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queequeg

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Posts posted by queequeg

  2. Stratton

    in New England

    Posted

    On 1/25/2019 at 7:27 PM, pow4ever said:

    lol Jose!  Kirkwood not treating you well? 😜

    Kirkwood is fantastic! But tahoe traffic makes weekend trips not worthwhile 😞. Its often a *very* slow and long drive back. 

     

    • Sad 1

  8. Softboot and what’s wrong with them

    in The Lodge

    Posted

    On 4/3/2018 at 6:48 PM, Jack M said:

    IMHO, in softboots, higher than 15 degrees on the back foot and you start losing toeside power. 

    When I was running softies the past few seasons I didn’t have much problems with my rear foot well over 15 degrees. That said: it seems like everyone’s experiences in softies are fairly varied. I’m experimenting with hardboots and super-soft tongues instead of softies this year, mostly due to how insanely uncomfortable i find the softies. 

  9. Hot Gear Bag

    in Carving Central

    Posted

    I had one. It wasn’t great. My initial review was positive but I ended up finding it to be more of a nuisance than it was worth. Also: if you have any punches in your boots DEFINITELY don’t get one as it puts out enough heat to restore boot shells to their original shape. 

  12. Minds in the Water

    in Summer Carving

    Posted

    I spent the last two days introducing a friend to surfing in Santa Cruz. It was a bit on the flat side at the hook but steamer lane was working. Looking forward to a week in Ecuador at the end of November. It seems like this past summer was a particularly crappy one for surf, but now that winter is beginning to take shape things seem to be on the mend. Snapped some photos off the cliff at Steamer Lane and I think they came out well, film is still drying but will post here once they are scanned in ?

     

    Also : I have seen quite a few of those hydrofoil boards on the water. Watching people get accustomed to them is *really* funny but when employed effectively ... gotta admit that looks fun.

    • Like 1

  17. I have a very stuck screw on my Fintec heel, suggestions?

    in Carving Central

    Posted

    32 minutes ago, Corey said:

    I'd drill off the head.  You know the size of the screw from the other ones, just pick a drill bit slightly larger than the shank of the other screws.  Then stop and check often.  Eventually the head will pop off.  Then slide off the heel and hammer out the offending stub/t-nut.  

    I've done this exact thing before to good success.  Any heating is going to damage the heel or shell. 

    This seems like a better idea than the drill press. I wonder how extracting the remainder of the screw from the t-nut would go though. I guess you could use a pair of vice grips on what's left for greater leverage and hope it doesn't snap.

  18. I have a very stuck screw on my Fintec heel, suggestions?

    in Carving Central

    Posted

    3 hours ago, Erik J said:

    Looking to remove my Fintec heels. I have all the screws out but one.

    What I have tried so far - 

    PB blaster, overnight soak with multiple applications - nope

    Tap a hammer onto a flathead screwdriver towards the left to loosen the screw - nope

    Heat - the torch is a bit tough to get on the screw as it's recessed. I don't want to start melting plastic so nope

    Tapping a screwdiver into the screw head for better grip - nope

    Drilled out the screw head to insert a screw extractor -  I have good bite from the screw extractor but the screw will not spin. I don't want to break off the extractor in the screw.

    I'm on the verge of going to my dads shop to put the heel under a drill press to just bore the whole thing out but that seems like damage may ensue.

    Any suggestions?

     

    I had a really difficult time getting my fintec heels out of my old UPZ's that I had t-nutted myself. One of the screws had basically bonded to one of the t-nuts and no amount of cajoling, convincing, sweet-talking, or violence was getting it free. I wonder if this is what you have encountered? I ended up sawing the T-nut apart with a dremel. I can't recall whether or the boots survived but I think I managed to keep them intact. They were done for anyhow so I was not too concerned about the boots. I would think you could extract them with a drill press safely if you started with a narrow bit to bore-out the middle of the screw — then at least it might be weak enough to break? You''d probably have to replace the t-nut anyhow if the rest of the screw was still stuck in there. Best of luck!

    I'm wondering if you can heat the screw without using a blowtorch and risk melting the plastic? Maybe turning the boot upside down, and balancing a soldering iron tip down on the screw to transfer heat into it? That might get the screw hot enough to have some effect if you leave it on there long enough BUT: it would probably also heat up the heel and the plastic parts within it as well, which might not be so good.

  20. Felony charges for former Bomber owners

    in The Lodge

    Posted

    12 hours ago, Corey said:

    If someone was planning to start a business to defraud a bunch of people/entities, I'd hope they pick something other than a tiny niche market.  What's the total customer base for Bomber? 200 people? 

    There's no way this was Jim and Angie's plan from the start; they're too smart for that. But apparently one bad decision led to another, and another... 

    Totally agree, I don't think anyone planned for this to happen. Of course not, that would just be crazy. It's the extent of the criminal stuff that I am talking about. I think it's very easy in life to find yourself in a very bad position because of bad luck, bad decisions or both: and to adopt a somewhat Machiavellian perspective insofar as what kinds of desperate measures are justified to keep your head above water. But you get to a crossroads eventually—where the acts undertaken to protect yourself from your circumstances vastly overshadow the original problem and involve other innocent parties unwillingly. At that point you are deciding much more than how you are going to get yourself out of a sticky mess (that you probably realize is now out of your control). That is the point at which you are deciding what kind of person you want to be, because that is all you really have control over anymore.

