NateW

I'll be up there for the next few Wednesdays, and one day per weekend, if the snowpack stays decent. Excelsior, I'll send you a PM... I have AWD and snow tires. (And a clutch problem, but I hope to get that fixed Monday.) This coming weekend, I'll be there Sunday.

I resemble that remark. :lol: I don't much care what it looks like though, it's fun. I would trust those Nitros for carving, but not for jumping. Almost all of my binding failures have happened when undershooting or overshooting jumps, (plus a couple others in moguls). I've had hard landings with and without binding failures, and I greatly prefer without. :) Intec TDs and Intec Cateks are the strongest thing I know of, I've been riding TDs almost exclusively for years and they haven't failed me yet. (Cateks are a close second, they haven't broken either but they require frequent tweaks to stay tight.)

I don't have a stomp pad, but I've been meaning to change that. For years. If I need my rear foot to stay in one place, such as for a rope tow, I put it on the binding, duck stance. Getting off the lift, I usually put my rear foot next to my front foot. When I do get around to it, I'll probably put on two stomp pads.

Great pic, Erik! E30, you can keep a pretty constant speed on moderate slopes, but when it gets steeper, just forget about constant speed. Lots of the fun of carving hard comes from accelerating into a turn, and staying committed, and then coming out at a traverse at a moderate speed again. If you commit to the carve early, you will accelerate as your carve takes you from a traverse to going straight down the fall line, but if you stay committed you'll also decelerate without skidding, as your carve brings you back into a traverse. The extremecarve guys talk about "push-pull," and took a while for that to click for me, but it helps a lot. Going edge-to-edge is much faster when I pull the board in, and pushing it back out helps provide more edge pressure in the early part of the turn, on the downhill edge, as you see in Erik's picture.

Get comfortable riding 55/50, and then turn both angles up by 2 degrees, and get completely comfortable again. Repeat until you're at 65/60. I bet it works. :) I had a board with a 17cm waist, it's been a couple years but I think I was running 65/60 on it. It felt weird at first, but it didn't take long to feel normal doing almost everything with that stance. The exception: counter-rotation, such as when riding moguls, felt a little bit constrained. I still think that's a solvable problem, but I broke the board before I got completely comfortable riding it in moguls. At some point I will get another skinny board, and try to figure that out.

Could be worse.... consider Aggression. I had a Tarquin 165 in 1992 or so, it was a great board. They got bought out by Volant. In 1997 or 1998 (plus or minus...) I broke 3 in one season. Total of 8 days IIRC. They kept expressing shock, saying they'd never heard of a broken board before. Three times. They gave me warranty replacements, but I gave away the last one. Far as I know, the brand no longer exists.

Never been there, but here's a writeup from someone who has: http://www.snowboardseattle.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6856 If you read that, you know everything I know.

Ditto. I used 1/2" HDPE to make adapters to put 4-hole bindings on a 5-hole board and it worked fine. It was a bit heavy, but a lot of the weight was from having two sets of really long screws holding things together. If this chain has a location near you, I highly recommend them: http://www.tapplastics.com/ They've helped me out with a bunch of small odd projects like this.

After answering the question, try this mental exercise: How much money do you spend on gear and lift tickets in an average year? Any how many days per year do you ride? Do you get the same number?

But not too upset to put blame on himself, and not too poor to stop him from buying another Virus: "I doubt it will be replaced. Probably gonna buy a new one but a custom that can handle what I dish out to it!" Somebody get that man a Sawzall. I want to see the gory details. :)

Center your stance. Then keep your weight equal on each foot. Now your weight is in the right place and your front leg doesn't wear out. Works for me!

Hey, we already did this thread. :)

When you buy jeans, what inseam measurement do you look for? Multiply that by 0.6. How does that compare to your current stance width? It's a good place to start...

