bjvircks

This poll needs a "Zero Option" for Iowa too. There is the rare day when another carver is on the hill, but it is indeed rare. In the last 2 years I've seen only 2 hardbooters (in Iowa) besides me. Next season I'm going to make an effort to meet up with the folks in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Nope... they are frightening. I hope they develop a reasonable amount of maturity very quickly. I do not want to be anywhere near those buggers when I'm riding.

Petrol unless you read more in another article somewhere, what you stated above is not really completely true. Nothing of this sort was mentioned in the subject article. Yes, the dad did lead the child down a slope which was 'steeper' but nothing was said regarding looking uphill. Regarding the seriousness of the injuries and the amount of the judgement. Was anything at all said regarding the country of residence of the injured boy? Could he be American? Could his dad have poor (or no) insurance? The kids leg was broken in 5 places. This is serious stuff! The growth plates in his bones could be severely compromised and his injured leg may never match the other. The $30k award may not be enough!

This is a recent judgment for collision that occurred 8 years ago! Justice is not swift. I just read some of the reader comments regarding this story. I also paid attention to the "agree/disagree" count at each comment. I am amazed that comments which endorse personal responsibility are more disagreed and the posts which seem to indicate the offending person was treated unfairly are MORE AGREED. What is wrong with these people??? I'm betting that the $30K was not just about medical bills, but had a punative component to it. Did anyone catch the comment that came from the guilty kid? He said the 5 yo hit HIM!!!

Find this clip on youtube Wesley Muresan - 3 year old snowboarder - Mad Rails at Sundown This is Sundown Mountain..... Dubuque, Iowa!! Wesley's local hill (and mine). I freqently saw him on Tuesday nights (our beer league race night) all this winter. It is really weird to see such a small kid on such a small board. He got some national TV attention when one of the network morning shows came out and did a segment on him. Great attention and he didn't have to pretend to behiding in an attic while his dad says "I think he's in the balloon!"

absolutely right... follow the forces and minimize redirection and dissipation. Attachment of the plates right along the board edges makes the most sense because that is where the force needs to be directed. That is where the force will ultimately end up, regardless... because that is where the board gets its reaction force, the edge engaged in the snow. I think 'plates only' boards would be best served by migrating to an insert pattern out at the edges.

Thanks, BobD Dawn wants to try a couple sizes of frames/wheels before she commits. She is just getting frustrated because I roll so well I pick up speed going uphill.

The wife & I inline skate and bicycle. We used to go to our local indoor ice arena and skate but got fed up with dealing with the club (and Dawn prefers long track anyway). BobD ... Do you know anything about Adam's Inline in Minneapolis? Dawn wants to get some frames to put on her iceskate boots so she can use 90 mm to 100mm wheels. We found Adam's using Google. Any other Mpls/StPaul shops you'd reccommend?

"Hot Air" = next door know-it-all

kjl.... is there a long spiral of remaining material (remnants of male thread) left in the female thread? If so, you may need a good magnifying glass, a tight/bright light and a sharp tipped precision angled tweezers. CAREFULLY partly chasing the female thread with a bottoming tap may dislodge the top end coil enough to grab and pull out with the tweezers. If just loose chips... What the other guys suggest! For compressed air and safety glasses maybe hook up a needle (don't know the name for the fitting used to inflate basketballs) to compressed air to get air direct to bottom of insert, better to carry chips out.

Thanks for the reply, Bruce! I had always figured that the lack of detailed photos was a courtesy to Apex, but felt compelled to press for them anyway. My primary unknown regarding the apex plate is.... can the pins on the plate underside be moved forward or backward to change the center to center pitch, or are they in permanently fixed positions? My guess is that a given plate would have either the rear pin location or the front pin location moveable to a small number of preset positions in order to allow a plate pitch to be tailored to more than one board setup.

I'm a hardware guy. A plate wouldn't be of much help to my riding because I'm not at that level of fitness or performance. But I like to figure stuff out. And I like toys. I might make my own home brew. (I have access to world class design tools, FEA and dynamics simulations tools and machine shops. I've got a rapid prototype machine sitting about 30 feet from my desk.) But my free time and $$ are going to other things.