    The option to throw-in the towel, declare bankruptcy and admit that you failed before engaging in (pretty serious, if white-collar) criminal activity is always available, and totally honorable. That was always an option (and certainly one that would have been far less ruinous for all involved).

    I feel really bad for Jim and Angie. I first met Jim randomly on Copper Mtn when he was helping to support a RTTC event in the very early season (IIRC). He had just driven there from Chicago to help with the event and was obviously just a guy who was super-stoked to carve and a total gentleman. I took my very first run at my very first ECES with Angie at Stowe in (2007?) and she was fun and helped to take the edge of intimidation of the event, as someone who was just getting back into hardboots and had a lot to learn and re-learn. They both seemed totally great. Jim was always super welcoming, gregarious and a total virtuoso when it came to burning high-speed turns. So yeah: I really want to think well of them, but the facts are difficult to ignore.

    Judging by the evidence posted online it seems like Angie is taking most of the legal penalties for all of this, and we will probably never know how the details of this all played out, or about how much of it Jim was or wasn't aware of (though I think this sort of thing is probably REALLY) hard to hide. During the first ATC ... which I guess was somewhat of a postscript for SES ... they both did not seem like themselves. They both seemed super irritable, and stressed out: beyond what one would expect of just ... busy super stressed out small business owners trying to manage this big-ish event for the first time. It seemed pretty obvious that there was some other kind of trouble. I do recall Jim taking a more aggressive sales-oriented approach to stuff than I had ever seen, and I recall having the same thoughts as others regarding the van, website redesign, video productions, and the big tour of different mountains etc ... I figured they were in deep shit, but I never would have guessed that they would have undertaken a bunch of criminal activity to maintain the subterfuge that bomber was solvent.

    Good people do bad things sometimes. We're all human ... but looking at the extent of the criminal activity it seems like at some point you've gotta call a spade a spade, we all shed a little bit of innocence when we do bad stuff. 

    BUT: it also stands to bear that pretty much everyone included in this discussion is not in possession of all the facts (or even most of them probably). We all probably know very little, though some more than others (most of whom are not saying a peep). It just doesn't look good, given the information that is available online. There could be other information out there that would paint this in a totally different light, but I think it would have to be pretty overwhelming to make this look much different.

    Mostly, this just sucks for alpine snowboarding. It makes us look like a mess.

    • Like 2

  21. Felony charges for former Bomber owners

    in The Lodge

    Posted

    This whole thing is a ****ing bummer, and sad for all involved.

    I really want to convince myself that this is a matter of slippery-slope bad decisions cascading into an out-of-control runaway-train disaster ... that could happen to anyone naieve enough to take on this challenge without fully comprehending the risk and challenges.

    But a number of the details suggest that this isn’t quite what happenned. 

    • Like 1

  22. Cord Porn

    in Carving Central

    Posted

    On 6/22/2018 at 7:25 PM, lowrider said:

     

    I would want to personally be involved in the installation of the anchor points used for an adventure like this. Helmet, racing harness and Depends for sure ! Must be one hell of an oil sump on that engine to tackle angles like that . I'm also thinking the cup holders would be kind of useless at those angles. 

    Judging by the angle that people are standing at on the top of this photo, and the angle of the horizon this photo is somewhat tilted to make things seem steeper; but it's still steep AF despite the fact that it has been tilted.

  23. Trying hardboots in the pow again

    in All Mountain Hardbooting

    Posted

    A quick update on this thread. I managed to extract the tongue-anchor screws from the spinning anchor (used a pair of right-angle pliers and a clutch driver to remove them). Subsequently I permanently fixed the anchors in place with a bit of epoxy so that they won't spin the next time I want to change tongues. With that done I went ahead and changed all the hardware on the boots from the annoying star-driver screws that UPZ supplies, to 4mm hex. I also replaced all of the F2 binding hardware with 4mm hex. So now I can adjust my boots, my soft F2 bindings, and my firm Virus bindings with just a single tool ? — no need to carry around a two star-wrenches, two different hex wrenches, and a pozidriv just to make simple adjustments on the mountain. 

    With the tongue anchors firmly epoxied in place, swapping tongues from stiff to soft is like a 3-minute job. No carpet-carving yet but maybe this weekend.

    • Like 1

  25. Trying hardboots in the pow again

    in All Mountain Hardbooting

    Posted

    19 minutes ago, Corey said:

    Have you done some carpet surfing?  I'm interested in your impressions as I'm considering the same.  

    I used a small adjustable wrench (like https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/3197in%2Btm%2BL._SL500_AC_SS350_.jpg), angled down through the tongue opening.  It's not perfect with only the corners of the jaws on the square flange, but it worked. 

    I didn't do any carpet surfing last night but this is not my first go with these bindings. They are pretty soft. I'll see how it all feels once I get those red tongues in there. 

    Thanks for the tip on using a small adjustable wrench. Will give that a go.

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