Jack M

With size 10 boots, you will boot-out on a 240mm waist if you try to carve deeply. I use a 275mm waist board for softboot carving with size 10.5 boots.

Get well soon, Rob. Sounds lousy. Good luck!

There really wasn't much at all, and what little there was was pretty obscure stuff. I eagerly looked through it hoping to find something I could use, but there was nothing for me. Even if I didn't own any boards already.

The entire board inventory was put on eBay by the bank. I assume they all sold there. There weren't many.

That's kind of my point - I want to invoke the no friends on a powder day rules on a corduroy day, but I can't fully. Fortunately my skiing wife is my riding buddy and she likes to get after it too. My teenagers are also self starters and have their own agendas that don't require my involvement. Even still, I have to keep the urgency in check. On perfect 10 carving days my wife gets it and will offer to meet me after a run if she needs a bio break. Also we got our first dog last year - that added one more obstacle between me and the sweet groom in the mornings. Been there. I basically resigned from ever getting first tracks or much snow time in general for about 5 years after our first kid. C'est la vie.

Anybody else get this feeling? Like the old saying "no friends on a powder day", basically meaning no waiting around for any slow-poke nonsense, even if it's a friend. Gotta get after it while the gettin' is good! You have to pee? Your buckle broke? Catch ya later! If I wake up to see blue skies, low winds, and fresh cord, I get fired up with that same rush of urgency. I have to check myself because very few people around me are experiencing the same thing. I have to make an effort to keep cool while inside I'm about to burst. I get frustrated when I see multiple doubles ahead of me in line who refuse to quad-up. And other stuff like that. Just one more way we are unusual and misunderstood I guess! What do you experience on an epic corduroy day?

Update, an Invision support technician has reviewed all subscriptions and fixed all remaining issues that had been caused before the recent bug fix. Hopefully going forward we will be all set. If anyone sees their membership drop or gets a cancellation email after today, please get in touch with me right away. Thanks everyone for your patience! Your support is doing good things. The forum is self-sustaining, and together we have donated nearly $500 each to USASA and USSRT since subscriptions began at the end of April. Youth racing is a great feeder to our sport, and racing in general advances gear technology that we can all enjoy. Let's keep up the good work!

Bizarre. In the forum admin panel, it thinks you hadn't paid since June 18. Looking in the PayPal account now, it mostly agrees with what you say above, except just not the July payment. My apologies. The subscription system is a relatively new feature for Invision, and it has had some bugs. I *think* they're resolved now, but older accounts may still be affected. I will look further into this later today, thanks for your patience! In the meantime I've manually made you a supporting member.

Thanks Pat. That was an unrelated coincidence. Looks like you had two billing agreements here, and the Invision tech canceled one of them, hence the alert. You are still subscribed.

OK, they retail for $550. The O-Drives use a somewhat similar suspension principal as TD2/3, but only on one axis. I've tried them, I bought them (NOS though). Better than my Burton Genesis-X.

Well, they're not entry-level bindings. Comparable softboot bindings are Now O-Drives, which retail for $500.

Hi SunSurfer, thanks for the heads up. The forum provider, Invision Community, is doing some maintenance on the subscription system. That email notification was triggered by whatever they're doing, sorry for the surprise. Turns out there was some problem with your billing agreement. It hadn't automatically paid since July, so you haven't been a subscriber for some time. I previously thought you had canceled your billing agreement through your PayPal account, so I hadn't addressed it earlier. I will post an update when I hear from Invision.

That's a great start. Any cant or lift? What's the durometer on those bumpers? I like that we can see that there is some sliding happening between your plate and the board. Have you done an a/b comparison between this setup and stock F2s? Are these a one-off of your design or is someone producing them? I spy holes for Burton 3D inserts too. I would think TD toe/heel assemblies would save a little weight without the complex sizing mechanism. There is some sizing and micro adjustment in the TD units. My untested hypothesis about setting up Gecko plates asymmetrically is that they will impose a twist on the board when flexed, which would certainly apply here, but maybe it isn't significant. That would work for a lot of people.

Another @Shred Gruumer Twin Tail I see! No moguls for you!! Loving @slopestar's PJ6 tribute. The best year of PJ graphics. I wanted that board so bad but neither of my local shops could get one in.

Just came across this on my hard drive, thought of this thread. Coiler Nirvana Energy 174:

From our Facebook PM: "Hello Jack, Its one of the actual Pro Model Boards we crafted. This would have been Esters board on standby in case she needed one. However it has not been ridden and is signed by Ester. Its the one and only chance to get a hand on one of these."

I asked. Turns out it is her backup board, unridden. Still pretty cool and only one available.

This is cool https://www.shop-sgsnowboards.com/product/ester-ledecka-signature-snowboard

Ha! What I'm thinking of isn't anything like that though. That was an early attempt at a full isolation plate, with lockable torsion control.

Well, yeah, but you'd need to buy the right length screws and some washers and even then it's probably not a good idea to do that to the plates as they weren't designed for that kind of loading. However this does raise the idea of a binding whose baseplate is something like a Gecko.

Impossible anyway, as there would be nothing holding the system to the board. Geckos rely on the binding trapping them. Thanks for that, good to know - e-ring shall remain. I misprocessed TD2 as TD1 in that post. Indeed the center of a TD2 is too thin. I think it was tongue-in-cheek though.

Haha, not a bad idea! I can't imagine how binding footprint wouldn't affect board flex. I believe that a binding can line-load a board at the front edge of the front binding or back edge of the back binding, and the board bends relatively abruptly at that line. I've seen that happen. I also believe the board remains flat under the binding footprint. I like how the Gecko spreads out the board/binding intersection so it's no longer a line. Assuming that the Gecko plate flexes and the bumpers squish a little. Did you get the matching 5mm stealth insert extensions? You should be able to just subtract 5mm from your previous measurement, right? I'll be interested to hear how they ride. With no squish in the bumpers you'll be relying purely on the flex of the Gecko plates for any benefit. I'd like to try Geckos with the medium (orange) bumpers on the outer fingers and the rest hard (red). I'd also like to try the X-Plate again.

LOL, oh right. I forgot about these... and I own a set. TD3 with standard 3 degree disc at max lift measures 1.75" to the top of the toe pad. Height of the Gecko is 13mm per their website. So the BP cant is buying you almost 7mm less height. That's significant. I still think a new design could be lower and lighter. It wouldn't have suspension (and neither does the BP cant), but that's where the Gecko or some other plate comes in. I was even thinking of having a custom board made with inserts to mount toe/heel pads right to the board. At this point I think I know my exact stance. But then there'd be no suspension whatsoever. Maybe that would be ok. I would only do that for step-ins though. Clamping standard toe clips shut would be using the board as a stressed member.

That's a lot of holes. I wonder how much stress it can handle. I see some pretty thin potential crack paths.

Don't you think saying "Finally an intelligent cant design" logically means you're saying there have not been any other intelligent cant designs to date?