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Eastsiiiide

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Everything posted by Eastsiiiide

  1. Pcabq is previously described as ~135 lbs. I'm ~155, seems within reason (open to input here, please). TBH I'm directing my funds and attention toward a custom thirst for the next board, but this coiler is ready NOW. Season is disappearing fast. The contra design is popular, not to mention the board looks great and is barely used. Aw jeez, I'm sending a pm...
  2. Hmm, you could DIY modify the baseplate to do it, but without the SG uppers you'd be giving up part of the nice SG binding design: essentially you'd be paying a premium just for a nicer baseplate and center disk. Edit: One could almost do it by enlarginating the mounting holes in the intec uppers and then swapping the t-nuts from the SG uppers into the intecs. voila, step-in SGs. However the problem I see is that the intec toepiece has the mounting holes right very close to the edge of the sliding surface where the binding adjustment happens, so I don't know if there's enough room to accommodate a larger hole for the T-nut, and if there is it'd be worth looking very carefully at whether the resulting construction is something you want to trust your safety to. Maybe yes with the CNC version of F2 upper, no with the plastic one? This is assuming of course that the hole spacing is even the same between the brands.
  3. So I've been searching around the site and haven't found a definite answer to this question that was asked 5 years ago. I looked at the parts pics on the SG site, and the SG uppers *look* like the same mounting pattern as the F2 intec uppers. So what's the verdict?
  4. Wish I had seen this post earlier, was at June 3/8&10. I did see someone carving at June, looked like an oxess maybe?
  5. What's a bumper? Never had TDs .Edit: oh I see, it's a rubber doughnut that goes under each end of the base plate. Doesn't look too hard to improvise.
  6. you know thirst has a "powder carver" right? I'm on a similar mission, wanting to experiment with hard boots on softie boards for powder like you have, and not ready yet to plunk down for the Thirst PC, gorgeous though it is (Have my sights set on a SF or XC for my first Thirst). Like you I prefer steeper angles and narrower boards if possible. I bought @yamifumi's 14.5 waisted Virus Cyborg last year and it was instant love. That deep Sierra powder though... https://www.thirstsnowboards.com/pc "w: nominal 21cm"
  7. Love that single side swingarm in the back, and the way the pipe tucks into the space. Motorcycles may not be high on my priority list, but still I'd love to try a Ducati some day, just to see. Nice purchase!
  8. To make sure I understand correctly, I believe you're trying to protect against abrasive wear of the softer plastic tread that's overmolded onto the harder plastic body of the intec heel, because the tread's not replaceable as a separate part--as opposed to protecting the pins, right? So this would be when walking on pavement, like in a parking lot, and then when you're ready to strap in you take it off and stow it on your person until the end of the day or lunch break or whatever. As a bonus it has better traction than the minimal tread of the overmold. I'm not on pavement much, but it does get me thinking about the possibility of beefing up that tread with some studs or the like, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because I don't need any more projects right now
  9. I believe that unless you want to use vintage gear, Intec or a variant thereof is the only show in town. I finally got around to installing my intec heel and it's pretty lifechanging. I'm only using it on the rear foot so far. It's taken a little bit of effort to get it set up nice and solid where the boot doesn't wiggle around in the binding, but worth it. So much easier to seamlessly unclip coming into the lift line, besides the other obvious benefits. I was perfectly happy using lever bails for decades, and I know some people prefer levers because of performance compromises and stuff, but for now I'm just soaking up the slick convenience of the clickety clickie. BTW sometimes I see Deeluxe intecs for a bit cheaper. They're just rebranded F2's, everything is the same except the graphic accents (I have both).
  10. Got on the lift with a guy, ski instructor supervisor I think, he starts to say the usual "hey I haven't seen one of those in years, a mono- hey wait that's not a monoski, that's a, a skwal, isn't it? I haven't seen one of those in a long time either." The board's a 14.5 cm waist, so yeah fair do's, I said technically it's still a snowboard by 5mm, but skwal is close enough and tell him "you're the first person ever to say skwal to me, that's awesome". He goes on to tell me how he remembers skwals from, oh 30 years ago, and alpine snowboards too, and how there used to be this guy at Mammoth who was phenomenal at hardbooting and, being a big guy particularly, would leave crazy deep trenches all over the mountain. And not only that but he had top level instructor certification in 4 different sports at once, snowboarding, skiing, telemark, and ? (X-country?). Anybody here know or remember a guy called Tom Tuttle? Sounds pretty impressive. Another similar encounter was at June mtn, riding up the lift with a guy, tells me oh yeah there used to be a whole crew of hardbooters here back in the day. There was this one guy Terry, he always wore a red hat, did you know 'im?! It's not all clueless people, there are quite a few sophisticated folks out there who know what's up and have some stories to share. Not to mention I get surprised by the amount of knowledge and interest from younger people, mtn staff mainly.
