tufty

Those are beautiful, Jack. All they need now is a couple of stamps and a label with my address on.

The other thing is "don't try to clip in whilst sitting down, do it standing up". High angles and a sitting clip-in don't mix.

I run plates on everything, and run AF700s with "hard" tongues on everything but skis. Don't even have a softboot setup anymore. I generally try a pair of softboots once a season, to see if anything has changed - They are still waaay, waaay, too floppy, and still uncomfortable. And the boot-out drives me mad. I like things stiff though - I find my AF700s soft, more floppy than my (work provided) Garmont AT ski boots, and I loathe skiing in *them* - I much prefer my personal Nordicas for skiing, flex 120 FTW. One of these days I'll get them Vibram-soled and insist on using them for work. I've got no problem with riding low angles and "floppy" boards in powder, but I just can't love softboots.

Fair enough, I misread things, and with the fact that I block *all* smilies, I don't see them. Sorry if I got pissy over it. It may or may not have been preventable - people fall and jump from lifts all the time before you, as a liftie, have a chance to react. I certainly agree that if the kid was on the floor the lift should have been stopped if there was any danger of someone catching a chair to the face or someone coming off the lift and colliding with the kiddie or any of his / her entourage, though. That's bad (and reprimandable) form. Respectfully, by your referring to them as emergency "dead" stop and "soft" stop, I don't think you do, or at least not fully. A quick bit of "chairlift stopping 101". Lifts brake / stop in 3 separate and unconnected manners. Motor electrical braking - by reducing the current and reversing phases to the motor, the lift is slowed and brought to a halt using *only* the driving motor itself. Motor friction braking - by actioning the disk brake at the motor driveshaft, the lift is slowed and stopped by frictional forces. Emergency braking - by actioning the brakes on the drive pulley rim, the lift is stopped by frictional forces. That's the 3 *physical* mechanisms for stopping a lift in normal circumstances. Next up, there are 3 separate braking regimes for a lift, each actioned by a separate button and / or series of events. Firstly, the "parking brake". This drops everything and slams the lift to a halt should it be running. It is almost *never* used whilst the lift is running, as it tends to do things like "bend the pylons" and "throw passengers out of their seats". Seriously. The button for this is generally covered and locked. It is the only "dead" stop on a lift. Nextly, "electric stop" or "normal" braking (what you're referring to as "soft braking"). It's the smaller of the 2 buttons a liftie has at his disposal, but the most important. This is the fastest way to stop the lift safely. It uses the brakes on the motor driveshaft and the electrical braking of the motor itself to bring the lift to a standstill respecting the braking curves defined for the machine. Finally, there's the "emergency" stop (what you're referring to as the "dead" stop). It has a much bigger button, and stops the lift uniquely through friction braking on both the motor drive shaft and the drive pulley rim. The emergency stop is significantly slower to bring the lift to a halt than the electrical stop, but it can (and will) stop the lift in the case of cable runaway, cable reversing, drive pulley axle breakage, gearbox breakage or any number of other mechanical problems. It's not only slower to stop the machine using the emergency brake, it's also significantly slower to restart it afterwards. Excessive use of this button tends to result in lifties getting their wrists slapped. The parking brake is only actionable by the driver. The normal brake is actionable by the driver and any other people working on the lift. the emergency brake is actional by the driver, other people working on the lift, clients (using the emergency buttons you see occasionally), and the machine itself in the case of a fault occurring. There is no button that can be used to instantly bring a lift to a halt whilst it has people on it, at least not without causing major injuries to a significant number of people. Us lifties have dark and mysterious powers, but we can't overcome inertia.

Had one this morning. First time out on the board this season, guy on softies tried (and did pretty well, actually) to follow my lines - I was pulling hard turns on an SL board... He caught up with me at the lift, where I was chatting with a colleague: Him (with very english accent) - "Bonjour" Me - "Hello" Him - "Oh - erm - hello. Nice board. How do I get my board to turn like that?" We rode up and down a couple of times together, showed him how to norm, he's heading off to the one rental shop that has hard setups this afternoon.