So Bruce... Any chance of some close-up photos of the apex brackets that mount to the board and how the pins are fixed into the composite plate?? I think I've got a fair idea of what to expect. I expect the brackets to be a wide, shallow, flat bottomed 'U'. Front and rear brackets will be almost identical but one set will be slotted and the other will have tight tolerance clearance holes. Two brackets at front, two at rear. I expect the plate underside to have four (2 front, 2 rear) composite bulges built up to provide attachment sleeves for 2" long hardened steel pins to slide into. So... how far off am I?? Brad Vircks... the other BV

I don't think you are getting it.... and I'm not inclined to pursue this any further tonight. Maybe some other time.

BlueB just super to see dads and kids having so much fun together! It has been a real long time since my kids were banging around in my oversized gear... but I remember their faces. Just like from your opening post of Luka here.

King Crimson... Isolation can have several aspects. What I think was being discussed is what might be considered 'classical' up and down isolation. Think of this like a car body and its wheels. When going over a bumpy road the wheels travel up and down following the contours of the bumps while the car body remains fairly stable. The suspension system 'isolates' the car body. I've worked on mounts for avionics systems using isolators custom tailored to equipment weight, excitation frequency and amplitude. The isolation that I think you are discussing is more akin to decoupling. While it is a form of isolation, the mechanism is different. The wild changes in board shape during chatter are directly coupled into the rider's legs when using a basic rigid binding hard mounted to a board. A plate system with one or more sliders will decouple the plate flatness from the board camber changes and by doing so will impart a high degree of 'smoothness'. But this is quite a bit different from isolation. I'm just shooting from the hip, here. I'd have to dig up some of my old textbooks like 'Kinematics and Dynamics' and 'Design of Machine Elements' in order to quote chapter and verse of exact definitions.

the comparison makes PERFECT sense when TRYING TO EXPLAIN the concept of isolation.

You did the stepins and the standards in the same load???

LMAO !!! My first thoughts were... "man oh man... it was great being a bachelor."

I recall reading/hearing somewhere that a big part of the magic is getting the 'to-the-board' attachment locations placed in just the right spots. This would be dependant on the board specifics, rider weight and riding characteristics, etc. If getting the plate anchored at the best points (fore-aft and center-to-center) is critical for a specific board... I would think where the pins get located in the plate would have some adjustability. However, from what I've been able to reverse engineer/deduce from limited detail photos is that the apex plate pins are in fixed locations in the composite undersurface. Think of a long 2x4 on a pair of sawhorses. Imagine now placing a whole lot of small sandbags uniformly along the entire length of the 2x4. Now lets move the sawhorses around a bit. If the sawhorses are closely spaced near the center of the 2x4 the ends will curve down and the center will curve up. If the sawhorses are very widely spaced (close to the ends of the 2x4) the center will curve down and the ends curve up. If the sawhorses are placed about 1/3 of the way in from each end... the center will curve down AND the ends will curve down. This is a very crude example to illustrate why the plate attachment locations are very important. Of course, our stance widths (and plate mountings) do not span the extremes of this example, but the underlying principle applies. This additionally holds, even considering that a board's stiffness is typically not uniform along its length the way a 2x4 is. Board builders design the stiffness distribution of boards to be a series of compromises based on an expectation of rider stance width, weight, agressiveness, board purpose, etc. Perhaps "Plate Specific" or "Plate Only" boards are on the near horizon. They may well already be here, but I'm too isolated to know! Oh, well.... so much blabber... now must get up and get to work. Brad Vircks..... the other BV

yeah... good photos... not taken from across the room showing the whole freekin board. We already know what the thing looks like on a macro scale. Tight cropping of the actual workings. How the pins are glassed (composited?) into the body of the plate.

yeah, but not every home-brew plate system will be well thought out and safely executed. We should expect a certain amount of well accorded scepticism and scrutiny for a while.

someone having a period?

I did a zoom in of the image and it looks like the clip lever is a toe bale. For a heel bale the boot engaging portion is much shorter and in a different relation to the lever.

SUPER COMMENT ! I've gotten lazy, but will get out to the garage and do this very soon. Years ago my house (California) was broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen. A few weeks later my camera gear was found in Florida because my CA driver's license # was on all of it.