workshop7 Posted December 18, 2017 Report Share Posted December 18, 2017 (edited) This board was made with the design and performance of the MK as the model. The following specs are where the board differs from the MK. Length: 172cm Waist Width: 19cm Side Cut Radius: 11m I mounted a pair of TD3s centered on the inserts, with a stance width of 20.5". I'm using 6* toe lift on the front foot and 6* heel lift on the back foot. My angles are 59/56 with a 28.5 boot. All of the above binding numbers are identical to the ones I use on my MK with one exception, the angles on the MK are 61/59. I will report back to this review a few more times this season, but for now, my thoughts on the first ride. Dec 18 Conditions: Mostly man made with sub freezing temps for the last week, today was 24*. Snow was groomed the night before and well set up this morning. No one on the hill. The first run was what I expected. It rides just like an MK that makes a bigger turn. It was super stable whenever I came upon anything icy. I spent all day yesterday on my MK so it's ride characteristics were fresh on my mind. After a few more runs the 172 started to reveal itself. I naturally like a longer turning radius. The MK is great in its edge hold, liveliness and perfect match to a small hill with a lot of people. However, given the choice I'm always going to pick my 180 Proteus (SCR 13) over everything else. The 172 rides like the MK but it pushes back much harder than the MK. I was loving the larger turning radius and the energy that I could generate though the turn. If I wanted to I could be a foot or more in the air on every transition. I had assumed the 172 would not tire the legs like the MK does because of the reduction in the number of turns made from top to bottom. I was wrong. Because I am able to push harder through the turn than I can, or need to, on the MK the 172 definitely taps the legs. As a result, the 172 kicks my a$$ just as much as it's little sister does. My overall impression of the board is very favorable. I'm certainly happy I bought this one and I don't see it leaving my quiver for years to come. Edited January 27, 2018 by workshop7 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonny Posted December 19, 2017 Report Share Posted December 19, 2017 Nice writeup and nice design! So, how does it differ in performance from your Proteus? Nimbler? Even more pop coming-out of the turn? 22.5" seems like a wider spread than most use these days - are you very tall? My Proteus 180 got its first turns yesterday and it certainly kicked me around, Not unruly at all, it just hooks up so hard that every turn that isn't deliberately sketched is a hard, accelerating swoop of G-forces. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
workshop7 Posted December 19, 2017 Author Report Share Posted December 19, 2017 (edited) On 12/18/2017 at 9:58 PM, Jonny said: Nice writeup and nice design! So, how does it differ in performance from your Proteus? Nimbler? Even more pop coming-out of the turn? 22.5" seems like a wider spread than most use these days - are you very tall? They are very similar in the way they hold an edge on ice. Also, because the are both of a single radius design, they have similar turn dynamics. The Proteus is damp. I've often described it as predictable in the way it rides. The 172 is far from damp. It is lively with lots of pop and will throw you if you don't pay attention. Lastly, the Proteus is not fun at my local small hill unless there is no one there. It just makes too big of a turn to deal with narrow and/or crowded trails. Nice catch on the 22.5". My stance width is 20.5". I'm not sure how or why I made that mistake. It's been fixed. Edited January 27, 2018 by workshop7 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonny Posted December 19, 2017 Report Share Posted December 19, 2017 Thanks for the reply! And thanks for the stance correction - I was thinking of trying a really wide stance so I could be like you and probably would have pulled a groin muscle. I ride at 19 5/8" and have for years but the Proteus may like something a little wider and with less cant so that I can bend some decamber into it actively with my knees. Looks like my recollection of the top of Waterville in your pic - is that where you ride? Congratulations on being the first to tweak the MK in this way. I think every big guy who's ever ridden one, or a MADD for that matter, has thought "If only if it were 170ish....?" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
