NateW

$600-$800 because that's about what it costs to get a board with the dimensions I want. To me it's all about the dimensions... I don't race, and I'm pretty sure my biggest "problem" is all about technique ("problem" in quotes because I'm almost satisfied with my riding ability), so I figure that the benefits of exotic construction would be lost on me. I want to have just two boards: one for everything, and one for a backup when the first one breaks. :)

When I was in the shop for a boot fitting, I started at the bottom and they said don't. Then I've been doing it wrong for a couple decades. (Minus the rear-entry ski boot era.) But I fiddle with the buckles between runs all day long so I don't think it really matters. Especially with Raichle buckles, since with those it's near impossible to get the same fit every time you put the boot on.

33, writing software for the evil empire Starting riding in 88 or 89, switched to hard boots in 94 (and kept using freeride boards for a few years after that)

Like Alex said above, I think wheels and trucks are HUGE factors in a skateboard's carve-ability - maybe even more than the deck. If you're only familiar with conventional trucks (Tracker, Gullwing, etc), then borrow a board with Seismics, and one with Randals, and see how they feel. And bear in mind that they're both available with different angles (very similar to different sidecuts on snowboards). I switched over to Seismics completely, except for one drop-thru board (Kebbek JimZ) that needs Randals. FWIW, I have a 40" Gravity Brad Edwards as well, but I find it too flexy. I can feel the kicktail sag when I lean back a bit... so I replaced it with a Comet Park 40" which has similar dimensions but is super stiff. That makes me happy. I think Comet makes the same board under a different name now.

I run 3 degrees inward cant on each foot. It's that "personal preference" thing again. :)

Both binding cants should angle the boots toward the center. Picture a triangle with your hips at the tip and and one of your feet at each bottom corner... Binding cants are basically there to help aim your lower legs toward your hips. But your knees and boots do that too, so they're not essential. As for forward lean adjustments on boots... I find that with less angle in the ankle, my quads last longer. More angle = tired quads sooner. I've been riding Raichles with 5-position lean adjusters for about 10 years and I still tinker with them quite a bit. Lower angles (more upright) definitely helps later in the day as my legs are getting tired. I think more angle (a more crouched posture) helps with bumps and jumps but it could all just be in my head. In both cases, the best thing to do is try some different settings and see what you like and what you don't like. Personal preference is a huge factor in this stuff. If you race, look at your times; if you don't, as yourself how much fun you're having / how comfortable you are (those are probably tightly correlated!).

Well dang. Now I'm all curious.

"In the last five or six years racers have been going to wider and wider boards. Klug rides a waist width of 210 and his shell size is a 28.0, I beleive. Zac Kay also rides boards over 200 mm wide. Personally I ride a board with a 19.5 waist width, my shell size is a 25.5 and I ride the physics which allows me to set-up my boots with a smaller sole lenght than normal." Yeah, but you can't *really* carve on anything less than 22cm. (JOKE! JOKE! JUST KIDDING!) "Ski designers probably would have figured out the whole sidecut thing on their own eventually (like, many years later), but it is a known fact that the inspiration for shaped skis was that skiers were jealous of snowboarders' carves." I dunno, I was in junior high when someone explained sidecut to me, and I was like, "But there's hardly any! Why not way more?" I'll grant that a snowboard builder tried it first, but it had to happen. I'm surprised it took as long as it did. Besides, if racing drives improvements so much, why did it take so damn long for skiers to catch on to deeper sidecuts? There's been way more ski races and ski racers for way longer than snowboarding. Kinda puts a hole in the theory that racing drives mass-market technology, unless somebody wants to posit that snowboarding does technology transfer better. Which I highly doubt, because: "Your examples of Volkl, F2 and Nidecker don't make a truely race worthy board that you can buy anymore. If the big manufactures kept up with current trends in raceing their boards would be wider." So, I continue to believe that carving doesn't need racing. It ain't helping much today, we'd do just fine without it. "Look at sports cars, if these makers did not race, we would not have Porsche, and Lotus and such." And for the 99% of us who drive on government roads in Mustangs and Miatas and Preludes and Corvettes and Eclipses and A4s, how much does it matter? I'll grant that the WRC did a lot to bring the Subaru WRX and Mitsubish Evo to market, but if organized racing ended tomorrow there would still be plenty of people willing to pony up (pardon the pun) for faster cars, and plenty of choices on the market, because the 99% of people who buy that stuff do not race. They just like driving high performance cars. That demand will always be there, whether or not there's organized races on TV or across town. Random tangent time. True or false: Four door sedans are to car racing what soft boots are to snowboard racing. They ain't better, but they're what people buy, so the races are designed to make them more competitive.

