NateW

About 20 years ago, I had some soccer shin guards that were basically a thin layer of hard plastic with a 1/4" thick layer of foam under them. If you can find a set, and carve out the foam over the wound, and maybe add some foam around the edges of the wound (weather stripping, perhaps?), that might allow you to ride without aggravating the wound. No promises, I'm just thinking out loud here...

Research causes cancer in laboratory animals. I used to drink a lot of soda, at some point I stopped and replaced it with orange juice. Then I realized how much sugar/calories is in that stuff too, and switched to water. Now soda tastes horribly sweet and leaves my stomach feeling queasy. I don't drink while snowboarding, but I always crave water (and chug it) for the rest of the day. This thread gotten me thinking that's a problem I should fix. Thanks for the insight, everybody.

I lost power for about a day and a half, I think I was one of the lucky ones as there were dark neighborhoods and streetlights in all directions for quite a while after. I also lost a small section of fence, but thankfully all of my trees are still standing.... My parents lost ten trees (10!) on their three-quarter acre lot. I'll be helping them clean up this week. Their whole neighborhood was hit pretty hard, there's lots of tall evergreens out there, and now lots of smashed roofs and decks. No carbon monoxide poisoning here, but my fuel light went on as I pulled into work Thursday AM and I thought, "no big deal, I have enough to get through the day, I'll fill up tomorrow morning." I heard there was a storm coming, but didn't really pay attention to the magnitude... :) Tomorrow morning there were no open gas stations for miles. Parts of Seattle still had gas (and no lines!) but I wasn't sure I could make it that far. My folks picked me up and took me to their place Friday so my parrots could stay warm (no power there either, but they have an old-school gas fireplace.) I borrowed a car and drove my birds and myself to Seattle to sleep at my GF's place, and came back home with a couple gallons of gas. That got me to a gas station with a 5-minute line on Saturday. It was $3.10/gallon and I was grateful to pay every cent. Lesson learned: 1) It's good to have friends and family. 2) I ain't letting my car go below a half tank 'til April. :)

<sarcasm> Carve: to turn while moving forward. As in "we were really carving up the powder." </sarcasm>

I also found them harder to get in and out of than my Raichles.

Pay real close attention to your weight distribution right at take-off. Ideally you want to be either totally centered with the base flat. It also works to take off from an edge (it's practically mandatory for spins over 180) but it complicates things a little. Also, any movement in your body at the moment of takeoff is just going to get amplified while you're airborne, so be totally composed at the bottom of the jump and hold still 'til you leave the lip. You can of course boost with your legs or aborb some of the jump (you'll want to work on the latter for BX as you lose less speed that way) but again that complicates things a bit. Until you get your landings consistent it would probably help to work on just staying motionless as you leave the lip.

It really isn't significantly harder than softbooting - lots of stuff gets easier - and you sound committed, so I say just take the plunge. Buy boots, bindings, and a board. Check the classifieds here if the up-front cost of a whole new setup is too much. But don't worry too much about trying it and not liking it, once you get past the adjustment period you'll find that you can ride just fine, only with more control and confidence. Where do you normally ride?

I had a bunch of trouble with toe-lever bindings (bomber and others) releasing when landing big jumps (only the too-hard landings that come from overshooting or undershooting the sweet spot - proper landings were never a problem). I tried various amounts of tension on the toe-lever, from too much to too little, even tried sending bindings and boots to Fin for professional calibration. Eventually gave up, switched to SIs, and have been very happy ever since. My best guess is that the problem stems from the heel bail being shaped to fit many boots and not precisely matching the contour of my own boots. Under extreme loads (on the axis that you'd call pronation or supination if it was just your foot), the heel ledge pries itself out from the heel bail. That's speculation - you'd have to watch a release happen with a high-speed video camera or something to really know - but I think that's what was happening.

I'm not, but I know a guy who is... http://www.happymonkeysnowboards.com/mike/index.htm He has some happy customers, and a "do it right" attitude that inspires confidence in his product. I took a couple runs on one board last year, and I think I will be demoing another prototype in the next week or two. I'm all about bouncing ideas. I can't wait to try some laminations with carbon fiber X patterns to minimize torsional flex, and experiment with core profiles, and whatever else comes to mind.

Half the time I wax my board, I don't scrape it. The wax on the edges comes off anyway; as for the wax in the middle, I'm not riding on it much so who cares?

I think a longer sidecut radius makes for more graceful, deeply angulated turns - like 12m or bigger. I don't think length is very critical, I've been happy on 170-183 and I think I could go a bit shorter provided the board is stiff (I don't think you'll find a shorter board with a long sidecut though). $0.02

But seriously though... Hard boots, high angles, and narrow boards work best as a package deal. I rode hard boots and low angles on a freeride board for years and liked it, but when I started going with higher angles and narrower boards I liked it even more. And when I got into the groove with hardbooting technique - rather than my familiar softboot technique in hard boots - I liked it even more. So my advice to you would be to try going fully alpine before you give up on the hard boot idea. Go for at least 55/50 angles, which means a waist of at most 23cm (consider 21cm). Aim your shoulders forward. Hold your 'rear' hand over the nose of the board when you're carving heelside. Face straight down the hill when you're riding moguls. Try to think of it as a new technique - not just snowboarding with different boots, but something as different from snowboarding as tele is from regular skiing. Adapt your style to suit the gear, then decide if you like it or not. I ride with Raichle 324s, locked in position 4, and I feel the flex is OK for moguls and jumps and whatnot. You wouldn't be the first person to choose to ride with the levers in walk mode though. I did myself for a while, though with the twisty thing in the position that gives firm support against my calves, like a highback binding. Been thinking about getting the BTS things, haven't really decided yet.

