tufty

Oh, not every Brit, by any means. I'm one, for example, and I like me. Even the British (or any other nationality) tourists who come over here and don't speak a word of the lingo are OK, they're generally smart enough to be at least mildly polite and keep their heads down, at least in the resorts I've worked (small "family" resorts, mainly). What I can't stand is the ex-pats in places like Morzine and, above all, Chamonix; their attitude is summed up by the bar in the middle of Cham with a sign on the door saying "no french allowed". There are decent expats - I know, and have known, a few of them, and none of them live in or around Chamonix. Not been to La Plagne for a good while, PM me with your dates and I'll see if I've got time off around then.

You're probably right in many respects, but there's more to it than just $$$, at least for me. A certain amount of it is political, even, and I have somewhere between zero and zero motivation and intention to plunge myself into the expat community; certainly in Chamonix. Over here I've been accepted as a brother by the French. I've been treated like **** by the expats. Far as I'm concerned, they can continue to pretend to themselves that Chamonix is a little part of Kensington, complain loudly to themselves about the locals' appalling manners, and keep their heads stuffed firmly up their arses. I want nothing to do with them. Yeah, I could probably get my BASI stuff (my boarding's certainly up to par, and skiing's not that far off) and end up as a teacher for one of the expat schools over here, but I know the majority of the people who run them over here, and they are not the kind of people I want to do business with. I'd rather smack myself in the balls with a hammer, and that's before you consider that I'd end up being forced to "teach" people to "snowboard" by riding duck on some awful soft board at best. At worst, I'd end up like my fully BASIed friend who was promised a place teaching but ended up driving a transfer bus to and from Geneva every day at minimum wage. The same thing goes for guiding with any of the "expat" places, with the added bonus of my off-piste skillz not being mad enough, and not having the local knowledge required to consider myself able to safely take amateurs off-piste (and especially not around Chamonix). Getting people killed is not part of what I want to do. Which leaves the ESF and other "French" ski schools, which are insanely hard to get into, and the "Bureaux des Guides" who are equally, if not more, exigent. As it is, I like my life as it is. I can ride every day for at least an hour (weather permitting), sometimes more (I got 3 hours in today), I can ride anywhere in France for free, and get treated more or less like royalty in every resort I go to. There's a very close knit community of lifties in every resort, and the job itself is kinda fun. The money's not great, but really, who cares? Life's not about money, it's about living. I probably came across a bit harsh in my last post, and wouldn't want it to appear that I consider everyone with new gear to be a "poseur" (especially considering many of those here with new boards could ride circles around me even with older, crappier, gear than mine), but I would suggest that anyone who needs to ask the question "why are you riding that old gear when there's new stuff available" has a major disconnect with most people's financial reality. I'm not a reverse snob, by any means. Nor am I too proud to accept donations. PM me for an address to stick on your unloved, cast-off 2010 Kesslers and so forth before entrusting them to the USPS (or local equivalent) :) Also, happy new year. I wish good snow and better grooming to all of you.

I'm more curious about the people who would state that they consider snowboarding to be their A-list activity / passion / lifestyle, and yet somehow manage to make enough money to be able to afford a multi-thousand-dollar investment in equipment every season. After all, if you're living a snowboarding lifestyle, surely you're on the slopes riding (or doing something else related), and not sat on your arse in an office earning enough to pay for a new board. Personally, I ride older gear because it's good enough for me. Having $NEW_METAL_TOYS isn't going to make me a better rider, and I can live with the extra tenth of a second it takes me to get down to the bottom of the lift on my "crappy" board compared to what I might hypothetically be able to do on a spanking new board that I'm afraid to crash or even scratch. For me, snow is my life, and alpine boarding in particular. That means I jacked in the high paying IT career in the City of London to move to the alps, and I now spend my time driving a chairlift for slightly above minimum wage. This, combined with a mortgage, wife, 2 kids and all that goes with it, means that blowing megabucks on gear isn't even a question for me. My entire setup cost less than most poseurs are willing to spend on a frickin' pair of bindings. Yes, I said "poseurs". I meant it, too. Not that there's anything wrong with treating yourself to something nice, but don't pretend having $NEW_METAL_TOYS is gonna suddenly turn you into Serge Vitelli. New toys are nice, but it's what you do with them that matters. So, whilst you're carefully steering around the tiniest bit of gravel in the snow, avoiding bumpy stuff in case you fold your new toy up, and being paranoid about leaving something that's worth more than my car stacked against the wall of the restaurant in case it gets stolen or even knocked over, I'll be digging enormous trenches with some old Hot Logical / Blast or similar, and you won't be able to wipe the smile off my face; if I rip out an edge or someone is stupid enough to steal the board I'll just pick up another one for next to nothing and do it all over again. When snowboarding becomes about what you're riding as opposed to just riding, you might as well get a pair of baggy pants, mount yourself duck on your full-banana gizmostick and go hang about in the park with the other wankers.