There's just as big a percentage of softbooters as hardbooters obsessing over their equipment. Some people get into that kind of thing, some don't, whether it's bikes, boards, cars, or kites or whatever. Personally I don't race (tried it, didn't like it) and only barely know one guy who does (not counting internet acquaintances). If racing disappeared, I wouldn't even notice. How much would it really affect the market? What percentage of Doneks, Coilers, Priors, F2s, etc go to racers? And how bad would they hurt if those racers didn't have racing? Would the racers still ride for the fun of it? I assume so. Would their purchases slow down? Who knows? I'm guessing it would slow down a little, but not greatly. I'm guessing that most of the market doesn't race and doesn't much care that other people race. Even those who do race, won't stop riding fast just because the gates are gone. The fact that there are a bunch of people out there racing and riding better than me doesn't have much bearing on whether I'm going to buy hard or soft boots next season. Doesn't affect the way I ride, except in the most indirect way. (I've taken one half day of lessons in the last 15 years, and I'm pretty happy with how I ride.) Does it affect the way anyone else rides? Maybe it's just that there's only a tiny sliver of a snowboard race scene in my area, and I got tired of standing in line above the starting gate after just a few races, but as far as I can tell, racing is just something other people do somewhere else. More power to 'em. I'll keep buying my all-mountain boards just the same, whether or not they're still at it. Really, just the same. Maybe racing affects board design a little, but it seems to me that the construction has pretty well stabilized a long time ago - vertically laminated wood cores, fiber glass sandwidth, radial edges, etc, etc. I'd be happy riding 2001-designed boards for the next 50 years. I don't much care about Olympic construction or Torsion Plus or whatever. Sure, the construction and techniques will evolve, and they'll evolve a bit faster with racing out there to push a little more... but they'll still evolve (if slower) just because the people who love to go fast are still going to be pushing themselves, their gear, their techniques, gates or no gates. And there will always be gear-obsessed types who will still buy a new board or two every season just to try new things. If most of those people are non-racers already, then would the end of racing really put a big dent in demand?

The site looks great, nice work! Any chance those new skis will have sidecut radii in the teens?

I was going to come in here and say there's a nose grabby thing that I enjoyed in soft boots but haven't been able to do in hard boots... but Jack posted a photo of exactly what I had in mind. IMO that's the most stylish way to do a straight jump, but in hard boots I have to settle for a tail grab... which I like almost as much, but not quite. Those of you having trouble spinning in hard boots - is it because of the boots, or is it the boards? If mean, if your hard setup is >165cm and your soft setup is < 160cm, then it's not necessarily the boots. :) For me, everything got easier and more comfortable when I got into hard boots - carving, bumps, jumps, 360s, everything. And more comfortable. With soft boots I always had to crank down on the straps to feel like I had a proper connection to the board. Then my feet would go numb. I hated those things. I didn't switch to hard boots because I thought they would be better, I switched because I thought they would hurt less. I was glad to find that they give me the control I want without the pressure points. The fact that they give me so much more control was kind of just a side benefit. Did I mention that I hate soft boots? Hate 'em. Totally.

Hilarious. It's true, you do rule.

Seems to me that you have a pretty good intro setup... My guess is that you'll learn faster by sticking with it than by spending time on transitional equiment. As a couple other people said, low angles might help with the learning curve - you're probably not going to be railing turns for a few days yet, so having some toe/heel overhang shouldn't hurt (but if you ever do feel the brakes come on mid-turn, increase your angles a bit). That should give you a little more leverage over the board, and make it feel a bit less brick-like. You might also try soft boots on your Axis, but my you might have have to run really high angles to get the toe/heel overhang down to a manageable level. IMO hard boots on a freeride board takes more effort than hard boots on an all-mountain board like your Axis. I did that for a while myself but after I switched to a narrower board I only wished I'd switched sooner. My 21cm and 23cm boards feel much more responsive than my old 25cm freeride boards - I think it has a lot to do with have better leverage on the edge. Did you spend some time on bunny hills? Swallow your pride for a day or two. :) Get used to making big easy skidding turns, then tighten them up over the course of the day until you've got a nice rhythm going. Then go back to making big turns, and try to skid less and carve more. Having a buddy to help you get started couldn't hurt either. Some random questions, just in case: How wide is your stance? How far is the center of your stance from the center of the board? What angles are you running now?

Video of hardbooters doing bumps, jumps, and other stuff besides carving and racing. There's a bogus perception that hard boots aren't as versatile as soft boots... wanna be part of the problem, or part of the solution? ;) (Not that I've contributed much myself, but I'll work on that this season.)

Nice board Fleaman - I really dig the rounded corners on the tail. Hey CSquared, what exactly are the specs of that board you were wanting that JaseyJ already had built?

How wide are your feet? I have 324s (same mold as the Lemans, as mentioned earlier) and they're too narrow for my feet, which are D width. I got some UPZs last year that seem to fit quite a bit better, but I haven't ridden them yet, so can't be 100% sure.

How true, I get stiff watching those guys. Whoah, which videos are you watching? All I found at those sites was some outdoor gymnastics stuff...

I think I'm gonna pick up a STIFF softie setup and learn how to ride fakie again. Any suggestions ? One suggestion: forget about the softie stuff, just get an all-mountain alpine board. (I'm told it's possible to ride switch well on a "true" alpine board the but square tails frighten me). Since if you are (were?) already comfortable riding fakie in soft gear, I bet you can do it 90% as well on hard gear, and fully as well after a few days (just a couple days if you really focus on it). It's different, but not really harder. Oh, and r.e. stickers on computers - I read the other day that Dell was negotiating with Intel and Microsoft to build machines without stickers because it would make their assembly line just that much quicker.

