Xargo

I've only ridden hardboots for two seasons basically so not that much experience but from what I've seen and heard, usually hardbooters ride firm conditions and go home or switch to softboots if it's softer. Also not all hardbooters (and even fewer softbooters) go for crazy extreme edge angles, especially if it's soft. If the idea is to ride on soft conditions and you also want to go for extreme edge angles at the same time, you need zero overhang or even underhang. That's a very specific application though. Doesn't really matter if it's softboots or hardboots imo. Fuego test ftw: https://www.extremecarving.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7172

Length of the day is finally over 12h here in Finland some 50km from the arctic circle and it's getting brighter every day. So finally enough light for some high framerate footage:

Here are two screenshots from that vid showing the bootout (the board sinks even more later but the boots get covered by the spray so I thought this illustrates the problem better):

I agree with James about this bootout thing. I have some bootout problems still with 300mm waist and 21f -21r angles. Size 9 boot. It has to do with extreme edge angles combined with extending legs. If I extend my legs a lot, I still boot out so I have to maintain a bit of bend. Soft snow is another thing which can result in bootout. Here's an example (44s) where I hit a snowmobile track where the lugs have softened the snow and board sinks there, causing my board to sink so much that it's a clear bootout. Extreme edge angles also makes the board more prone to sinking since there isn't much base contact vertically. The camera angle makes it easy to see that there's enough clearance just before I hit the soft spot. In that case I managed to engage the board to the firm groomer again so I could recover. If the slope was that soft overall, I would have needed a wider board, steeper binding angles, reduced binding+boot footprint or less extreme edge angles/bent legs. I'm pretty sure James has similar issues. I have couple of millimeters underhang both sides with my setup. I wish the board was even wider but the titanal sheet is the limiting factor at 31cm width. I think Ryan needs the massive width because he rides soft snow. I mostly ride firm/icy groomers so excluding those nemesis snowmobile tracks, I'm fine with this setup.

That sounds very interesting. At the moment I don't need a new board but that sounds like it could be worthy Contra replacement if I break my current board for example and if Contras are no longer available at that point. I tried to check the Donek site but couldn't even find that model. Patience I guess...

Couldn't make it to the live stream (5am for me) but watched the recording now and a lot of good discussion there. It's always interesting to hear with what kind of gear people got started with and if they took any classes or such. I think those early sessions really affect your riding style even if you later purposely learn a new style.

Inspecting some cord at Pyhä ski resort this morning. This was probably the best in bounds snowboarding session I've ever had. Groom was close to perfect, hardly anyone else there and plenty of sunshine: The photo is from the end of the first steep section of Piste Palander (FIS spec black diamond).

Can't complain: -32°C morning and no weekend traffic meant the resort was almost empty today and the chairlift leading to this area was closed due to the temp so I got my favorite black slope basically all to myself. This area was nice and warm at -25°C too. Time for a trip to another ski resort next week.

Finland, but close enough. It's been windy lately so slopes are pretty firm. Some might call them icy but my opinion is that it ain't ice if it's white. Have a lookie here how it was last week at Levi: 1:50 for a surface firmness demonstration, followed by my first try of the steepest slope they had there. Could only ride it twice before I had to check out so didn't get a clean run. Anyways, the snow quality is usually pretty good in northern Finland but the resorts don't have much elevation. My favorite black slope at Ruka for example is only about 125m vertical. The good thing is that the rotation time is only around 7min for that slope. Perfect for a quick morning workout before a day at the office. Ruka season will last until 5.5. They could close even later so they can pretty much guarantee that date. Here's some info about their snowhow: https://www.ruka.fi/en/skiresort/slopes/snowhow

This might work for heel lift: https://www.bestboards.gr/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=130 Deeluxe used to sell those directly but it looks like they have closed their direct shop. There's also new Pro version but I can't find it from any European retailers. Donek sells it: https://www.donek.com/product/deeluxe-heel-harness-pro/ I would just e-mail Deeluxe and ask where to buy that. I have two normal versions myself. Calf bite sounds like it might be a technique problem. Try to lift your toes instead of pushing against the highback. Also the heel lift might be partly a technique issue. Try to stand on your toes instead of leaning towards the tongue of the boot. J-bars can also work depending on your ankle shape but personally I haven't had much help from those. That heel harness has worked much better for me.

