Donek

I'd probably recommend an incline. I have seen some guys ride the axis with catek freeride bindings. It really depends on what angles you're willing to go with and how aggressively you pressure the edge. If you want to know how your boots/bindings will fit on the board, cut a piece of cardboard to 21.5cm (8.5in) wide and place your boots/bindings on it. You'll get a pretty good sense of how they will fit and what angles will work. On second thought, a standard piece of paper is 8.5in X 11in, so you can set your boots/bindings on top of a piece of paper to get a feel for the width/angles.

We are interviewing right now for part time production techs. I see you're in Denver, so you might be interested in driving east of DIA if you are really interested in the job. Give me a call if it interests you.

CarvCanada E-mail me some photos of this will you. The topsheet colors do tend to change a bit in UV as time progresses, but I haven't heard about or seen this one yet. I'd be curious to have a look. Sean Martin Donek Snowboards Inc. smartin@donek.com http://www.donek.com/ phone:877-53-DONEK

I will make an effort to be there with at least one of the Pilot boards in hand. I'm not sure what the dates are. Can you let me know the dates of Nationals and when you and other parents are likely to show up and leave.

Kent, As I said we're considering a couple other sizes. If you have recommendations, I am listening. How small? Appropriate sidecut radii for the little guys a bit outside my normal experience.

The boards are intended to accomodate lighter riders. If you look at the 147, you'll probably notice some similarities to the 146 junior race in stiffness. It will work very nicely for a young or small rider. We are looking at snowpro bindings and F2. As far as performance, there was mention that I spent some time on the 167. The board performed very nicely. As my speed increased and I layed it over more I did notice a need to pressure the outside of my boots in order to prevent it from folding at the waist. Remember I weight 185 lbs. It's not a board for an experienced heavy carver, but will do very well for someone starting out.

I've been informed that there are some questions regarding our new Pilot Series board. Hopefully I'm not overstepping my bounds by posting some specs and answers here. Over the last few years there has been a certain amount of interest in an entry level product. We have decided to introduce one to see how things go with it. It's purpose is to make entry into the carving world a little less demanding on ones pocket book. After consulting with some experts on teaching beginning carves we arrived at specs for 3 different sizes. These are square tail models and can be used learn to carve or by junior level racers for Slalom and possibly GS. The price tag is $375. We hope to be offering a plastic binding with them next season as a package. Our target package price is $550 for board and binding. We are considering adding up to 3 more sizes to this line. The fundamental difference in these boards is in their core construction. If you look at the tech for our cores, you'll find we do a number of things at the manufacturing stage to improve the performance of the board. The pilot will not get any of these improvements. Essentially we are using the same core production process used by the rest of the industry. This reduces the core production time to 1/3 of the time for our symmetriflex cores. The flex pattern has also been modified to maximize lumber yield. This results in a larger platform or untapered portion of the core, making the board softer between the feet. We have also elliminated the ash perimeter making the finished board less torsionally stiff. We have produced a few of these boards so far. At this time we do not have a finalized graphic for them or the means to produce them as a production item. We are taking orders, but there may be delays in filling those orders. The intention was to release the concept and show them off at SES and go into production for the 05/06 season. The specs for the 3 sizes are as follows. <TABLE BORDER CELLPADDING="2"> <TR><TD>model</TD><TD>EE</TD><TD>Sidecut</TD><TD>Waist</TD></TR> <TR><TD>147</TD><TD>130</TD><TD>8</TD><TD>19.5</TD></TR> <TR><TD>157</TD><TD>140</TD><TD>8.8</TD><TD>19.5</TD></TR> <TR><TD>167</TD><TD>150 </TD><TD>10.6</TD><TD>20.0</TD></TR> </TABLE>

Tom, I've actually never had to deal with this. The only solution I can come up with that will have minimal impact on the board is to drill a small hole in the board and insert. A strategically placed 1/8in hole drilled through the base of the insert would allow you to insert a small nail or steel pin to keep it from spinning while removing the binding. A small jole of this size will have no more affect on the running base than hitting a small rock. Once you're done, you could cut the nail to be slighty below the base level of the board. Fill the hole with epoxy and push the pin into the hole.. File things clean or get a base grind and the board should be fine. Just for reference, the base of the insert should be 3/4in in diameter, so try to hit it somewhere close to the edge to provide the most amount of torque.

I think the major difference between the Axis and 4X4 is how we weighted the powder vs carving performance. When I designed the Axis, I build a board that could go anywhere, but I looked at the frequency I felt many riders would see hard pack vs powder. I felt that the hardpack won out in most cases. As a result the Axis was designed to be a carving board that can do trees. I think the 4X4 is more of a powder/tree board for carvers. Chris might say it a bit differently, but the flex on the 4X4 is a bit softer than the Axis. This will lend itself more to powder than boiler plate. I hope that helps a bit.

I get asked a lot of questions about this index... It's kind of broken. It is just intended as a guide to indicate relative stiffness within our line. It is based on theoretical numbers for the overall stiffness of a board. The problem is, I have a value off somewhere in my calculations that throws the numbers off slightly as the width of the boards change. If this error were corrected, I could provide an accurate BOBSI value. I simply have not had the time to track down this value. I hope to be able to at some point in the next year or so.

The problem is not with delamination, it's with deformation. As you are probably aware, you get some binding suck with the bindings mounted to the board. By heating the board up in this tensioned state, you can leave the board with permamnent binding suck even when the bindings are removed. Epoxy resin systems vary, but it is possible to reach the glass transition temperature while hot waxing if you are not careful. Epoxies don't move much at these temperatures, but they will a bit. I think you can pretty safely wax the board without causing delamination. Your binding suck may become deeper or larger though.