I ride AF700s. While they are stiffer than the SB series boots, they're soft compared to skiboots, even the AT boots I wear day in, day out, at work. They don't even come into the same ballpark as a pair of "proper" skiboots, let alone race plugs. The problem with all the Raichle and Deeluxe boots is not so much stiffness as articulation. The SB series in particular is a problem with this; you're deforming the boot to get articulation rather than anything else - the AF's rely much more on the tongue and articulate better (but, again, not as good as even a low-end skiboot). The other difference between AF and SB is fit - the AFs are wider. If they fit you, and you have a choice, the AF is an all-round better boot.

Snowboardmaterials.com are massively expensive, and what you're looking at, i.e. raw materials, is far from being a particularly significant factor in what it costs to design, prototype, test, produce and sell a model of snowboard. This summer, a bloke at the local ski manufacturers *gave* me enough material to make 3 boards. That's race-grade p-tex, edges, damping rubber, inserts, triax glass and topsheet material. He offered me cores, but I turned him down (gotta do *some* work, eh?). He considered this was "throwaway" material, and when I offered to pay, was told "send me photos". What you're paying for when you buy a snowboard or ski is, in large part, tooling and time. And when you're dealing with small manufacturers, you also get the option of a custom-made product; there's no way you're gonna get that from one of the big manufacturers unless you're a world cup racer. That said, I don't see any particular (or even potential) problems with the Gromel boards linked apart from an asymmetric layup with glass+glass on top and glass+carbon underneath. And the prices are certainly attractive. I'd like to try one.

The epoxy generally used is not "marine" epoxy (which, although waterproof, is not designed for extremely low temperatures combined with heavy flexing), but it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. Most of the US-based DIYers use West System epoxy of one type or another, which is, if nothing else, relatively easily available. If you're only worried about repairing a core shot rather than laminating a whole board, then you can most probably get away with using any old epoxy. As for making the ptex stick, you're right - bugger all sticks to HMDPE, which is part of what makes it so good as a base material. It needs to be flame / abrasion treated to make it "stickable". Once treated, the ptex sticks perfectly well using epoxy. I have a load of base material here and would post side-by-side shots of the treated and untreated sides, but my camera's on the fritz. Again. If you're wanting to add inserts, then you probably want pre-ptexed inserts of the correct size and depth, which can be purchased relatively cheaply - Worden in france, for example, will sell you a set of 10 pre-ptexed 9mm deep inserts for 15.40€.

Not necessarily. The locking holds the plate fixed longitudinally WRT a specific place on the board. In your design it also holds the plate fixed in altitude WRT the board. I see no absolute reason why you couldn't have slotted pucks front and rear combined with, for example, vertical pins or similar holding the board "fixed" longitudinally but simultaneously allowing it to float vertically at that point. Alternatively, fix the plate centrally and have your front and rear slots follow the arc described by the front / rear mounting points as the board curves (may require dedicated pucks for each front / rear insert position) There's other ways of doing this, too. That said, all the ways I can think of doing this would be heavier, require additional inserts for the centre fixing point, provide an additional point of failure, and I don't see any particular benefit in doing it.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6022040.pdf

It's not just a couple of softbooters. It's the "this site is all about carving yada yada yada now feck off all you softbooters" hypocrisy. "Pushing the softboot agenda"? Bollocks. Fin, please delete my account.

I suspect the majority do, yes. However, for at least 3 pages of this thread, anyone daring to mention that sofbooters might be able to carve got shouted down and pretty much told to "**** off to one of the knuckle-dragger sites". On rereading, they were mainly being shouted down by one poster. ...going offtopic, a little, although this thread is symptomatic... That said, I do feel there's a highly elitist gearhead attitude here, and one that probably doesn't do much to get new recruits - as soon as anyone disagrees with the accepted truth, they will get shouted down by one or more of the "usual suspects". "Softboots are crap". "Glass boards are crap". "Less expensive bindings are crap". "Older boots are crap". "Boots without BTS are crap". "If you're not spending more than $1000 on a board, you're crap". Etc etc. It's easy to chat to people on the slopes, get sofbooters over to (or back over to) the "dark side", but as soon as they start asking where to go for more information, it starts getting tricky. Admittedly, a lot of the people I meet are francophone, so this site is pretty much out due to language issues, but my list of sites to point people to are, in this order: alpinecarving.com (decent gear overviews) ebay.de (hardbooting gear on the relatively cheap) extremecarving.com (friendly forums with decent tech advice in English, French, Italian, German, Russian and Korean) 99% of the time I deliberately won't send people here, although I will point them to Bomber if they are determined to spend a lot of money on bindings. It's not a language thing, it's a "likelihood of having people fart in your face by way of an introduction" thing. It's a shame. There's so much good information here.

