Jack M

1. Thank your wife profusely - that's a sweet setup!! 2. Read How to Set Up Your Plate Bindings 3. Read TD2 Set Up 4. Read Feel the Carve, Ride "The Norm" if you need some help getting back into the groove. 5. Have fun and report back here!!

The 172 Silberpfeil has an 11m radius. This will be much easier to learn on than the 173RS, which has a 14m radius. The RS will have to be ridden much faster to carve small enough turns. Beginner carvers need a board that will carve at slower speeds where they will be more comfortable. Alex said he is a beginner carver. EC style is NOT for beginners. It is a very advanced way of carving. As for bindings, Alex, what can I say, TD2 all the way!! :) 3 degree discs front and rear, and the yellow e-rings are a good place to start.

How to Buy an Alpine Snowboard

Forget the Speedster for now, the Silberpfeil is what you want. The Speedster 183 would be very difficult for learning, it is a pure GS race machine. The Silberpfeil is a freecarver that will let you learn to carve at slower, more comfortable speeds. There are some articles you might like to read in the Welcome Center of this site. -Jack

Greg, I'm sorry to say that what you have there is a collector's item - not a functional snowboard. It is an obsolete design that will most likely teach you some bad habits. There is more info on the rise and fall of asymmetrical snowboards in the tech articles section of this site.

all this stuff is sold here: http://www.bomberonline.com/Store/index.cfm just in case you hadn't seen that yet.

I have tried both flat and 3 in the front, and I prefer 3 degrees. I find my front leg fatigues faster if I ride flat, and the 3 helps me to be more centered on the board.

If you want it to be a fair comparison, you should have both boards tuned by the same guy right before you do this. If you got the PTC tune with your Madd, it has an Olympic quality tune on it. Chances are your Donek doesn't.

I believe the Raichle 423 has become the 413, sold here: http://www.bomberonline.com/store/boots/raichle_sb_413.cfm For $150 new, how can you go wrong? If you don't like them, they'll be easy to sell here to another newby carver. If you're looking for a carvey softboot setup, I think Flow and the Catek Freeride are as close as you're gonna get. However with Flow I've often heard of people not getting a good fit without the matching Flow boots.

This goes along with what Phil said. Many people here have been riding long enough to remember snowboarder certification - you had to pass a riding test in order to be "certified" to snowboard at a particular resort. This concept promptly died when some lawyer pointed it out to a resort that they could be sued if a snowboarder injured themself at the resort after having been issued a certification that they were good enough to ride there. Policies and laws like this are a real slippery slope because they take the responsibility off the individual and place it on the entity making the policy. If a ski resort mandated helmets, it would then be their fault if someone slipped past the lifty without one and then injured themself. A resort would also have to provide helmets either for sale or rent for people ignorant of the policy, and that becomes a humongous liability. "The helmet they made me buy/rent wasn't good enough. Give me a million dollars." -Jack (helmet wearer)

Yup. Although specifically, the terms "cant" and "lift" are spoken of as being relative to your foot, not the board. So pure lift is as you say above - the disc slopes parallel with the direction your boot is pointing. Pure cant would be the disc sloping perpendicular to your boot direction. With TD2s, you can rotate the disc so it is is sloping in any direction, in 5 degree increments. For example, I enjoy heel lift and "a little bit" of <i>outward</i> canting for my rear foot. My binding angle is 60 degrees, so I set the disc angle to 55 degress (nose of the board is 90 degrees). Get it? This feature of the TD2 is simple to adjust and because all settings are quantifiable - you just read them off the binding. This is nice for experimenting and also for when you need to repeat a setup when you re-mount the bindings.

yup.