  11. I suspect this is about leverage and control vectors. At a steeper angle on a wider board, especially without the rigidity of a hard boot, it's much harder to apply and precisely modulate force over short delta-t (and delta-d). The sensory/muscular feedback loop is weaker, slower and sloppier, with heelside being worse than toeside. Angling the rear foot more perpendicular to the board aligns the dominant power system of your foot and leg, the toe to heel axis, with the thing you're trying to control, a big flat plane. It's just like how you can't run sideways with anywhere near the speed and precision you can running forward, or how if you're trying to move a control surface on an airplane you'd want the servo arm perpendicular to the flap, not reaching out at an angle. A lower binding angle puts the toe and heel closer to the edges, which is where the leverage difference comes into play on the wider board. This is a big part of why I prefer hardboots and a narrow board--I don't like my feet to be sideways relative to the direction of high speed travel, on top of which my hips have zero splay (when I walk my toes point forward), so a big difference between front-rear binding angles feels really unnatural. But that's just my hot take on it, there are folks on here who have spent a lot more time thinking about this stuff than I have. Charts and diagrams even. Looking at you @SunSurfer edit: And of course I will take any opportunity to plug @Beckmann AG's treatise on the subject, which is my main source material for thinking more rigorously about this stuff, as will be obvious once you read it: https://beckmannag.com/hardboot-snowboarding/hardboot-binding-configuration
  12. I play on hard mode. Oddly enough I've been getting them in fewer steps on hard. I like to go back to normal mode too because it's fun to have more freedom to design logical tests. I always start with whatever word pops into my head that seems decent. That's part of the fun! Starting with the same word or two every time would be too boring for me to keep playing. Funny how people are different. Now should we talk about spelling bee?
  13. Here is a thread I started on wide boots last year that has some good input from others. I have Deeluxe T700 and UPZ RC12, and I find the T700 much roomier in the toebox. They're the same stated boot size, and I've tried a variety of liners, including swapping the same liners back and forth between them. Unfortunately the Palau thermo liners the T700s came with have been a total fail as the heel hold disappeared after molding. The UPZ liners that come with the RC12 are stitched really narrow at the toe, but the material is thin and flexible (looks like neoprene) so they actually stretch to fit nicely around the toes. There is also have a lot of padding around the ankle for heel hold, so I find they actually work well in the T700s, which are known for poor-to-nonexistant heel hold. The T700s feel like a blank slate to me, a big empty shell that's totally dependent on what liner you put inside it. The design and quality of the RC12s is excellent, but I expect I'll have to invest in significant bootfitting to make the toe and midfoot wider in order to make them work.
  14. Yeah this. And hey, I think we're not even all talking about the same thing. At Mammoth for example there's a park for olympic-level airs (it was pretty mind blowing in the lead-up to the last olympics) and then there are multiple other parks for various other parky uses. I wandered into the world class park once and was like jesus christo this is not where I meant to be this place is terrifying get me the eff out of here now pls, while the other ones with rails and stuff are just not interesting for carving compared to well, any other part of the mountain, but the littler, just-for-fun terrain spots, when they're not being used, are open season to whatever you want to do, going over under around and through, as Grover would say. So to just say "should you go in a park?" is misleading. I think it's easy for folks to have a knee jerk response to this question based on the park scene they're used to at their mountain, but the context actually varies a lot. If I answered this question based just on the monster freestyle run at Mammoth I would say holy hell, stay out of there man, are you high? Unless of course you can do big airs on your carving board, which I would like to see. If it was the park with all the rails and stuff I'd say, yeah wth, give em a fly-by now and then Maverick, if you really want to for some reason (but why? it sucks there). If it's a few built features on one of the better runs for carving, I say yeah, go for it, and try to use some of that terrain to challenge yourself. It's all very situational, no? (btw thank you @pow4ever for such a hilarious topic)
  15. Omg this is litrally LOL every time I read it. Thank you I needed that. Oh me.
  16. So if I have a 14.5 x 185 cm snowboard, can I just put the F2 rider-mounting-flanges at 0 degrees and go almost-skwalling, or is there significantly more magic built into the bones of a skwal that's missing from a narrow snowboard, to the point that I shouldn't bother with this as a method to find out if I like this madness called skwalling? I've already discovered that I am deeply bitten by this madness called super-narrow snowboarding, next step seems obviously crank those bindings to zero degrees or so and see what happens. Or do I just do nothing, and wait for an agent of the skwaluminati to contact me in the dead of night? I feel like I'm joining the French resistance.