Stewart, We will have a full fleet of demos at the event that you can try. Bomber usually has some entry level boards as well. If things work out as they should, there will likely be some entry level prototypes from us too. We have plans to introduce an entry level line in the next few months.

:)

:)

Sorry, I saw Tim yesterday, but forgot to ask. I know he's going to be inthe office next week. Just call and ask for him. He should be able to give you some kind of feedback on what their policy will be as well as how well the board will hold up.

I ride a 160 with the freeride binding. My other prefered board is a 171 FCI with Bomber or Catek plates.

We have a number of customers riding plates on our incline deck. I have a few that I know of riding them on wides. I don't normally recommend the use of plates on anything wider than our incline. We've seen some failure on wider boards due to the greater leverage required to put them on edge. If you order a wide intending to put plates on it, inform us that you are doing so and we can reinforce the insert area further. This will take care of the problem. The Never Summer cores are mostly aspen with a beach (I think) hardwood through the inserts. I'm sure the beach can handle the forces, but would be skeptical about the aspen surrounding it. The retention strength is somewhat related to the lumber around the stringer that the inserts are in. Not a definite yes or no, but a word of caution. I'll be seeing Tim from NS tomorrow. I'll try to remember to ask him if they've ever seen any failures in this situation.

What I tell everyone is bring a stone with you. You'll regret detuning too much, but rarely too little, if you have a stone in your pocket. These adjustments are best made on the hill, not in the shop where you can't determine the results.

You are either very tall or missinterpreted the center of rotation idea. If your knee had a hinge pin in it, that would be where the measurement is taken from. Kind of dead center on the side of your knee. The bottom of your heel should also be in your socks, not in shoes or a boot.

Linus, Our recommended starting point is: center to center distance should be equal to the distance from the bottom of your heel to the center of rotation of you knee. Shoulder width is another relative approximation, but it's difficult to measure on yourself.

The 2X4 hole pattern tends to swiss cheese the core reducing the strength of the board in that area. The concept of people using more screws is a good one, but in practice it doesn't often happen. The Bomber bindings have the 2X4 hole pattern built into them, so nothing is gained by building it into the board as well. Cateks holes are space a little bit different, but you can still attain basically the same adjustability (within 1/4in), so you're not gaining anything there either. Soft bindings typically incorporate a slot or multiple holes as well. So everything is covered. A lot of freestylers tend to missuse the slot or additional holes for moving their foot towards the toe or heel side of the board and eliminate a lot of stance options. The adjustments in the heel cup is intended for this purpose.

Ray, Your USPS guy is probably right. The 108" length plus girth applies to the US. When shipping outside the US via postal services, many other contries have restrictions on overall length. You can find these restriction on the international section of the USPS web site. We use FedEx on all our international shipments. We have a pretty hefty discount due to our volume. FedEx also offers something called great Rates to existing customers. Don't ask about them at your local shipper or from your driver. They don't know anything about them or are told to keep it under wraps. You'll need to call your FedEx sales rep to use such a thing. Great rates are only available to countries they frequently fly to and change on a daily basis. They are strictly based on space available on planes. They use them to fill planes that are not likely to be full. If you have any other questions, feel free to e-mail me or give me a call.

I used to work with the head chemist for Notwax at NREL about 8 years ago. I learned a lot about the stuff. The intersting thing is the comment on it's price. NotWax was a Dow byproduct that was simply sitting in barrels hoping to find a home. The original company was getting it for free. The founder of that company died and the company was sold, so I don't know the current situation. Notwax is a liquid flouropolymer. Huh?!... Many of you have probably used flourinated wax. The reason it works well is because it has flourocarbon (ground up teflon) in it. Because water molecules have a charge, like charged molecules will tend to repel it. These materials are called hydrophobic. Flourine is one of these hyfrophobic materials. In wet snow, a highly flourinated base will actually repel the water much like a well waxed automobile, making it glide very fast in conditions that would normally be very slow. As you can probably guess a flourinated wax has limited applications. These applications are mostly at temperatures that permit melted snow to develop under the board or when the snow is already wet. Notwax is an excellent product for spring and warm conditions. If you use notwax by itself, it has a limited life, but can be easily reapplied on the hill. Very small amounts go a very long way. Using it in powder will actually leave you very dissapointed unless it's a wet snow. If you want to get the benefits of the material and a longer lasting application, apply a sparing coat of not wax to a clean base and then hotwax over it with a suitable temp wax. You'll have to work a bit harder to get the wax to penetrate the base, but you'll have an application that will frequently last a full day.

Rick, I'll make one suggestions before you embark on this endeavor. Take a look at how many companies started making boards last year and have already failed. Then look at companies who started in the last 5 and have failed. Just as an example. There was a company here in Denver that decided to purchase all of B-Lines equipment when they went under. They paid over $100,000 for it. One year later they sold it all for less than $10,000. They couldn't make it happen. Mostly because they believed that if they turned on the machinery, the job would get done. You may not have the same problem, but there will be plenty of them. The success rate of snowboard companies is so abysmally low, it's staggering. You should make sure you know exactly what it is you're getting into before you begin. You'll want to build boards for yourself and a couple of friends for at least 3 years before you even consider trying to sell one. I talk with all the companies here in Colorado (US, Never Summer, Unity, Venture). Every single one of us agree on one point. We may have thought we'd get rich at one point, but the only reason we're still in business is because it's a passion. None of us are driving fancy cars. Some of us are even supported by our wives.

Someone probably wasn't thinking straight. It should be Starting Gate, not Racer's Edge. We'll fix it.