There is a general theme to this thread that I find astonishing - that you've got to be stupid not to wear a helmet. Stupidity has nothing to do with it. What it is, is everyone has a different threshold for acceptible risk. There are probably plenty of people who think that you've got to be stupid to do something as absurd as slide down a snow covered hill strapped to a plank at high speed with trees and lift towers and other people around. And I know there are plenty of people who don't just think it's stupid to motorcycle without a helmet, they think it's stupid to motorcycle <i>at all</i>. When you study the stats of motorcyclist injury per accident compared to car stats, it's easy to write off motorcycling altogether as "stupid". It's not, it's just someone else's idea of acceptible risk.

There is an article on how to set up TD2s here: http://www.bomberonline.com/articles/TD2_setup.cfm and a partial matrix of cant/lift combinations here: http://www.bomberonline.com/JackM/td2matrix.xls

2nd week of March, Sugarloaf/USA. only it will be called something else.

Exactly. 10 years ago if there was a bump or roll on a trail that you might be able to get 2 feet of air off of, it would be barricaded with bamboo poles. Now we have snowcat sculpted table-tops, halfpipes, launchers, gaps, rails, funboxes, etc. That's a good thing - it's freedom baby, yeah! Notice the sign at the top of every park - it says "at your own risk". It also says that on the back of your LIFT TICKET. Those stats are fine and good and indisputable, but the fact is that the decision is up to the individual. -Jack (helmet wearer, able to think for himself)

There are certain words I always misspell. I guess mandatory is one of them! And no, I wasn't the one suggesting we all use Word to write our posts. And I guess I'm not sure about helmets in NH, but I do know first hand that eye protection is mandi... mandi... required.

That's funny because in NH, not only is a helmet required, but so is eye protection. Got pulled over once for riding with my faceshield up because it was a hot day and I was in 10mph traffic. I suppose goggles should be manditory on the slopes too.

I guess I don't understand how anything unnecessarily risky can be legal in a country with state supplied healthcare. Snowboarding and skiing should be illegal in Canada. So should McDonald's, and tobacco, and alcohol, and snowmobiles, and skydiving, and motorcycles, and unprotected sex, and.... Also, if you have a crash where a helmet would protect you from serious head injury (not just a no-cost concussion), chances are excellent that you are also going to sustain some other hospitalizing injury. So I suppose air-bag-vests should be manditory? I ask in all seriousness. They've already been invented for motorcyclists. (they just haven't caught on yet)

In theory it's possible to mount 3-hole Bombers on top of Burton Unicants but you really don't want to. Too much stack height and it's just unnecessary - the TD2s adjustability will get you where you need to go. Also the plastic Unicant is much weaker than the Bomber, and you'd be cancelling or otherwise funkifying the effect of the elastomer. If you've been using 2 degrees on the Burtons, the 3 degree TD2 will be just fine. For your wife at 7 degrees on the Burton, the 6 degree TD2 will do the trick.

I do wear them though, full-face and full leathers on the bike, and a helmet on the board. I suppose seat belt laws (and therefore helmet laws) for children aren't such a bad thing, but then again I don't like the idea of the state as my kid's nanny. It's all just part of the sickness that takes responsibility off of the individual and places it on the state. Cradle-to-grave indeed.

Absolutely.

Someone posted a link to a ski helmet site and they had this poll question there. I was shocked and dismayed to see that "Yes" held the majority. I believe I do not need the government, or a ski area managment, to protect me from myself. If we are really <i>that</i> concerned with safety, skiing and snowboarding should be illegal altogether.

No. The discs are machined to be either 0, 3, or 6 degrees. The only thing you can do is rotate them. So, you can aim the slope along with the long axis of your board, or along the angle of your binding, or across the board, or wherever, in 5 degree increments. The slope of the disc does not change, just its orientation. I suppose yes, if you are using the Burton unicant (or whatever it's called) system that has two mating sloped plastic discs, then the Bomber system is not quite as adjustable. But the all-metal Bomber is a heck of a lot more durable and solid connection. Shouldn't be a problem at all. Several people do this.

found here: http://www.prudenttravels.com/ski.htm during a random Google search. Anyone we know? Sure looks like Bordy. Great technique!