My reasoning is that you first got people's attention by showing your riding but that doesn't get you subscribers. If you take a look at my duck stance carving vid I released a month ago, that's got 28k views atm. but I only have 155 subscribers and I started from around 80 (I'm not really interested in growing my channel though). The interesting thing I just noticed when I looked at some stats is that most of those are pretty recent which is pretty logical since now the season is on. So release timing is important too. But the main point is that you don't get subscribers by showing your riding even if you get views. But you will get their attention and when you then show them instructional video how to ride like that, you get to where you are now. Lot's of views and healthy amount of subs too. So yeah, I do agree with you that instructional videos get you subs but people won't believe you unless you show them the end results and that's where the riding comes in. You did do that and it works. Looks like your examples also use that approach. @shmsnow shows impressive thumbnails. You don't even have to watch the vid and you already get a lot of attention from just the thumbnails. @Justaride-Snowboard-Channel also has well designed thumbnails. Those get you a lot of views from Youtube algorithms. Both show what kind of riding you can achieve even without having to look at any of their vids. But it's the @skng example I'd like to point out the most. His thumbnails look really professional and if you hover the mouse over them, you will see the riding in many of his vids. That's what I meant in the first place. Take a look at "How to Ski Parallel - Intermediate Ski Lesson #3.1" with 1.5M views for example. The thumbnail already shows clearly what the video is about and if you hover over it, you'll see a cleanly executed intermediate turn. So you know straight away what to expect if you watch the video. The riding isn't anything special in that example but it clearly shows what the video is about. Also one reason why I suggested to show more riding was that I thought it's easy to make that kind of vids. Of course if you have to book a videographer, that gets harder but grabbing a selfie stick is easy. Maybe I thought that too much from my own perspective since I film like 70% of my riding anyways, so I thought the riding footage is already there. I don't think showing the same style of riding over and over again is much of a problem. Just take a look at Ryan Knapton. I watch all his vids even though he pretty much rides the same style in every vid. Then there's the point about video quality. Selfie stick solves the resolution issue of the 360-cams. I totally agree that it's hard to get high quality video from far away but with selfie stick or helmet mount, the camera is close to you at all times which results in good image quality. Of course the perspective has its limitations but the ease of video capture and the high image quality is worth the tradeoff imo. It's a pity we don't ride the same resorts since I have all the gear and know-how to capture high quality video but I have no-one to film and there's no-one to film me with all my fancy gear. I work for this institute, so that might give an idea what kind of gear I have access to: https://memo.aalto.fi/

Moar duckfoot bending. This time from Levi:

Couldn't agree more. Equipment only becomes critical once you reach the level of expertise where equipment becomes the limiting factor and that is long way from casual slarving skills which probably is the main target audience.

More riding. The Part I explains how you ride and got you the audience so now I think it would be a good idea to show more riding and briefly explain what you did in that footage. Like for example when you ride rollers and switch to down-unweighted for those. Show and explain that kind of cases. Why do you do it and a brief explanation why it works. Give small tips and if people want to have more complete info, you can then point them to Part I. I don't know if you like to ride pow but if you do, first carve some groomers and then go off-piste for couple of turns and then come back to groomers (within the same run I mean). I'm sure that would impress a lot of people and these ~300mm boards can easily float.

Nidecker Kaon-CX comes to mind. I have the L-size for my 27MP and the boot hardly fits to the heelcup. It's so tight fit with sharp edges (where highback touches the boot) that my boots got damaged. I had to modify the bindings to make the boot fit better. L-size is supposed to fit 26-29.5. The baseplate seems more true to size. That got me thinking maybe the M-size could work for you. It should fit 22.5-26.6 range. Beware of that sharp highback heelcup edge though and maybe round it a bit if you get that binding. https://www.nidecker.com/en/bindings/55-kaon-cx.html#size-chart

So before my trip to another resort I wanted to go capture another vid from the same place with duck setup this time so here goes: That slam was so fun I just had to include it. I had some work stuff this morning so couldn't make it to morning groomers so this is from afternoon. Much worse surface than yesterday (the previous vid) but still plenty of fun. Don't mean to hijack the thread but rather show how the techniques you teach in your vid can be used for duck stance carving as well. I'm assuming most of the people watching softboot carving tutorials these days come from duck stance and some of them might get motivated if they can think they can some day carve well with duck stance by learning to carve posi/posi first.

I tried today to stick the camera to the side of the slope but resolution is just not enough for my liking. Posi/posi here because I had race practice at the morning so this is with AT boot setup and +45/+55 angles or something like that. 247mm wide Contra ECC with 16m scr. Forgot to take off those shin guards so not the ideal setup but the goal was to try the camera setup anyways. I'll try to film a similar clip about the duck carving as well but personally I much prefer the selfie stick or even the helmet mount footage.

