NateW

Damn! That stuff tastes horrible! That slap you heard in the distance earlier today was my palm hitting my forehead. No, not because I made a grease sandwich... I have been having trouble getting my heel to click in for the last couple days, and have been meaning to take a set of calipers to the heel receiver to see if I bent one of the ears in inward somehow... but I kept forgetting about it during the drive home. But this morning I put a dab of Bomber Butter on each of the ears and that totally fixed it the problem. Effortless click-in all day long. I should have thought of this sooner!

Different race, slo-mo shows Zidek doing the same thing at the finish line: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5113190/detail.html Speaking of video, here's Jasey Jay's tangle with the gate: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5113188/detail.html (Zidek gets in a little method in at the end. :) )

<i>why risk throwing it all away so you can look cool. </i> You're assuming it's all about looking cool, I'm assuming it was 10% appearances and 95% exuberance. Big air is fun, big tweaked airs more so. :)

Did anyone else notice Radoslav Zidek, the men's SBX silver medal winner, during the last stretch? Bombing straight down to the finish, his weight was WAY back, so far back the nose of the board was off the snow. Erwin just posted some similar photos in this thread: http://www.bomberonline.com/VBulletin/showthread.php?t=10082 I've never seen this kind of thing before... have I just not been paying attention, or is this the favored technique for straight-line speed?

Busting a move in the biggest race of your life = putting fun above winning = highly respectable in and of itself. The press is just beating her up over this, which I think is just plain stupid. It cost her a notch on the podium but she did things her way, she reached for a little extra joy... she broke the mold, and for that I salute her. It's a bummer that it cost her the gold, but she's still bringing home a medal! :) That chick rocks. I hope she comes back in 2010, hucks a rodeo on the final jump, and finishes the race switch.

I did the hard boots / freeride board thing for years, and at the time I enjoyed it, but if I could do it all over again I'd go narrower sooner. If you have or can afford the whole setup now, I say go for it. If you have to wait to get the board, then putting hard boots on a freeride board will work until then. It will take a bit of adjustment, but IMO you'll get better faster if you jump right in than if you spend time getting used to a hybrid setup that you'll probably abandon later. Hard boots are definitely better suited to narrower boards. The stiffness and high angles and narrowness just all work better together. At the time I was concerned that an alpine board would not be as versatile (off-piste, jumps, etc) but in retrospect I was quite wrong. All-mountain alpine boards really ARE great all over the mountain. :)

SBX Heat 2: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5111590/detail.html Seth cleans up: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5113178/detail.html Helmetcam SBX, but with districting crappy video editing: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5111590/detail.html Anyone know of sites with good olympic coverage other than NBC?

Nothing unusual... I've only had one other board blow up that quickly, and that time the manufacturer's response to that one was "yeah, all of the boards in that batch are coming apart, we'll get you a new one ASAP." And the replacement held up just fine. Volant on the other hand just said "gosh, we've never heard of that happening to one of our boards," three times in a row. I gave away the last board they sent me...

I think the key word there is parallel long jump. That should make for some interesting crashes. :) On a just-barely-related note, watch this guy stick 1440 triple back flips: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5087068/detail.html

Intuition is (or was) the OEM for Raichle's Thermoflex liners. They are available in two thickesses (9mm and 13 or 14mm if I remember right). It sounds like you want the thin ones...

If she's already in hard boots, I bet she'll be happier on an alpine board than on a freeride board. Give her yours until she can get her own. :)

I blew up two non-metal-topsheet Aggressions, and second was replaced with a Volant-branded metal-topsheet board, which also delaminated. I got a total of 8 days out of all three boards. Volant no longer even tries to make snowboards. :rolleyes:

That's pretty funny. :)

Your failure is either due to material defect at manufacture or fatigue due to flexing - either type is not a "shear" failure. I guess I don't understand the term "shear" the same way you do... I claim no expertise in this domain though so that's no surprise. Anyhow, mine broke off flush with the side of the heel unit, where the cross-section is circular rather than the smaller rectanglular section where skategoat's broke. There were some small peaks and valleys above and below the level of the plastic, but it was pretty much flush. It had the same color and texture that you see in the photo of the part in skategoat's hand. "Pot metal" was my thought as well. And again, it broke on the first day, so "material defect at manufacture" is my theory as well. Flex and fatigue had to be negligible in my case.

