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How to get heel lift?


kmartshopper

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Finally had my first day on hardboots this weekend, and I improved greatly over the few days. I was railing on a salomon precept 167 (265mm waist!) - and I'm beat to crap! Donek FCII 171 arrives this week!!

Anyway, my question...

I believe I could benefit from at least some rear foot heel lift. My question is how do I go about getting that? I'm running older snowpro race bindings. Are there generic shims... or do you need specific hardware?

Thanks.

________

Avandia Settlements

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Take a cutting board and bandsaw it out... Drill out hoels for your screws, and order stainless bolts to compimetn from a hardware store. I just raised my TD1's and used 10mm of lift.. Had to order stainless 8mm X 30 mm screws with a 1.25 pitch. Total cost of lifters for me was about $16. Well worth every penny..

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Originally posted by neil sunday

Take a cutting board and bandsaw it out... Drill out hoels for your screws, and order stainless bolts to compimetn from a hardware store. I just raised my TD1's and used 10mm of lift..

Did you do this to just lift the bindings 10mm all over, or did you taper the peice so the binding was actually tilted a few degrees with the heel higher than the toe?

I'm pretty maxed out on the rear foot lean, and would like to get the 'lean' from the bindings, and leave the boot in a somewhat neutral position.

________

Foot problems advice

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to make sure the sole of the boot didnt become effected by the lifter, i raised both the heel and toe pieces. this results in an increase in the ability to get the board on edge. i will say, be careful when first trying it out, as the effects are immediate and rather dramatic. it took me four to five days of riding and race training to get comfortable on the setup.

i suppose you could taper the thing, but i personally wouldnt risk the boot hold down properties of the current binding system.

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The F2s I have have a no cant heel lift block for the heel and a small tapered wedge for the toe lift. With the band saw technique you can make any cant and lift combo you want. Since your new, dont get all wrapped up in the cant lift thing. Just add some heel lift and forget about it.

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Originally posted by Bobby Buggs

Like Ronco said, Set it and Forget it.

Alex:eek:

Heh :)

Yeah, I'm still fighting things, and familiar enough to know what little tweaks I want yet.... I was just locking the rear foot in the most leaning position every time, and I wanted it to be more neutral for when I flip it into powder mode for bumps etc. I'll definately take the new board out first to get a good feel before messing with it.

But it sounds like it's not a good idea to just put a shim under the heel plate, and leave the toe plate flat, in order to get heel lift. Since I don't have any wedge shaped peices, I'd probably have to muck around to cobble something up.

Thanks for the info.

________

Bali recipes

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Hmm... sounds like I'm just missing the shims... I did buy the bindings used. The canting shims are built in, but no heel/toe lift wedges.

I'll give Dan a call and see if he can help me out. I will probably try like 10mm of flat shims under the heel for the time being - should be roughly 3*... it doesn't seem to misalign things much, and the soft rubber heel/toe peices on the boots seem to eat up any gaps at that level. Going up to 6*, it starts to be a little more noticeable, and I'd probably want some sort of wedge to eat up the gaps.

Maybe I'll just hit my home-made shims with a belt sander for some taper.

________

DODGE ZEO SPECIFICATIONS

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OK, there are two different concepts, and I think they are getting a bit muddled here.

You want heel lift.

But..,..

Most of the snow pros come with wedges than angle your bindings towards eachother, and neither raise nor lower the heel compared to the toe; at least that is how the set i have is. I call this canting. I am pretty sure my set (which I have not seen in about 5 years) is the same as yours.

I would suggest that you should ride both bindings flat cant - no need to cant at all. Some people like to ride cants; if you do, then you can use wedges or something, but at most you probably would want something like 3 degrees. The reason why people used to use cants was to get their knees together; but people don't ride like that so much any more. The knees about is a much more stable way to ride I think.

For heel lift, if you are riding in a more swiss rotational style, then heel lift seems less necessary. However, a bit of heel lift (about 1cm/ 3/8 of an inch) can make traversing a bit easier and stops you from falling backwards. This you can definitely make out of a cutting board; the white looking cutting board is perfect, and about the right thickness even. You would try to insert this between the baseplate and the piece with the bale/peice for your foot to sit on. And yes, you will probably need longer screws; I think (but cannot quite recall) that they are M6 thread screws. This is a metric screw 6mm.

The problem is that if you just raise the back heel, then your boot is going to be angled, and your bindings are still going to be flat, so this will put a bit of pressure on the front of each binding part for your boot, since the boot won't be sitting quite flat anymore in the binding. In my opinion, if you are using a snowboard boot with a rubber sole, then this is not a huge deal, since the sole will absorb most of the unevenness.

If you are a master grinder, you could bevel off the piece of chopping board you have cut out and drilled to have about a 3 degree or so bevel angling towards the toe piece of the binding. It would be possible, but rather hard to grind out a piece of really thin chopping board and do the same thing with the toe piece, so I would just not worry about it, unless you have access to a grinder and know how to grind very thin things.

If you lift both the heel piece and the toe piece as well, I can't see that you will get any benefit.

So.... take the heel piece off; cut a piece of chopping board about 3/8 of an inch thick off, and drill it, grind it if you want so the heel piece leans forward a bit towards the toe to match the base of your boot, and you are going to be away laughing.

Good as gold mate, let us know how you get on.

Sawasdee krap

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ONe more thing....

Depending on boots, one of the things I didn't use to like about the snowboard boots... If you put more lean into the boot, it automatically becomes stiffer unless there is an adjustment to the flex available, such as the RAB on the indys.

So, if you start with your two feet the same, then angle the back foot more than the front, then the back foot is locked forward more but also stiffer as well, which is not I believe what you want to be doing.

So, then some people leave the top buckles on the rear boot open, which then starts to affect heel lift in the boot, and so on.

Instead, if you can get both boots to flex the same, and if you must, then add some heel lift into the binding, this is a better solution. Otherwise, if will feel like your back foot is not angled, since as soon as your weight goes forward, the back boot will be stiffer already, and thus start transfering weight onto the front of the boot on toe side turns faster than your front foot.

So I reckon you should set both boots the same forward lean and instead increase the ":heel lift" that you want via the chopping board stuck under the heel of the back foot.

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