workshop7 Posted December 20, 2017 Author Report Share Posted December 20, 2017 On 12/19/2017 at 9:52 AM, Jonny said: Looks like my recollection of the top of Waterville in your pic - is that where you ride? The pic was taken a Pats Peak. I ride all over but Pats is is too close to my house and inexpensive to buy season passes to not ride there a lot. I'd bet I'm not the first to tweak the MK, just the first big mouth to tell everyone about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted January 25, 2018 Report Share Posted January 25, 2018 @workshop7 was kind enough to let me try this board. It rips. Definitely a candidate to be included in the MK line. Cuts like a knife, very energetic. I had just stepped off my metal Kessler 168, so my first impression of this non-metal board while just moving around and sliding to the trail was that it felt "brittle". However once carving, any concerns about edge hold disappeared. Tenacious tip to tail grip that locks on quickly and holds on longer. Reminded me of that original Donek Freecarve 171 I demo'd in 2001 that I immediately had to have, no matter what price. Although there is no decambering whatsoever (edit - so it appeared at first, see below), the nose surprisingly sliced right through piles of loose stuff. Of course it did have its limits, and I would give the K the nod for overall terrain handling, smoothness, and versatility. This should be expected, it's metal. But this board is more lively and poppy and very entertaining. This longer length and longer radius is a better fit for me at 5'11" 190, over the MK 161. It gives you more time to settle in and enjoy each carve, and if you need to surf out a turn or just cruise it's more agreeable. The flex pattern felt perfectly matched to the sidecut, whereas I felt my Proteus 175 was a touch stiff for the radius. The 19cm waist is also a better fit for my size 28 boots than the MK's 18cm waist, but it still feels very quick and responsive. It's just right for an all-business board like this. Nice design, Workshop! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
workshop7 Posted January 25, 2018 Author Report Share Posted January 25, 2018 Thanks for the review Jack. If you look again, there is 4-5cm of decamber at the nose. The base’s first point of contact is definitely behind the beginning of the effective edge. It has become my go to board this year. So, give it back! 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted January 25, 2018 Report Share Posted January 25, 2018 Cool, I guess I would have to do the piece of paper test to detect it, because I couldn't see any decamber by eye. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertAlexander Posted March 13, 2018 Report Share Posted March 13, 2018 (edited) Flatten board , slide paper. The rear should have a smaller amount of decamber as well. yes on 4 to 5cm nose , approx. what the MK has. Good write up. Edited March 13, 2018 by RobertAlexander add Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted March 13, 2018 Report Share Posted March 13, 2018 1 hour ago, RobertAlexander said: Flatten board , slide paper. The rear should have a smaller amount of decamber as well. yes on 4 to 5cm nose , approx. what the MK has. Good write up. Actually I would say 4-5cm doesn't qualify as decamber, a.k.a. early rise. It's just the usual blending of the camber with the upturn of the nose, i.e. normal rise. The decamber of my Kessler 168 starts somewhere around the first 'e' in Kessler. Now that's early rise. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkJeangerard Posted April 4, 2018 Report Share Posted April 4, 2018 (edited) I really like this board. It's been a rough start though due to me having not carved in 6 years, not remembering what a good stance feels like on carpet, and incorrectly copying my binding settings on day one. Day 1 I had a bogus setup and never rode the board correctly. It was the last week of the local mountain and at 9am it was 30 degrees, frozen corduroy shaped slush from the previous afternoon and by 9:45 the top layer was slush again and i couldn't hold a carve past the fall line. So, impressions first day: The color! I couldn't be happier with my topsheet choice. Green Swift. The blue and green are so rich in the sunlight. The build quality on the board. Every surface smooth, every mating undetectable, every bevel exact. Wow. Camber seems a bit low by looking at it. Nasty frozen smush, bad stance, sounds like a file on plastic = perfect 1/4 inch slices in the surface with no apparent skidding. Huh... It felt much less controlled. Edited April 10, 2018 by MarkJeangerard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkJeangerard Posted April 4, 2018 Report Share Posted April 4, 2018 (edited) Day 2 I had a bogus setup and never rode the board correctly. Brian Head, Utah. 29 degrees, partly cloudy. Hero Snow. The first two runs i made sidecut turns, mostly crossover, mostly by leaning. Every turn was exactly the same size. Big too. Like, the typical turn on my 180. Deep trenches, smooth and silent. The first pitch on the hill was groomed perfectly. The second looked and felt like they just took one quick pass at a fairly chopped slope. The second slope felt rougher, and there was some undulation but the tracks looked exactly the