Excellent vid! Though I do agree with @Jack M about the intro bit. Even though I carve black diamonds with a duck stance myself, I think saying that it's way harder than doing it posi/posi is correct and I think the approach you teach is the best way of teaching duck riders to carve better. I too only managed to carve steeps with a duck stance after first learning to carve them with a posi/posi setup. So even if the goal is to learn to carve steeps with a duck stance, the way to go is to first learn what you taught in the vid. When people keep asking me how to do those deep duck carves, I always tell them to learn posi/posi first, preferably with hardboots (because it's easier). Yesterday I tried posi/posi angles with my 300mm wide 16m scr Contra and it was way easier to nail the heelside carve on my favorite black run than with a duck stance. Duck still feels more fun to me so I'll mainly stick with that but it was a fun test.

Not sure if this is the kind of riding you refer to when you mention duck EC (not sure if duck EC is even a thing ) @Ster but this is with -21/+21, 58cm wide duck stance, 300mm waist 16m sidecut board and mondo 27 boot size. I'm close to bootout with this setup and with some bindings that have a thicker heel loop, I do bootout with this. I'm sorry but with your boot size and your preferred duck angles, you will bootout if you try this: Also when it comes to board materials and construction, the titanal sheet is 31cm wide (at least the ones Coiler uses) so even with this board the titanal doesn't reach the edges of the board near tip and tail. So going wider than my board with titanal means having to do some tricks with the edge reinforcement or forget titanal. Like others, I would suggest steeper positive angles if you are planning to do high edge angle carving. In my opinion it's easier to learn positive angles with a hardboot setup and then transition those skills to softboot riding. That's what I did. Rode softboot duck stance for around 20 years, then two years of harbooting to learn new techniques and now this season I'm on my dream softboot duck setup. The board you are specifying sounds great but just don't expect to be able to go for those high edge angle carves duck since it's just not wide enough. It will still make a stellar carving tool for softboot posi angles. @crackaddict is the man to watch for regarding that style.

I've used both Backland Carbons and Hawx XTD 95 and the pivot behaves very differently. Backlands allow a lot of movement in walk mode even if the top buckles are closed. With Hawx closing the buckles restricts movement a lot. So with Backlands I would use closed or open top buckles depending on the situation but with Hawx it's open top buckles all the time while skinning. My problem is that I tend to forget to close the buckles when I go ride.

Now I've got the footage. This is what the board was designed for and it does it very very well:

Yeah, your board served as an inspiration when I was still figuring out what specs I wanted for my Coiler. I would have probably went with what I got in the end anyways but seeing how well even a short 20m sidecut works, I could order pretty short 16m without feeling anxious. I still like to ride my 7 to 9m scr boards as well but only if I feel super tired.

Duckfoot bending of Coiler CFR 164 with a view:

For me the biggest thing is that hardbooting really taught me to use hip rotation to make the carving way more dynamic. Prior to hardbooting, I would just use the sidecut and the board would make whatever arc turn the edge angle and the sidecut radius would dictate. With a proper hip rotation, I can alter the turn shape in ways I didn't knew were possible. The background is that I spent about 20 years riding duck stance before learning hardbooting. The reason why I went hardboots is that I booted out with all the production carving boards with a duck setup so it was time to either to custom wide board or alpine. Affordable second hand alpine gear made the choice pretty obvious and I haven't regretted. Now that I finally have my dream custom wide board, I can use the techniques I learned from alpine snowboarding. The biggest advantage is the heelside turn. It's a lot harder to implement proper hip rotation with a duck stance than with posi angles so at least for me it was really important that I already had the rotation in muscle memory from alpine setup when I tried to translate that into duck stance riding. I'm pretty damn happy with the results and I don't know if I ever learnt this technique by just riding duck. Probably not. It's harder for me to contemplate if there was any benefit from my softboot riding when learning to ride alpine gear. I think it's easier to think about how the new stuff affects your riding than something that has developed over a long time. Now when I've ridden this early season almost exclusively with a softboot duck setup, it was interesting when I tried alpine setup one day. It was so much easier to carve the heelside turns. One thing I felt like the softboot riding benefited my hardboot riding that day is the toeside turn. Last season I had problems with the hardboot toeside turn but now that I've ridden duck so much where the toeside is much easier, I was more confident doing hardboot toesides and those worked a lot better than earlier. So I guess in a nutshell the toesides are easier with relaxed angles and heelsides are easier with high posi angles. Also I 100% agree with @crackaddict that it's so much more comfortable to fall with a softboot setup that it really helps you commit. At the moment I have enjoyed the new softboot setup a bit too much though and my front leg ankle is pretty sore so might have to hardboot a bit and let it rest. That's another thing why I really like to be able to ride both setups. You can take turns and that way keep on riding even if you have exercised too much using one specific setup.

Sounds good. Mine is 136 cm effective on a 164. 16m sidecut though but anyways, I like the length a lot.