Personally, I voted "no", because not only is it carving, no matter what the board or boots you ride, but the techniques cross over. I can see an argument for having a separate forum, though. What gets on my tits is the anti-SB twattishness being shown in this thread. I have a tendency to chat with hardbooters and skwallers at work, and anyone who is obviously ripping it on softies. I've been known to go out and rip with them on my lunchbreaks, days off, and late start days. that goes for the swallowtail / dupraz guys, too. And occasionally a few of those satanic "two-plankers". What matters is knowing how to ride, not what you're riding on. Personally, you wouldn't get me in softies any more, but that's personal choice. Hell, saw a guy today on a Rossi race deck, with softies. Mounted duck. I would have laughed, but he was cutting clean, pure lines in ice. "Hey", I thought to myself, "carver, not a twat", and had a chat with him. But, you know, if you're not wearing hardboots with BTS, mounted on Sidewinders and riding 1000$+ of metal deck, you're obviously scum. Yeah, this is the "Carving Community". Shame it's full of elitist gearhead w*nkers.

Ummmm. Who *really* gives a flying **** what gear *other people* are riding as long as they are having fun? Oh, yeah. Twats, that's who. Not only should we not create a separate forum, but "this is not hardboot related" whiny-ass posts should be sanctioned.

Oddly enough, I was thinking along the same lines (just for laffs); I have a bunch of hard, hard, hard skis lying about that I never use. Unfortunately, they are also old, and have sidecuts in the 50-70m range, so that plan's kiboshed.

Dunno. RAB doesn't seem to hurt, but doesn't help much either. false. Some skwals ride better offpiste and in the crud, though. 4cm (about an inch and three quarters) rear toe to front heel.

A 170ishcm Lacroix GS board a friend lent me around 6 years ago. Spent 3 days on it, and went shopping for an alpine setup. I have probably put less than 3 days on my freeride board since, and even those were done with plates and hardboots. The experience was close to religious when compared to noodly soft setups. Then my 160cm Hot Blast SL showed me what "having to be on your game" means. Both of these are "unforgiving" boards that will spank you hard if you get it even close to wrong. But when you get it right, it's a fantastic feeling. As luck would have it, one of the shops where I work have a pretty much brand spanking new Lacroix Super-G (it's old, but has only spent 3 days on the snow, one with me) that I'm currently negotiating a price on. As you might expect from a super-G board, it's "quite fast". Well, "terrifyingly fast", in fact.

You'll get more mileage at http://skwalzone.org/forums3/index.php and http://www.skwalzone.org/technique1.php, I suspect. you might want some translation via google, a lot of the posts are in French

Or Mpride, or RAD, or Oxess, or Lacroix, or Lagriffe, to pull a few other manufacturers out of my hat.

I have lower back problems. Enough to take me totally out of action for a week or two if I "get it wrong". This can involve bad turning technique, or simply overdoing a "jump-turn" to start a run. Moving to alpine, and the corresponding change in technique, improved the situation no end, but I still have to be careful. I probably shouldn't board or ski, but hell, a life with no risk is a life wasted.

Personally, I ride mainly a Hot Blast 160SL - it's a fairly "lively" ride (I had a comment yesterday from another boarder along the lines of "you get more air riding a blue run than I do in the snowpark") You really need to be on top of your game with small radius boards, or at least the ones I've ridden - forget "EC" style laid-out turns unless you're 3 feet tall, you simply don't have the time. The main problem people seem to have with riding SL boards, or at least the people I know, is that if you ride hard and fast, you're gonna launch on every edge change. This is fun, but as you pull your carves further from the fall line it gets harder to get the landing right every time, especially on non-hero snow or steeper slopes - this, I suspect, is why a lot of footage of SL riding you'll see either involves carve-traverse-carve; the traverse taking the place of the "launch" in a hard-ridden board's "natural" carve-launch-carve cycle, or more "mellow" carving close to the fall line. You've gotta be quick to be fast. As BlueB says, you can fight the board and pull longer, wider-radius carves, but it takes practice to stop it "skarving".

easiest way of extracting audio from an mp4 is using VLC's streaming and transcoding wizard. it's about 5 clicks in total.

