Carving Start

[Guest glennmorton]

I am tending away from all around freeride, and more into straight carving. My soft boot set up is Never Summer T5 165, Burton Drivers, and some variety of Flow bindings that I am lost track of the model number as there are one million models. On groomers I can lay trenches, and that is all I generally do now, however when I see a hard booter, I always think "that is the shiznit"

I am pretty sure a hard boot set up is next, but aside from dropping the better part of 2K CDN on something I have never done, what is the best way to get started? Are there ever demo events in the Montreal area?

I think next day out I am going to do with a really forward stance on my set up. Do people do this? Any angles suggestions?

Thanks,

Glenn

[Fleaman]

I will reply tomorrow, I am too dr unk to re;ply tonihught, I wol maybe sell you some shiut, let me know, email me at fleamnan @hotmail.com

[alpinegirl]

and yeah, it's the next day...

really forward angles in softies: let us know what you did with them and tell us about your day. some of us have to live vicariously through others. personally i avoid going past 30* in my soft boots. but some people have had fun going beyond that.

and, i would suggest going to ECES. in the very least you would get to hang out with and ride with a bunch of really passionate folks who will probably be more than happy to help you out with this stuff. nothing beats checking out gear first hand. just be careful, you may not want to give it back.

and definitely be certain that you have a good pair of boots that fit well. bindings and boards are easy to deal with, but a poor fitting pair of boots can suck the joy out of even the most glorious day of riding. there seem to be a few places on this planet that even demo gear, but the guys who know what those places are will have to tell you that.

[Derf]

We are a couple of riders from Montreal on this forum. The is me, bartron, CarvCanada, Ernie00, eos4life and some others I don't know. I only met bartron and CarvCanada though.

Unfortunately, there is no demo event that I know of in the Montreal area. If you go to my webpage, you can find some good ressources though. If you shop and bargain, you can get a setup for under 700-800$CDN. Depending on your board, getting boots and bindings and putting them on your board could be a start.

We could arrange to go riding together a bunch of us and see if there's anything we could do.

Feel free to contact me by email if you want. I speak French and English (mostly French).

[Fleaman]

oops, I am not sure what that was all about. Sorry, I have nothing for sale.:(

[D-Sub]

damn, fleaman! you were a wreck last night!

;)

[Allee]

Hi Glenn!

You might want to read about Scott's adventures in softies and his start in carving here :

http://www.bomberonline.com/VBulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4731

As for the gear, just keep your eyes open. E-Bay has some good deals - if you go to www.raceboarders.com and click on the Ebay link the search there is great to keep an eye on.

Boards go cheap all the time. bindings seem to be the thing ... they can get expensive and people tend to hang on to them, but again, just keep the eyes open. Sometimes you can score them with the board for a reasonable amount. For starter kit, I'd be really surprised if you couldn't source for around $300-$350.

Good luck!

[Jack M]

check it out HERE

[SWriverstone]

Hey Glenn---glad to hear about another carving initiate! As someone mentioned, I've been sort of "blogging" about my adventures learning to carve (see link above). It's definitely addictive!

I spent weeks in soft boots on my freeride board just starting to practice technique I read about here on Bomber and Alpinecarving.com. One of the first things I did was start cranking up my bindings to steeper angles. I went about 5 degrees at a time 'til I ended up at 45 degrees both front and back. That made a BIG difference---when I made the transition to hardboots and a carving board a couple weeks ago, it was relatively easy as I was already used to the high angles.

Have fun!

Scott

[CarvCanada]

Hey

We should ride together!! I started out carving on softies with a freeride deck, with binding angles of 50/45 to have no overhang. Those stance angles, when set up right with some good highback lean can get you into a nice neutral position with lots of bending in the knees, and while riding your free to use lots of upper body rotation to initiate turns. I still do carve in softies whenever I go to a more freeride-ish mountain like Sutton or Jay, but the change to a full on alpine deck with good plates and good boots was really sweet. It's quite a different feeling at first, but on fresh cord and good even packed snow, pretty much everything you can do with a freeride/softies, you can do with plates/alpine except much more solid, and a much more aggressive flow! :)

A NS 165 should work pretty well! You can demo one of my boards if you have near size 26 feet. Other than the shops around MTL (Sharks, Oberson), the only way of finding equipment is the internet. Sharks has some sweet stuff, but all good NEW alpine gear is expensive. You can find good used stuff here.