same. Round and symmetrical. The Hero Snow wasn't helping I could feel the stance was nowhere near decent but I kept completing turn after turn. I wore out in about in 3 hours. The F2 bindings were too much for me to deal with on the hill so I went over to Bombers for day 3 and 4. Day 2 impressions: It is really easy to dictate turn shape on the board. Shallow/completed or finished, large/small, opening/closing, all with pretty much nothing more than edge angle/tilt. On Hero Snow the thing runs silent. It's really cool how quiet it is sonically. Still haven't ridden the board properly. Oi... I hit a rock and gouged the base from tip to tail. Ouch. Only about twice the depth of the structure. Edited April 10, 2018 by MarkJeangerard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkJeangerard Posted April 5, 2018 Report Share Posted April 5, 2018 (edited) Days 3 & 4 I kept pursuing a bunk stance. Going off what was evident on my existing snowboards that handle differently and which I haven't ridden in a number of years. Day 3 was ski-over-mark's-new-snowboard day. Twice, about an hour apart, two of the cutest 6 year olds you've ever seen skied right into the tail of my board. (I was, of course, off to the side, well away from the top of the lift, sitting stationary at a bench.) Because daddy had ridden around me and stopped on the other side of me, both girls, after being stopped abruptly by my snowboard, saw no option other than to continue to skate across my snowboard. 4 or 6 tiny adorable little steps each, skidding and scraping across my topsheet, jabbing at my boots and shins with their cute little poles. Oddly, the girl who did the exact SAME THING on day 4 was fully 35 years old and it wasn't cute at all. End result: Barely noticeable dulling in the finish. No identifiable scratches. You really have to look close in the right light. Carbonium FTW. Finally on day five, I nailed it. Days 5 I went with TD1s because of their ease of adjustment on hill. Now that I know what I want I am going to go back to the F2s. Length: 172cm Waist Width: 18cm Side Cut Radius: 11m Stance 65/65. Natural center @ 19.7 inches. 3° cant plates running 90°, across the board. Front cant low on heelside, rear cant low on toeside. So, around 2° cant and a little less lift? Conditions: Spring slush groomed into roy in the late afternoon/evening, hardened over freezing night, turning to slush in the sun. It stays pretty cold at Brian Head so the slush comes on slowly. It's rideable most of the day. One of the first things I noticed about this board is the feedback. Carving on the frozen roy was a loud affair. Like a heavy canvas tarp ripping, or something, and a distinct scraping sound not unlike a skidded turn. The turns felt heavily skidded, about the same way I'm used to when the Madd does a 4 inch or so wide skid. But looking at the tracks, there was no skidding. Pencil thin lines from start to finish. Round turn shapes. When the Donek skids, it actually quiets up some both sonically and kinetically. Skids are predictable and easily controllable after just a few "test" skids to get a read on when and how the board breaks loose. Resetting the edge with any speed is a dramatic affair as the board sets immediately. Wherever the weight is is where it's gonna grip. When I didn't feel comfortable driving the board back up the hill I was very confident letting the speed in and shallowing up larger turn shapes - skidding off excess speed when necessary. Although, I rarely found it necessary until hitting slow or lift zones. The board responds very quickly to any input. Is it critical, I would say so. Several times I found myself having to deal with energy I had injected into the board through over exuberant gestures. Andre, a local hardbooter, suggested that I may be riding it as a larger board, that I just need to resize my movements. I thought that was a pretty cool observation. Thinking along those lines I noticed that my mistakes were mostly fore/aft. Bingo. One thing that really stands out for me with this board is the ability to manipulate the turn shape with tilt and twist. Diving in to high edge angle is extremely predictable. Being thrown to the hip by surprise seems to be less common on this board than any other board I remember riding. What did catch me by surprise was how tight the carve was once I tipped the thing up. It rides so well at larger radii that I had forgotten how small it really is. I experimented more and found it remarkably easy to move from large open, to small closed, to medium closed, small open, etc. with astonishing symmetry in size and shape toe and heel. Looking at the lines from the lift showed carves to be pure, start to finish. No bobbles while changing turn size. Flex between the bindings is really excellent too. This is one of my favorite characteristics of the board. It is very easy to create big differences in edge angle, tip to