1. 14-15 years old, skateboarding, wood halfpipe, hit my head on the flatbottom, dizzy for a few minutes but no big deal. Don't remember if I was wearing a helmet back then. 2. 18 years old, my second time on campus ever, had just dropped off a carload of stuff at my dorm, was driving toward town to get some food when my girlfriend said something about a stop sign. And then there was this guy leaning over me with a clipboard asking if I knew my name, knew where I was, etc. My parents were already there, and it was a 90 minute drive for them to get there. I'd run a stop sign and been t-boned by a VW bus on a street with a 35 mph limit. No helmet, naturally. I was moderately retarded for a couple/few weeks. I remember constantly feeling like I had just woken up, an hour too soon. Doctors said I might get better, might not. I did. 3. Around 25-30 years old, terrain park at Snoqualmie Central, icy. I stopped above a jump and was wondered if I should go for a 360, or just a 180, and then I was lying on my back taking inventory. Wiggle fingers? Check. Wiggle toes? Check. Move head a little bit? Check. Move arms? Legs? Move head more? Etc, etc. All systems go. Rode to the bottom of the lift, realized I didn't know what day it was. Wait, it's Wednesday, shouldn't I be at work? I should call... no, wait. I have a concussion! Went to the lodge to get some food and see if my head would clear. Walking through the lodge I crossed paths with a guy whose eyes got HUGE. "DUDE, ARE YOU OK?????" "I've been better." "I saw that 360 man, that was BRUTAL." So, apparently I went for the 360. Without the helmet I'd have been crippled. No doubt. Maybe killed. I wasn't really in the habit of wearing a helmet at the time, but I've been pretty religious about it ever since.

When I get new boards/boots/bindings I tweak them every day I ride, and maybe multiple times per day. Once I get them set to my liking, I leave them. I'm picky, but I'm not fickle. :)

Looked perfectly reasonable to me. Mellow speed, lots of room between you and everybody else. Looking forward to the next episode...

"What the hell do you call that thing?" "It's a race board." "Oh. Are those ski boots?" "Nope, race boots." I explained the difference between carving and skidding as we rode the chair up. He was self-taught, fairly new, and I don't think carving had even occurred to him yet.

Email sent!

When people ask what I'm riding, I usually tell them it's a race board. It's the most understandable term I can think of. People say, "oh," whereas when I say it's an alpine snowboard they usually say, "huh?" I think the Olympics will give us all some help. When people ask, I'm going to tell them to watch the snowboarding GS event, or ask if they watched it.

I wax, and scrape, and I have a very fine stone+guide for keeping the edges sharp. For anything else I take it to a shop.

If Intec isn't the answer, you're asking the wrong question.

This. I've bagged it after a couple runs on two occasions. Once, the ice was transparent and a couple inches thick. Sounds like what Sultan Guy was describing. Once, the ice was the usual frozen-snow white stuff, but it was so hard that I wasn't leaving any trace in the corduroy. Half the problem that day was that the slightest skid sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. So, the skidding was just as unbearable as the carving. Thankfully those circumstances are super-rare. Once each in about 20 years. BTW, I was going to go up this weekend, probably to the same place as you, Sultan Guy (Stevens Pass?) but pre-bagged it because of the weather reports. I figured it was going to suck but I never guessed it would suck that bad. Wednesday is looking good though.

I fixed a front-quad-burn problem by moving my bindings forward. I was leaning too much on my front leg because I had to in order to make the board work properly. Moving the bindings forward means I can have my weight in the right place and have a comfortable stance with equal weight on each leg. Conventional wisdom says to center your stance in or two aft of the center of the effective edge, and most boards' inserts are laid out with that idea in mind. I've decided that's crap - and it's probably why instructors are always telling students to lean forward, more weight forward, more weight on your front foot, lean forward, blah blah blah. It's good advice, but only because bindings are generally in the wrong places. :) That said, I do keep one of my boards set up with a rear-ish stance, because it works a lot better in deep snow. It might be a little bitter for off-piste steeps too (skidded turns, moguls) but I'm not yet convinced either way. But for just about everything, especially carving on groomers, centered works way better for me.

Data gathered only from the top tier of competitive athletes will result in a thesis that has "strong implications" only for the top tier of competitive athletes. Is that what you're aiming for?

Fixed that for you.