tuned the flex of the Secret construction to be more suitable to freeriding rather than racing.

Bump back to the first page...

For those not on a season's pass, it looks like the rates for day passes will fluctuate between an expected range of $49 to $99. https://www.skihood.com/about-us/meadows-blog/posts/2018/10/mt-hood-meadows-gets-dynamic-to-improve-overall-resort-experience

I’ll agree with this. It’s a stab at a different/artistic/stylized spin on the conventional alpine snowboarding video. Some of it might not work, and all of it may not be to everyone’s taste, but I’ll give credit to Donek for trying something different in what is usually a highly formulaic genre.

I don't anthropomorphize inanimate objects; I've never been moved to name a car, motorcycle, or a snowboard for that matter. Then my new Thirst board showed up today. But still, I'm not going to name it. Nope. I'll just refer to it as "the girl my mother warned me about". Thirst SF 162cm WARP (goofy asym build), 18 cm waist, WARP sidecuts vary between heel and toe A bit stiffer than Mark would normally build it, it's for my shorter night-riding sessions at Mt. Hood Meadows, narrower runs, short to non-existent lift lines, 3 hours and done. The pics don't really do the graphics justice, the Thirst industrial snowflake is in there but very subtly, shows best in the full sunlight. There's a FB video which shows this board beside a 185cm 8RW for comparison, you can see the graphics better in that.

http://www.skimd.com/pro-glide.html