(French) regulation stop time on a fixed chair lift running at top speed (2.5 m/s) is enough that, if someone fails to get off before the point at which their feet leave the ground, (usually, but not always, at the point where the chair enters the bullwheel) they haven't actually left the bullwheel by the time the lift comes to a halt. The override gate works so that the chair is stopped (probably past the bullwheel) at a point where it's possible to unload the passenger without significant danger, although this may involve ladders. As Bob says, if someone fails to get off the lift - well, they fscked up. It's usually not the kids that do this, unless they are completely new at the game, too small to have their feet hit the ground, or are being "helped" by an over-cautious parent. In this case, kids will usually stay on the chair (screaming) until they hit the bar and stop. The main danger here is *not* to the kid, but to the parent who will stop instantly, turn round, and get a chair to the face. There is nothing the liftie can do about this - by the time it's happened, it's too late to react. Again, as Bob says, if someone gets off too late and jumps, they (usually) fsked up. The correct action is to stay on the lift, trip the bar, and get off at a standstill. With adults, it's usually the adult at the outside who does this (and it's not always their fault - if the person inboard of them has blocked them on the cair, they are stuffed), when they jump they will 4 times out of 10 take out the rest of the group. Again, by the time the liftie has realised what's happening, it's too damn late to stop it. As a liftie, anticipating this kind of thing is difficult to impossible. With a chairload of kids arriving, your finger hovers over the "slow" button before the kids arrive, but for adults it's almost impossible to second-guess what's gonna happen. Remember, you have a chair arriving every 6 to 7 seconds, you have 2 seconds maximum to decide if you need to slow or kill the lift. Stops happen *only* in an emergency as they can cause dangers elsewhere (i.e. the chair currently arriving, and the one(s) departing the takeoff), it usually takes a good 20-30 seconds to get things rolling again, up to a minute for an emergency stop. Even slowdowns should be exceptional - if your 10 minute lift ride takes 25 minutes because of continual slowdowns, anyone gets pissy. Anyway, accidents happen. If you hit a liftie over here, you can expect a night in the cells. That's often a problem with the clients as well. It doesn't matter how vocal you are, some people will *insist* on going up alone, or with their partner. When I was doing loading, we had a separate line in peak season for those willing to "fill" - when people realise that they're waiting 20 minutes in the queue so they can go up with their mates, but people are going straight past them, without waiting, to fill in the holes, they soon get the idea. The ones who want to go alone generally go the the gate, ready to go up with a chairload, then deliberately "hold back". the answer to this is simple - pull them aside to let the people behind through, then... "Sir, If you want to go alone, please feel free to come back when there's less of a queue. Otherwise, wait with me until there's a hole you can fill" If they've come through the "filler" queue, it's "please take off your skis and go to the back of the queue" Lifties can **** up your day, but it's not what we're paid to do. Mainly, we want an easy life - good loading and unloading is an easy life for us. We'll only actively **** you over if you try and **** *us* over. You know what the difference between the two buttons is, right? I'm guessing "no"

The same arguments are made in many fields; indeed, I would suspect, in any field where the means of production is in the reach of the "tinkerer". In my opinion, however, the existence of "hobby professionals" willing to work for peanuts doesn't devalue the work of the hardened professional in any way - in most (but certainly not all) cases, the work of the bargain basement hobby professional ends up having to be redone by someone who knows what they are doing anyway. There are fields where the market becomes flooded with crappy workers; photography and web design spring to mind instantly; at this point the people commissioning work tend to (of they have any sense) decide who to employ on a "recommendations" basis, or risk throwing away their money. If you let your CEO's nephew do your website because "he does a bit of web design", you risk - well, lots. The existence of the lower priced people, though, does open the market to a range of companies that wouldn't even have thought about hiring a professional - as a pro software producer, I've picked up a lot of work over the last few years due to poor work quality from such hobby producers (and also from work originally outsourced to India, then pulled back). The situation is slightly different when you're talking about mass produced vs "crafted" product - it is easily within the grasp of the "big boys" to put a line of cheaply produced alpine boards in production and swamp out the little guys who are producing labours of love. A board produced on a production line in China at a cost of 20 bucks* and labeled as "EXTREME RACE CARVE MACHINE" would, of course, still be sold at the price of a higher-end freeride deck (if not more). I can't, for example, imagine that the few alpine boards still being produced (nidecker, f2, etc) outside of the "niche" producers, have any lower a profit margin than any of the freeride decks. But even if the big boys decided to slash profit margins and go for volume, I don't see that this would make much difference. The existence of mass-produced boards, even at super low prices, doesn't and wouldn't detract at all from the quality of what you're producing - indeed, even if only one in a hundred, or a thousand, buyers of a mass-produced board decides to "do it properly" and goes on to buy a Donek / Prior / etc, it's an additional sale. When you factor in that the Pilot is lower priced for the consumer than any mass-produced alpine board on the market over here, and that even the "standard" Donek boards are only undercut by *one* board I can buy here... Simon * numbers pulled out my arse