  17. Mammoth has the deepest snow in the world this season (Dave McCoy was no dummy when he chose it!). Too much pow actually *is* a real problem when the mountain can no longer function. The top of Mammoth reportedly has snowpack 5ft deeper than even Palisades, not that you can get to it any time soon. They're struggling just to keep the parking lots open, let alone keep the lifts running even on the lower mountain, do avalanche mitigation, etc... Even if you can get there between storms there's no guarantee you won't spend half your day standing around waiting for lifts to open, possibly while stranded at the bottom of a lift somewhere when a sudden blizzard kicks up and even the buses can't run to get you back to your car (ask me how I know). Sadly our snow has been just for looking at for much too long this season, such a strange problem to have. Please, come and take some of it home with you, I want to go boarding. sources: https://www.snow-forecast.com/overviews/picks https://www.onthesnow.com/california/mammoth-mountain-ski-area/historical-snowfall pic: Main Lodge at NOON, ppl stranded. Day was supposed to be 'mostly clear'. Even the mammoth statue in the background looks desperate.
  18. As a stopgap you can do something like this. It'll be enough to hold the boot together at a selected cant position so you don't have to give up any days waiting for the replacement. Just take measures to make sure it stays tight since the bolt will want to loosen on you as the hinge moves back and forth, and this bypasses the locking system the stock fastener uses.
  19. Had a similar issue, so I wrote to UPZ at their main european contact--they were aware of the issue with the UPZ North America site and immediately sent me new cant discs via international mail. . Thanks UPZ!
  20. No wrong answers this season, it's insane out there. I went up on Thursday and they hadn't even dug out the parking lot yet ;(
  21. Don't despair! I carve in step-ons sometimes, BUT a) I stiffened my boots (I have the Photons, if you have Ions they are a bit stiffer out of the box) b) my feet are short, bindings size small, and my binding angles are steepish, so heel cup overhang has not been an issue c) Agreed with @b.free, in my experience (with first gen Step Ons) the bindings have wiggle that was driving me a little nuts, but I modded them a bit and stiffened up my boots and it's working well enough to have a good time carving pencil line arcs down the groomers, which I think is your immediate goal. In some ways I like it better than my hardboot setup, it feels playful and versatile, in a different way. I hope that like me you can find a happy spot with these boots and bindings where the geometry works out to get the result you want at this stage. I guess if the heel cup starts dragging on the snow, you'll know it doesn't! Until then I say give it a try. Again, if you have the Ion boots, they are fairly stiff out of the box. If you want them, uh, taller and stiffer, especially as they age, you might want to try what I did. Guess I should do a post on my binding mods too. It's basically multiple fender washers in the hinges, rubber shims under the corners. And thread locker to make sure all the fasteners stay tight, as mine kept loosening. But I think the boot mod was more important. Yes there is always some more amazing equipment around the corner, but I wouldn't assume that it's impossible to carve on what you have. You might be surprised what you can do with it.
  22. Hey jacker, In 2019 Mammoth still had a couple lifts running in early July. This season, the base snowpack is already 2 ft deeper (0.6m) than the max depth that season, 190" vs 165". Plan accordingly, eh. On average, Mammoth snowfall in March is 129cm, and April 66cm. What the temps and surface will be like, who can say, but we're currently seeing blizzard conditions and big snowfall. So it's def a good year to roll the dice on an April visit. Source: https://www.onthesnow.com/california/mammoth-mountain-ski-area/historical-snowfall
  23. After a few iterations of adding tongues and cuff spoilers to my soft boots, I hit upon a simple solution that is working great. Swapped over plastic-reinforced liners from a pair of old ski boots to replace the ones the boots came with. So much better. These Tecnicas are great old boots, btw, with many adjustments. I've boarded and skied them, prob the most comfortable boot my feet have been in. They don't make em like this anymore. I bet that with so many adjustments they were expensive to make. Plastic tongue is built into the liner, and plastic reinforcement around the back. I even have a "power strap" now
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