80% metal?!?!??

I sheared a pin as well. It happened on the very first day with that set of heels, so I assume it was just a random flaw in the metal. I looked for voids but didn't see any. In retrospect I wish I'd looked at it under a microscope. I sent it back to the retailer for a warranty exchange though so you get to keep that $50. This was a few years ago... I've forgotten the name of the retailer but I'm pretty sure I heard about them here... At the time their web site had white text on a black background, and they carried mostly softboot gear but had a small selection of alpine stuff. Sound familiar to anyone? I'd probably recognize the name if I heard it again. I think they were on the east coast. If the old board archive is still around, I am pretty sure there are some posts in there from me about this. Everyone said 'whoah, never even heard of that' so I stuck with Intec and haven't had another failure. I share Linus' opinion that Intec is the most reliable system. Even after the one pin broke, the other held my foot in. I didn't notice the problem til I came to a stop at the very end of the run, so I'm not sure what I was doing when it broke. Is the old board still around? And is it searchable? It happened on the day of an air contest I entered, and I posted a video of me sketching out and Maciek said something about me bouncing like a ball (which made me laugh). So a search on "maciek nate bounce ball" would probably turn up that thread, which would give you the date, and I'm sure I posted about the heel breakage within one or two days of that thread.

Yikes. Glad you are OK!

The occasional day on soft gear always serves to remind me why hard boots cost $400ish and good bindings cost close to $300: They're worth it.

I'm guessing it'll all be on Google Video... :)

A big-name cliff skier died of a ruptured aorta a while back when he landed on his back (on a rock, IIRC). There was also a fatality at Summit Central in WA two or three years ago which I heard (from a stranger) was due to an overshoot and a ruptured aorta. Overshoots by themselves are bad... You fall the height of the jump plus whatever height the kicker provided, and you stop falling instantly (not gradually as when you land on a downward slope). Might as well jump out a window. Plus he landed on his back, so his legs couldn't absorb any of the impact. :(

To be fair, we had a pretty weak December. But January made up for it. I suggest Stevens Pass and/or Crystal. I like Stevens a little better personally. Alpental is nice if you're into steep slopes with moguls, not so great for carving though. :)

Whoah. Any more than about 10 degrees apart and my knees ain't comfortable.

Someone needs to explain the idea of "landing switch" to this guy one more time, more carefully than last time. Posted on the TGR forum: if the cliff was 245 feet, and he landed in a six foot crater, does that mean his head did a 257 foot drop? (By my math it's 263 feet, though.) See also: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/sports/article1000653.ece

I've been riding with softbooter friend this season and after the first day or two he asked, "do people always ask you about your board?" He thought it weird that my board was such a conversation piece. (I'd forgotten that wasn't normal.) Fast-forward to today... we spent the whole day lapping the terrain park (at Stevens Pass, which is not the place I usually ride). And at one point my buddy says something like, "man, you should hear those people in the park when you hit the jumps... they're like, 'is he going to hit the jump on that thing?' 'whoah, he did it!' 'what the hell?'" (There's usually a half-dozen or so people queued up for the jumps, watching the people ahead of them while they wait for their turn.) Later in the day I worked up the courage to start doing 180s... Not off the biggest jumps in the park, but still pretty good size - there was a contest on this particular set of jumps last week and people were doing rodeos and stuff. Anyway, I'd 180 off the first jump, ride switch to the next one, 180 again. So later I had to ask, what sort of comments did that bring out? "Holy ****!" "He landed it!" "What's that guy thinking?"

My guess is that it's due to the the berms they put on the corners in the BX courses. That makes soft boots competitive with hard boots. Take away the berms and I bet you'd see hard boots dominating just like they do in SL and GS. Which is why I'm sure the berms are here to stay and will only get bigger as time goes on.