Even selling them "over the counter", you're massively under the cost of the rest of the market, Sean. 415 bucks is 280 euros, which is around the point at which I personally might start thinking about the possibility of putting enough money aside to be able to buy new. Indeed, even your $680 price is "more than competitive". As an idea of costs over here, the cheapest new board I can get at my local "alpine stockist" (i.e. retail shop that admits alpine even exists) is an F2 Speedster, at 384 euros (566 bucks). This is the only board I can find new over here for less than the price of a new "Race" or "Freecarve" board from Sean; by the time we start talking about boards I'd actually like to ride (talking retail, not Donek, here), we're well into the 800 bucks range. That's retail price on "stock", mass-produced boards. Bollocks to that, I'll get the same thing used for 1/10 the price after it's clogged up the shelves of one of the local rental shops for a year or two. Which reminds me, there's a local shop here that allegedly has a large stock of almost unused gear they might be wanting to get rid of. Must remember to pop in and ask if they have any skwals lying about. In many respects, photodad has it right - it's all about the amount of money you can actually afford to throw into something that's a hobby vs the amount of perceived value in that investment. This is totally missing the point. Sure, if you have the money available to pay for cable / cellphone / fancy car, then yeah, you can prioritise your expenditure to cover a new board. If, however, the money you would have spent on cable is spent on food, the money you would have spent on a cellphone going into your mortgage, and you're running a 20 year old car that you do all the maintenance on yourself to fill the rest of the mortgage hole, then there is no way in hell you're going to be able to find $1000 to drop on a new board. Need I mention that this is more or less the situation I find myself in? 1080p tv? I run a TV "scrounged" from the local tip in the dead of night. What us cheapasses are complaining about is not the cost of new gear (the manufacturers are perfectly justified in charging what they like, and as Sean has indicated, they aren't exactly rolling in heaps of greenbacks laughing at us), nor the unavailability of super-cheap new gear (which would be 99% sure to be crap anyway if it were profitable to produce), but the elitist attitude of some on here who continually and constantly belittle those who don't have the latest and greatest board / boots / gloves / whatever. At the point where an alpine snowboarding community becomes, like a lot of "snowboarding", a dick-waving contest over who has the "best" toys - well, ya'know? **** that noise, man.

Suzukas are a nice boot, especially with BTS already fitted. At the risk of labouring the point, aftermarket footbeds are well worth the effort. Most ski shops will have a range "off the peg" for not very much $$$. "Superfeet" are a good brand to look for, but pretty much anything are better than the originals, especially if you have high arches. Again in the interest of reducing cost, if the liners are packed out a bit and you find fit is a problem, particularly WRT heel lift, you might want to investigate ankle wraps or the various other shims you can get from (for example) tognar before shelling out MAX DOLLAR on a pair of new liners. For the existing liners, IIRC the Suzukas came with either Thermofit (which auto mould to your foot while you use them) or thermoflex (heat mouldable) liners. Thermofit have a velcro strap, thermoflex don't. http://tognar.com/boot_heater_warmer_fitting_dryer_canting_dryers_ski_snowboard.html#bootshims

FWIW, and IMO, boot fit is vastly more important than flex. As has been said already, if you have wideish feet, the Raichle AF boots and Head boots fit wider around the toe area, and are more likely to be comfortable. Both are extremely good boots. The main problem I've found with the AF boots is not so much the way they close, but the extremely poor quality of the footbeds that come with them. This is general with pretty much every boot out there, ski or otherwise; even spending an extra 30€ or so on a pair of low-range footbeds can take a boot from excruciating to comfortable. I may go the step above this year and get some moulded footbeds for my AF700s, as my cheapos ones are dying after a couple of seasons intensive use (used every day for 4 months a year, and swapped between boots). As for flex - if you've ever skied, you'll find even the most rigid snowboard boot feels very flexy compared to skiboots. Compared to softies, of course, it's a whole different ballpark. the mods that can be made to the head boots to soften them up generally involve cutting bits of the boot away. That "may" affect the resale value of the boot. For the AFs you can fit a BTS kit; this is reversible. If you go second-hand, you'll likely end up with AFs that have the click-ratchet straps rather than proper buckles. They are a bit of a bugger to get used to, slightly more difficult to adjust the same every time you ride, and very occasionally they may get iced up and require a bit of deicing to make them close. Otherwise no big deal as long as they aren't utterly shagged. Bomber sell spares. For any secondhand boot, be aware that you may have to get new liners, and factor that into the price you pay (or be prepared to stick foam bits to the outside of the liner to get a proper fit if they are packed out). Bindings are a personal thing, but as long as you inspect carefully and are willing to replace worn parts there's not much danger in going secondhand. Unless you're going step-in, of course - too many subtly hidden and breakable bits there. Balance against budget, obviously, but don't be afraid of going for the SnowPro Race (my favourite) or F2 bindings as opposed to Catek or Bomber. As an example, over here in yurpland, F2 titanium intec + heels go for half the price of standard model TD3s. Yeah, I know, burn the heretic :)

