method9455

Nice!

From crappuweather for Lake Harmony. Assuming Big Boulder will be the first to open theirs is the forecast to watch. I kind of want to see how the trend goes over the next few weeks. I'd say it might be possible for them to do a Mount Snow style patch for Halloween if they want given Oct 28th/29th's nighttime forecast but the day still is going to be quite warm. Early november is looking a lot more promising for actual snowmaking. There is supposed to be a front on Nov 2nd with rain accompying it. I suspect the dates might be slightly off at that end but it reads as an actual front bringing cold air rather than just one random dip in temperature. That rain would wipe out a hypothetical halloween patch (if it lasted that long), but it would cement cold air in the area better than a quick moving system. Tuesday, Oct 28 Low: 23

Glenn that is a really good point in bold. It is what works for you. I push people away from ICS when I'm selling but summersux you know what you are getting into so go for it. Tell me what you think when you have one. I promise I will get to a Burton demo this season and try one out and give it another go. I went into it with a negative perception the first time I rode it so I'll go back with a more open mind this time and see what happens.

This is cool, Big Boulder's park crew built the jibs for Mount Snow this year.

It may well prove to be the next big thing in snowboarding. I am unconvinced. I point to SI bindings and the Burton Fusion as great ideas that failed miserably on the revolution in bindings. The bottom line to me is that you introduce weak spots into the board, introduce variable flex along its length when previously it was even, and increase the force on the screws connecting it to the board. In exchange you get a closer feel for your boot to the board and a bit better stance adjustment. I just don't feel that the advantages are worth more than the disadvantages. Your analysis is way off. Forget the sarcastic tone, you are just flat wrong. Inserts never pull up and out through the top of the board, ever. I didn't say they would. What happens to them is they get stripped when too much force is applied. So comparing the area of the bottom of the slot to the area of the bottom of the inserts is silly and pointless. And I wasn't even talking about the slot vs inserts in that situation, someone asked if a single row of inserts would work better, and I was answering that question. I don't think the slot would ever pull out of an ICS board. I really don't see how you can say that there are no new stress concentrations, that is just the way it is. I don't know how long it has been since you were in college but seriously, a quick Google search on the principal: http://books.google.com/books?id=gOfKT2Ya0...1&ct=result. When one engineer can recognize areas that will cause it to fail, and the other sticks their head in the sand saying NO IT WON'T, who is usually right? And jesus, read some of the things you wrote

I imagine the economics this winter are going to mean a tighter budget on snowmaking. It probably won't cut into the mid-season product much but I bet they will be less likely to blow for show and waste money here and there you know? There is no doubt people will be cutting back on their skiing this winter. Ski shops are already getting hammered, the ski resorts will be next.

Yea I meant the hikeable stuff. Word was that Killington didn't blow last night because they thought it was going to warm up too much this weekend and it would be a waste so I was wondering if Mount Snow though it would last through Monday. Apparently there is some rain coming down the pipe.

Tuesday, new episode 8-8:30, reruns at 8:30 and midnight Thursday, rerun at 11pm Friday, rerun at 3am. I also notice a beach rescue show at Dewey Beach Delaware. TruTV - where we make the trashy overly dramatic! Seriously, I hope this doesn't go to the Blue's patrollers heads. They are scrubs.

Are they definately going to continue to be open this weekend? I thought the actual opening date was targeted at Nov 8th. Does the weather look like they will expand the snow at the base?

Wakeboards are generally 6x1, it has been done on snowboards as well. For a minute, think about driving your car (with two hands, not the way we all do with 1). You have a hand at 3 and at 9, perfectly across from each other. When you turn the wheel, your forces are perfectly balanced and the wheel only spins, with no sideways forces or anything. This is called a couple moment. Two forces acting in opposite directions, creating a moment (a torque) as a couple around a point. That point on a steering wheel is centered which makes it have less friction than if it were off centered pushing sideways some amount. The same can be said for having 2 bolts through your binding into the board. When you push down on your heel edge, the heel side bolt is going to be pushing and the toeside bolt is going to be pulling in tension. When you rotate onto your toe, it is reversed. This makes the center of the couple moment the centerline of the board. Having 1 line of inserts (or an ICS slot), makes the center of the couple moment halfway between center of pressure of your heel, and the bolt. Your heel is pushing down in compression, and the bolt is pulling in tension. When you transition to that heelside turn, the moment is now centered between the center of pressure on your toe and the centerline bolt. What does that do? Frankly I'm not sure. I really don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know is that it will transmit more force through the bolts than if they were neatly coupled. The bolts we use today are designed to have 4 holding the binding in, 3 minimum. 2 might be pushing it. I have no numbers to back that up but it at some point you will start stripping screws or pulling out inserts. I'm not sure at what point that is. A 6x1 pattern would have lower stress concentrations than a slot for sure. That would allow you to have less reinforcement around it than a slot. The problem with a 4x2 pattern is that you have so many inserts in a row, it gets kind of stiff under the bindings. It is already pretty stiff with just a binding there, but it gets really stiff with so many inserts. A 6x1 doesn't suffer from this problem as much. So may be the best solution is a 6x1 row of inserts that strong enough to hold the forces required. That would certainly be interesting and do able. I'm still not entirely convinced strap bindings are the best way to go on snowboards. The straps transmit power to the binding inefficiently. Your power gets transmitted from the binding to the board inefficiently, it seems like we could make things a lot lighter and strong. I have some ideas about boots/bindings/boards rolling around in my head but nothing concrete yet. As for setting them up custom. It is probably not so much a manufacturing challenge as a user/business challenge. Assuming you start selling straight to the end user, it would be trivial to do in the factory. The hard part is people getting the right stance. I always have to play with mine on a new board a bit to get it right, how would you know before you owned the board? So it almost seems like you need to ship boards with no inserts to the shops, have people demo boards the boards, and then t-bolt the final thing. I think all of that hassle would be worse than the current solution. Spending more time to engineer it right up front is better than forcing every person who ever wants to use it down the line to waste time. An engineer can spend a year working to save every customer 1 hour of time and we would all net out ahead when you are selling thousands upon thousands of boards.