tail. Somehow, though, it's not so easy to do absent mindedly. There seems to be just the right balance in torsional stiffness nose/waist/tail that, just like the edge angle, it's easy to predict how much gas I'm giving it without nasty surprises. Looking at my lines from the lift again I'm noticing specific "kinks" that I purposefully put into my turn shapes. Above, at, and below the fall line it's literally simple to influence a change in turn shape or direction. I don't remember having that kind of mid turn control on any other board. The board really responds well to "Ivan" type maneuvers as well. It is really easy to accelerate in a variety of situations on this board. It seems like no matter what I was doing, if I needed the speed it was right there. Small gestures creating big returns. Like the toeside/heelside symmetry we are all always in pursuit of, I have to have crossover/crossunder symmetry as well. I don't tell the hill where I'm going, the hill tells me. Sometimes I don't know what type of turn I'm going to make until I'm mostly done with it. While this board is a crossover titan, the crossunders don't seem to have the type of pop that I remember getting on other boards. That being said, I'm not charging. It's been a while for me and I haven't let myself into situations that necessitate that type of split second decision making. Next year. At this point in time I rate the board really highly. It will be my go to stick until my Madd 170 is repaired and then we will see what the differences are. So, after all that blah-blah... If you are looking at this thread because you want a longer Madd Killer, this might be the board for you. But! This is an extrusion of the MK. I don't know the details, but when I ordered this board Sean offered me what was, at the time, the latest prototype of the 170 Madd Killer. So, that indicates that the board they are working on is different than this extrusion. I chose this board based solely on this thread, believing I would be happy with the board I read about here (I am!), and having little other information about the new prototype. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. You may want to wait. Not that there is anything wrong with this board. Just that... who knows what they like better about the next model in the line? Edited April 10, 2018 by MarkJeangerard Finally got my setup together. 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workshop7 Posted April 16, 2018 Author Report Share Posted April 16, 2018 (edited) March 26 - Mount Snow Perfect carving conditions to start. Several days after a storm in which they received 30" of powder. The temps stayed cold since then and after the grooming last night the snow set up just right. The end of the day brought some scraped off super hard pack, but not ice. This particular variation of a longer MK (my custom 172) continues to show an impressive depth in its capabilities. I was on it for 5 hours and was toast at the end of the day. It pushes back very hard. I love the energy build up and pop off the tail. For a few of the runs I stayed way up on the nose. Riding it like this was not a problem, unlike some of the other boards I've ridden. The nose is stiff and bites into the snow quickly, bending and bringing the rest of the board around in an aggressive but predictable turn. Most of the time I just stayed centered and it holds on and on and on. So much fun, all day! I still love my MK for my smaller home mountain, but for anything bigger this is a great board. I've heard that Sean is working on an official 170ish MK and I can't wait to ride it when he's finished. However, I can't see it performing much better than this option. Still happy with the purchase. Old picture. Edited April 16, 2018 by workshop7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randy Kight Posted December 29, 2018 Report Share Posted December 29, 2018 "Day 3 was ski-over-mark's-new-snowboard day. Twice, about an hour apart, two of the cutest 6 year olds you've ever seen skied right into the tail of my board. (I was, of course, off to the side, well away from the top of the lift, sitting stationary at a bench.) Because daddy had ridden around me and stopped on the other side of me, both girls, after being stopped abruptly by my snowboard, saw no option other than to continue to skate across my snowboard. 4 or 6 tiny adorable little steps each, skidding and scraping across my topsheet, jabbing at my boots and shins with their cute little poles. Oddly, the girl who did the exact SAME THING on day 4 was fully 35 years old and it wasn't cute at all. End result: Barely noticeable dulling in the finish. No identifiable scratches. You really have to look close in the right light. Carbonium FTW." - @MarkJeangerard So well written! I coughed coffee...a few times... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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