My hearing's no worse than the average 40 year old's. Which is to say, it has somewhere between 5 and 10 kHz less range than my kids' do. Assuming you're around the same age I am, we can probably hear pretty much the same stuff. That includes being able to tell the difference between mp3 and uncompressed audio, and being able to hear the distortion that really cheap gear puts into sound. I can't stand listening to iPods (or mp3 players of any type) in a quiet environment, for example. Bloody awful reproduction, even if you put decent cans on them, and that goes even if you're using lossless audio. Sheer. Comic. Genius.

I don't think anyone's arguing that materials tech, shapes and the like have changed, are continuing to change, and are, generally (*coff* libtech *coff*) moving towards the "better" end of the spectrum. That said, it's a question of "how much better is better, and is it worth the difference in price". At some point, the majority of non-olympic riders (i.e. 99% of us here) will simply not be able to use that difference. To take another approach, consider the market for Hi-Fi. You can go buy a cheapo combined CD player / radio / cassette deck, and it will play back your music. It's gonna sound a bit like crap if you crank the volume up, but hey, it plays your music, and it's cheap, and that's great, right? Or you can shell out a bit more and get a half-way decent separates setup. It's gonna cost some more, but the quality is gonna be better. Still, it plays your music, and that's great, right? Then maybe you'll get all obsessed, and start buying tube amps and $900 speaker cable. Even if there is a difference in quality*, your 40+ year old ears aren't gonna be able to discern it. But you won't admit that, it's better because it's better, it's better because it's more expensive, it's better because "those cables are ****ing CRYOGENICALLY TREATED, man" Most of us are at the stage where we can appreciate the difference between the low-end crapola and the mid-high range stuff. Personally, I would rather spend significantly less $$$ (and I'm talking 1/10 the price here) getting a second-hand deck than have the latest and greatest high-tech marvel, which I'm, quite frankly, not good enough to appreciate anyway. There's also the cost aspect. My gear is made to be ridden, bought to be ridden, and gets ridden. Sure, I get arsey about clueless tits riding over my tail in the lift line, but if I hit a rock and tear up my base on the slopes, well, that's too bad. If I was spending 10 times the price, I'd be paranoid about the slightest bit of damage that might possibly happen, to the point where I wouldn't be having fun any more. Of course, none of this means that you can't, or shouldn't, go out and buy any damn board you like, for any price you like. But don't fool yourself that the price you paid for that board makes any difference at all to the amount of fun you're having on slope relative to the amount of fun I'm having, or that having a custom-built olympic-quality board somehow makes you any better a rider than you would be on my gear. Anyway, can we stop bitching now? It's snowing outside my house. * note, I'm not suggesting in any way that the manufacturers of current carving gear are selling the same kind of snake oil that the audiophool sellers are.

No problem with one part of that, at least; I'm a communist. Not that I buy new anyway. I leave that to you capitalist running dog types.

That's not a crowded run, and the skiers weren't in the wrong. They'd slowed down to regroup at the top of a break in the terrain, hell, only one of them had actually stopped for more than a second or so. The guy who got hit was about to go, checked uphill, saw the snowboarder, and stopped to let the boarder carry on (or, more likely, join them; the "here he comes, he's moving" a second or so before the hit is a dead giveaway). About the only fault the skiers have there is not stopping at the side of the slope, but they are visible, not spread over the width of the slope, and there's plenty of room either side to go round. More than can be said for the boarder we see at 5 seconds in, who is fairly obviously well out of his depth, and ends up sat in the middle of the slope just after a terrain break (we see him sat down 7 seconds in) Snowboarder 100% at fault. Totally out of control.