Oh, and speaking of urban extreme sports: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_surfing

That looks pretty interesting for hardbooters wanting more flex, or softbooters wanting more support. Neither of which describes me, but still... I wonder if it catches on.

Sometimes I can't help but jump onto/over/off-or a bench or whatever when I am walking around sans skateboard. Maybe people will snicker less if I work some backflips into my routine.... :) Except that I will never, ever do a backflip from anything but a diving board. I am pretty sure that I missed the window of opportunity for learning such things. That flat-ground flip/twist/rodeo thing that guy does in the video above is frickin amazing though.

There are two failure modes: broken pins, and broken frames. Broken pins have been reported before by two people that I know of (I'm one of them). Joel is the first person I've ever heard of who broke the frame. When I had the pin break, the other pin held my foot into the binding. I didn't notice the break until I was back in the lift line, stepping. Far as I can tell, one pin is sufficient and failures are extremely rare - I'm not sure about your phrase "handful of people" as I've been participating in this forum for a few years and have only heard one other first-hand account. Anyhow, I don't think pin failures are a big safety issue. I think failure of the molded portion of the heel assembly (the frame, for lack of a better word) is a whole other matter, for two reasons. First, because there's no "other pin" to hold that foot in. Secord, because Joel's is the first case I've ever heard of. I don't see any reason to think that Bomber knew (or shoulda knew, or whatever the legalese is) that this product, which has served many people very well, could fail in this way. So I don't think Bomber (or any of us) had reason to think the heels were unsafe. Bomber is just a reseller of this product, and the product has (or had, until Joel's incident) a good safety record. And I say "good safety record" as a person who a) loves his knees; b) has experienced a pin failure; c) continues to ride Intec heels.

I think Rick was trying to be funny [...] I think Rick just needed to see some flames. I have two theories about that: 1) him mommy didn't show him enough attention during his formative years 2) he has a very large stockpile of marshmallows that need roasting

I'm using Gnome right now and I like it. I tried KDE and didn't like it, but that was a couple years ago so maybe it's improved.

The only sane judgement against Bomber in this case would be to require a refund. It totally sucks that Joel got hurt so bad, but there's no reason Bomber should be held liable for his injuries. Bomber's only mistake was providing Joel with exactly what he asked for - a product made by someone else. (They've graciously delivered a couple sets to me as well, and I don't fault them for it one bit.) That product failed, Bomber owes Joel his money back, and Joel can have my blessing should he choose to press on with his suit against the manufacturer. I started snowboarding in 1988 or 1989, and started breaking bindings almost immediately. Softboot bindings, hardboot bindings, different brands, different failure modes... I tried a bunch and couldn't find anything that held up to the way I ride (and yes I ruined a few boards, too). Then one day I stumbled on the Bomber web site and found bindings that looked much stronger than anything else I had ever tried before - strong than anything else I had ever seen. They cost twice as much as everything else on the market, but I figured that if they didn't break, they were worth it, not just because they last longer but because - as Joel's case so gruesomely demonstrated - a snowboarder with one leg detached from the board is at great risk of serious injury. I was VERY HAPPY to find that Bomber bindings are indeed far stronger than anything else. In fact, they're so strong, I have yet to break one. My first pair is still in great shape (and so is my second pair, and my third pair). That's a huge step forward from the days when I kep a second pair of my favorite bindings (the strongest I could find, at the time) in the trunk of my car just so I could swap parts as needed. Now I own three pairs of Bomber Trench Diggers, and I wish I had switched to them sooner. I'm also using Intec heels, and have never had them let go (not counting operator error (read: my own damn fault)). Even in flight of Joel's incident, I still consider Trench Digger + Intec to be the most reliable combination available. (When something better comes on the market, I'll buy three pair.) Bomber's bindings set a new standard for strength and reliability. Nobody else in America makes a binding I trust as much. Heck, nobody else in America makes a binding I trust enough to use at all. And now they're in court because, in addition to making and selling the most reliable bindings available, they also retailed a part - made by someone else - that failed. I'd call that ironic, if it wasn't so tragic. If the hardboot snowboarding community is really fortunate, Fin & Co. will exit this lawsuit with little or no penalty, and start making an Intec-compatible heel of the quality and reliability we've all come to expect from Bomber products. I'll buy a pair for every boot I ride. On the other hand, if America's "justice" system puts Bomber out of business, we'll lose the team responsible for more improvement in snowboard binding design and manufacture than any other company in the world, bar none. I didn't realize until now that the F2 heels could fail like this - I don't think any of us did. So now I'm waiting for Bomber to do for heels what they've already done for bindings: give me something I cannot break. In the meantime, I'll be riding TD SIs and Intec heels, same as last year... with home-brew ultra-heavy-duty leashes on each foot. There's no point replacing the Intec heels I already have, because there's nothing else on the market that is more deserving of my trust. P.S. With regard to "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers..." I came across a stack of those t-shirts last week. In light of recent events, how could I not buy one?