Maladjusted bale bindings do, yes. If your bindings are adjusted right, though, at rest the stress should be approximately the same. Once you're in motion, a bale binding has a slightly longer fulcrum on the boot in toeside turns, and as the "ledge" is a tight curve that's where you'd expect to see failures. On the other hand, the forces are spread through the heel area of the boot, and not relying on screws holding in place (for the crazy) or t-nuts acting on the heel of the boot (i.e. forces being applied at 90° to the holding surface). I could tell stories of walls being taken out by tightwires... Personally, I'd say it's much of a muchness between the two, with the intecs winning out slightly by force of not rising being overtightened. I'd also stand by my supposition that the rigidity of the bindings plays a major part in this - I've never seen a "nearly new" (i.e. less that 10 years old) snowboard boot blow out that way on "normal" bindings, and have personally never experienced it, even on hits hard enough to mangle the bales hard enough that they come out of the bindings / vice versa, or to rip insert packs clean through the topsheet. I saw a pair of *very* old burton boots come apart totally, but they were highly damaged and gouged beforehand - there's no way I would have ridden them. < 2 year old boots have no right to be coming apart unless they have been maltreated. As a lifty, I see my share of blown ski boots, it tends to be 20+ year old red boots in temperatures < -15°C. The white boots of the same vintage only seem to blow out at -20°C, I'm guessing UV aging and dye composition plays a major part in this. Back to snowboard boots; if it were only one case, I'd put it down to manufacturing flaws or taking a hit that damaged the boot in that area - 4 cases in this thread, and (at least) 2 separate models / manufacturers of boot, tends to put it into the "scary" category. That said, bobble's description below sounds like classic overtightening, possibly / probably aided and abetted by the differential in contraction rates between the plastic of the boots and the aluminium of the bindings. "on really cold days i'd have to hammer down on the bale to close it. on warm days (above 10F, guessing) at the start of the run it would take some effort to close the bale with one hand." But what do I know? My boots / boards / bindings are all "crap".

I'm guessing we have a different mentality over here; "Au Vieux Campeur" is almost exactly "Dick's Sporting Goods" except that it's a chain and thus even less likely to "take a chance" : http://www.auvieuxcampeur.fr/nos-produits/snowboard/materiel/planches-alpines Yep, Kessler boards in stock, and actually available to handle in-store. Getting back on track, though - What I understood Bob to be saying was nothing to do with stores, who largely don't even recognise alpine exists, let alone stock it, and everything to do with manufacturers - we are lucky in some respects to be reliant on a few small manufacturers, because they are willing and able to take the risk, to go all-out to make something better - without having to cater to the low-end market they can spend time producing something world-class. I'm not sure I personally buy this 100%, but I can certainly see where he's coming from.

Another way of looking at it is that the stress is distributed over 4 small-radius holes in the plastic, as opposed to being distributed through the entire rear shell of the boot which has (presumably) been designed to take the stress... From an engineering point of view, it would be interesting to know the answer, but I personally doubt there's much in it in the case of a boot in a properly tightened bale binding vs a boot with a [f]intec heel. What we're seeing here has one common factor - "bombproof" bindings (Catek and Bomber) - and you're seeing the result of the failure point moving from something cheap and replaceable (the bales of a "standard" binding) to something expensive (the boot shells). If you make the boot shells (or boot-binding interface, in the case of [f]intec heels) bombproof, the failure point will move somewhere else, potentially somewhere organic. It's a tradeoff, of course.

Nope, you won't find that in the slightest. As I (skim) read it, pretty much all the application covers is the "decambered tip", or interplay between sidecut radius and board camber. Sure, there's a passing mention of clothoids, but that's all. Indeed, if clothoids are at all important to Kessler, it would be stupid of them to put them into the same application as one which deals with decambered tips. The passing (and only) reference to that "killer app", the clothoid is, in reference to board geometry, "... it is also possible to use other elements, such as ellipses, clothoids, parabolas, etc ..." Yep, it's an excellent read.

The AF boots are, at least to my eyes, better in all respects than the SB series, so the question doesn't even get asked, but yes, the fit of the AF series is certainly much nicer if you have "wider" feet. Going from otherwise identically sized SB225s to AF700s was a revelation for me, I went from having slightly cramped (and cold) toes to being full-on comfortable. Using the exact same pair of custom footbeds, of course. On the other hand, the AFs are a b*st*rd to put on compared to the SBs (technically, according to my footsize, I "should" be wearing a half size up, 28.0 vs 27.5, but then I get heel lift issues - going down to the 27.x shells and adding good footbeds solved that problem). The main issue is getting that little bit of liner tongue at the bottom in the right place when you're fighting the "race" tongues on the shells - this was easy on the SBs as you can "flip" the shell tongue out of the way.