I used to have a camelback, never really liked it, although the instant and permanent on tap rehydration thing is a really good idea (see also post in the ibuprofen discussion). It always tasted of plastic, never could get used to that. Nowadays I have a litre stainless thermos in the rucksack. Probably not a great idea if I crash out hard, but on the other hand, I always have hot coffee available, and I can usually leave the bag with the lifties anyway (that's the great thing about being "in the biz", although I'll generally hold onto people's bags if they ask when I'm working, whoever they are.). Even before camelbacks came out, we used the "ghetto" solution when backpacking - the liner from a wine box is pretty tough, and squooshes into all sorts of odd little nooks and crannies in a backpack. It's very tempting simply to pull them from the box and shove them in the backpack "as is" as opposed to filling them with water, though - 5 litres of wine over a day tends to make your hiking trails meander a bit more than usual. Simon

Addiction doesn't imply illegality, nor enjoyment. It's a chemical change to your brain function. It's perfectly possible to become physically addicted to painkillers without ever getting any kind of "high" from them. From http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/understand.html Whilst the above is largely talking about "illegal" drugs, the same is true of many legal substances, from prescription painkillers through alcohol (possibly one of the most widespread and destructive drugs out there) and nicotine. Addiction doesn't necessarily mean a life "on the fringe" or dying by overdose, either; a large proportion of those who came home from WW1, specifically after battlefield surgery, came home with a lifelong heroin addiction. They were given, in the UK at least, pharm-grade heroin, and managed to hold down responsible jobs. My grandfather was one of these, coming home aged 19 with an addiction; he eventually passed away aged 92. Whilst he was quite old when I knew him, I certainly don't remember him going out knifecriming people for his fix, or shooting up with a rusty needle in some ****-filled back alley. Perhaps he kept that covered up, though. Personally, I take as few painkillers (or anything) as humanly possible, restricting their use to actual injury. What I can vouch for, as a hockey player, is the efficacity of keeping yourself well hydrated as a way of avoiding muscle pain after exertion. Taking painkillers to mask the effects of self-inflicted dehydration seems like a very good way of causing serious and potentially long term harm, at least to me. Yeah, tl;dr.

I've been lucky, I guess. Had a set of front inserts rip out going hard, but somehow managed no to break anything. Some muscular pain, but nothing to write home about. Had both (soft) bindings fall apart at once (possibly not at once, but it felt pretty instantaneous), I was fine there, too, and the board didn't take anyone else out on its uncontrolled race for the carpark, thank god. I've had the odd front foot release on the lifts, like all of us. Leash FTW. Whilst riding, I have *never* had a binding release through anything other than catastrophic failure. I tend to check my gear regularly (read: daily), though, I've bent the fsck out of the lighter weight snowpros (Twins, in particular, have very wimpy bails), anything looking bent or with fatigue cracks gets replaced stat. Like Bob, I used to work on hardboots all day, every day, so I beat my equipment up pretty bad too. Can't do that now, changed resort and I'm *required* to ride skis. Bloody employer's insurers.

There is cheaper gear out there, look for a cheapo digicam that does video. You probably won't get HD out of it, but the quality can be pretty good. Hre's my (somewhat boring) commute to work on skis, shot with a Sony DSC-600 camera, acquired from ebay as "busted" for €15 - cheap enough that I really don't care if it breaks. Mounting for this vid was electrical tape to the chest strap of my rucksack. I hadn't locked the focussing mech, so it floats a bit to start with, but the results are pretty good. The optics are certainly better than the majority of low-cost dedicated video cams, too. http://www.vimeo.com/3382483