Maybe you're just into softbooting. Not that there's anything wrong with that, heck some of my best friends are softbooters. Some people say it's a choice, some people say they were just born different. I say be proud of who you are, and don't try to conform to anyone else's expectations.

My riding buddy taught me to focus on a spot on he ground behind the lip and above the landing, as it always stays visible through the rotation. Seems like a good idea, helped a bit, but I still have a ways to go...

Speaking only for myself: Tail grabs are trivially easy, but nose grabs are utterly impossible. For tabletop-type jumps, straight airs are no harder, in fact probably easier as I'm more confident approaching the jump with hard boots. 360s are the same. Frontside 180s are not a problem, but I still struggle with backside (blnd) 180s. I think that's mostly mental though, I've gotten confident at riding switch, including taking off and landing, but the "flying blind" moment of a backside 180 is still really unsettling. 50/50s are easy enough, I started working on boardslides a bit last season and made some progress... I think the narrower waist is a bit of a drawback for that. I'm not really into rails though, and don't expect to spend much time working on them. I've done lots of bumps and jumps with a 17cm waisted board and 60/65 angles (size 27 Raichle 324s, no overhang) it's not a problem. Riding groomers with such a narrow waist took some getting used to, but once I got over that I felt just as confident in the park as I did on my previous board, which had a 21cm waist and 55/50 angles. Other than certain tweaks (like nose grabs), I don't think hard boots make things more difficult. Overall, I think they make most things easier. I plan my runs around where the best jumps are, for me that's what everything revolves around... I switched to hard boots a long time ago, and I don't see myself switching back to soft boots. The extra control I get on the ground is more than enough to make up for not being able to reach the nose when I'm in the air. They built a big plexiglass wall ride thing at my home hill last year and I was able to hit it frontside, backside, and fakie (forward up, switch down, never thought to try the opposite). I was just starting on alley-oops, I think backsides will be do-able but the boots might interfere with frontsides. This year my goals are blind 180s and "switch 0s," taking off switch and landing switch. I am sure I will be able to do switch 0s consistently in the kiddie parks, and possibly in the real parks too, but blind 180s have eluded me for years so I'm not as optimistic about those.

For future reference: You already told him once not to mess with you. If you remind him of the whole thing again right before you get to the mountain, he'll take away one of two things from that conversation: 1) That guy is angry. I better not mess with that guy. 2) If I mess with that guy, he'll pay attention to me. He'll acknowledge my existence. He'll remind me that I fxxked him over, that he was offended and I came out on top. Sweet! My mother never paid enough attention to me (well, there was that one time I peed on the carpet, that was pretty cool, but gawd my room stunk after that), so anyway now I need all the attention I can get. Let's do that again! I'll stay back and wait for him to come to a stop, and then we'll see what he does after I ruin his new toys. On the other hand, since you already warned him once, you don't need to warn him again. That would just put him on guard, so you lose your chance to surprise him. So don't even mention it. If he does anything stupid, just knock him to the ground and beat on his face for a while.

I would say that a helmet and wrist guards have been sufficient for me so far (coming up on 20 years), but if I said that, then I'd be doomed to a terrible injury that body armor would have prevented. So I'm not going to say that.

Speaking of...

No, my mustache isn't that cool.

My personal best yet: "Have you ever ridden a real snowboard?" "Hey, I was just about to ask you the same thing!" He laughed. I so little actual negativity that I can't think of any at the moment... Mostly people are just curious. I get way more crap about wearing a one-piece. Go ahead, bring it on. :D

In France, because of the metric system, this is called a Snowboard Royale. Awesome. :D :D :D

TD1, TD2, Catek WC, and Catek Olympics all feel about the same to me. TD2 with the suspension kit has a distinct feel when riding ice, there's less of a tingly sensation from the vibration. I don't notice a difference in how the board rides, but it feels nicer on my feet. :) On anything other than ice, they all feel the same to me.

http://www.deucesnowboards.com/ In accordance with the "don't knock it until you've tried it" guideline, I won't speculate out loud about how long the linkage system would survive under hard carving, moguls, and jumps. It's a neat idea though.

I have a twin-tip with a 23cm waist that I ride with 45/40 angles when the snow cover is too patchy to risk beating up the edges on a board I really like.

Every time I have gone down in width (25, 23, 21, 17cm over the last several years) it felt like it took less strength to tip the board up on edge, or to hold an edge while traversing. From a simple physics standpoint it makes sense that it would take less force to lift yourself off the snow on a shorter lever. People always talk about edge-to-edge quickness but I think that's just a side-effect of having better leverage, and needing less strength to accomplish the edge change in the first place.