This. If you listen to a lot of the guys here you'll end up spending $3K on a setup, when all you need to do is drop $30-100 on a pair of boots to make your existing board fun. It's a gearhead forum, after all. I've ridden one of those boards, picked up, ironically enough, from the trash, by a colleague. It was a huge amount of fun. Keep it - it's pretty muhch worthless in market terms anyway. FWIW, my current boots (AF700s) set me back €45 from a rental store that was dumping all its alpine gear. Unused, boxed, and I'm not an uncommon size (27.5 mondo). I probably could have gotten them for less, but I would have felt bad about taking them away :) Scrounge around the classifieds here, fleabay, and, if you have the option, second hand ski gear sales / rental stores. Picked up "new" bindings and ice knives for my AT skis for €25 at a sale last week (with 180cm skis attached - hell, they'll go towards making a bench). As far as "what boots" goes, almost whatever you can get your hands on. Prefer 4 buckles over 3, but beyond that, almost anything goes as long as it fits. Raichle SB series are okay, if a little tight around the toes, and watch for heel lift if the liners are "getting on a bit". AF series are lovely, but a lot stiffer (not nearly as stiff as ski boots, mind). Head / Blax are good if you have wider feet. People like the Burton boots, I've never tried them. There's a really good breakdown of what boots are what here : http://www.alpinecarving.com/ You are going to have to go to higher binding angles with big feet*, but you will get used to it, especially if you can already carve on softies. It feels weird at first (actually, scratch that, it hurts at first) but that goes away real fast as soon as you learn to stop skidding your turns. Simon * You know what they say 'bout guys with big feet, right? ... They wear big shoes.

Yeah, that's pretty much it - lower transmitted G's allowed on higher energy hits, and a more sensible testing regime (although the multiple high energy hits to the same impact site thing is still pretty dumb). Pretty much everything that the 2005 article covered, really. It's horses for courses, though, really, and the most important discriminator is still fit, as long as you try to understand the compromises made in the various testing scenarios. 99.9% of consumers don't, of course. Which almost brings us back on-topic, as 99.9% of snowboarders don't understand the compromises made in designing their "gnarly", "core" planks and softboots.

http://www.webbikeworld.com/motorcycle-helmets/snell-2010-standard.htm covers Snell 2010

That's not necessarily a bad thing - if it's passed the CE tests then it qualifies as safe, and there is a certain school of thought that the further certifications only help in some very track-oriented edge cases, and *decrease* protection / increase risk of concussion in "normal" crashes. The only safety-related reasons to plonk down bigger money on a lid are fit and noise issues (both of which are major concerns on a bike - if it doesn't fit, then it doesn't protect as it should, and long-term exposure to high noise levels is bad for you). If you can find a cheap helmet that fits, and you're either not worried about the noise issue, or you don't blast around at silly speeds all day, then there's no good reason *not* to buy it. For example, the predecessor to this helmet - http://www.motostrano.com/z1rphantom.html - under $100 retail - beat *all* the massively expensive helmets in terms of energy transmitted to the skull in testing, to the point of being "safe" in tests far exceeding the most violent tests currently used (marginally over 200G on a 185J hit, with Snell's hardest test specifying no more than 300Gs on a 150J hit) That said, yes, a bike helmet would probably be too heavy for boarding (not to mention that the testing for bike helmets takes into account a totally different set of parameters to that used for ski helmet testing, hence the different CE numbers). Personally, I find that anything heavier than a hat is too heavy for snowboarding, but that's a whole different can of worms. As far as DPronin is concerned, presumably the reason for wearing a helmet is for safety - it's worth considering that, should a major injury happen and your insurance company find out you were injured whilst wearing a helmet *not* tested for use in snowsports, you'd probably find yourself SOL as far as getting any insurance payout. If you're gonna buy a helmet, make sure it's tested to CE standard EN1077. And remember - helmets are disposable; if it's taken a hit, bin it. Simon

"phlat" bwahahahaha

I'd look for a buggered pair of TR9's for parts; it's not like they are super-expensive, and I believe the cuff is the same dimension across all the sizes. It's held in place, as I recall it, with 2 rivets, drill out and re-rivet a "new" one in place. I had a couple of destroyed pairs lying about but they went to a friend who needed parts for his, otherwise I'd have mailed you a cuff FOC. I'll ask about, see if there are any lying about at work. It's the left boot, no? Simon

600 bucks is a fricking lot of money. It's half my monthly salary before tax. It's 3 times what I pay per month in mortgage payments. You're young, and you're learning;you're better off spending 60 bucks each on 10 different second hand boards than spending 600 on one board. When you get to the point that you simply can't find a board second hand that isn't going to hold you back and frustrate you, then you start looking at dropping big money on boards*. Thin edges are no big deal, unless you find yourself sharpening your edges every other day. My freeride board has had "thin edges" for the last 3 years, and it still rides fine. Simon * Plus you can then resell the old boards on fleabay as R@R3!!!!! collector's items, and make a profit on the deal.