http://www.zumiez.com/ It's poserific

I agree with you about the feel of the EST bindings being better than a regular binding, I'm talking about defeciences in the board which is really due to ICS, not a knock on EST at all - but most people will see them as one in the same so I used them interchangbely, my bad. As a note, I personally like Burton binding, I definately mistook you for a mis-informed Burton fan boy which you are obviously not, and you are mistaking me for a mis informed Burton hater which I am not. I ride right now with a RED helmet, Anon googles, AK Jacket & pack, Cartel bindings. But I just do not like their boards outside of the Custom X and T6. To clarify, I think that the EST bindings are a great idea. But I don't think ICS is necessary. The advantage of EST comes from having the connect to the board on the OUTSIDE of the binding rather than inside. It has nothing to do with the slot. Look at wakeboarding bindings which have connected on the outside of the binding to regular insets on the board for years. There is no reason why should put such a drastic weakness down the middle of your board by machining a huge slot in it. The only advantage that offers over having insets and holes on the outside of the binding is allowing you more stance options. I kind of cut that out but truthfully the problem with the slots on the outside of the binding like a wakeboard as compared to holes on the binding and the slot on the board is you can't get to all of the same stance positions as a regular binding, so the slot allows you full range of position for the EST binding. But is that really worth the weakness? I don't think so. Thats what I meant by stance options, as compared to dead spots you get with an outside binding slot + board insert system. Ultimately you have to have a slot on one part and a hole on the other to have a range of mounting options. For years the bindings had the slots and the board had the holes. Now Burton reverses it, and I don't think it is the right move. The board is significantly harder to get to "feel" right than a binding, since the board has to have a perfect flex and the binding doesn't, it just needs to be stiff in that direction. So to me, an EST binding that worked universally on a 4x2 pattern would be great. But it doesn't work for Burton. Their boards don't have the 4x2 pattern so it wouldn't work, and they either needed to concede their 3 hole pattern marketing/patents and switch to 4x2, or come up with something new. This is what they came up with, and while it is right for them as a company, it isn't what you would come up with if you had a clean slate from which to design. It just adds too much complication and even if they say it is the same weight, even if it IS the same weight, it is mathematically impossible for them to have built a board that is the the same weight and has the same strength as the board they COULD build had they not put the slot in. The stress in the board gets multiplied by the slot to make it easier to break, and they had to fix that by beefing it up. If they put more expensive lighter materials in it to make it the same weight, then they could have made it EVEN LIGHTER, if it did not have the slot.

I could see that happening. Mountain Creek did something similiar to that last season so it wouldn't be a stretch to see it around here. As for a real opening, last week in October or first week in November is likely. Although shit, I just realized it is October 20th today! That is a few weeks away.

Nice

I don't care that it is all of 2" inches on the ground, on a trial that won't even be open the first day, you have to give them some props for doing it. If I lived around there I would hike a few turns before class.

I'd rather have 25 degrees and no precipitation than 25 with, rain and snow will raise the wet bulb temp too much, and cloud cover means the air at night cools slower. That said, I'll take 25 degrees every night for a week, and if a little snow coats the ground you waste less energy trying to seal the ground heat off from melting the subsequent snow making. If early november stays this cold we will be skiing in PA by veterans day.

As for why having a slot running down the middle of the board - this will be LONG, but not necessarily hard to understand (I hope). Mind you there is math that goes with all of this but I'll generally leave it out. If you want, skip to the bottom for my conclusion. A snowboard is basically a beam with pressure applied to it. It is relatively simple to figure out how much a beam will bend for a given force, and also at what point it will break. These two outcomes are based on three things, the shape of the beam, the force applied and the material. For snowboards, the forces will be the same so the thing that varies are the materials and the shape. You see a lot of variation in materials and some slight variations in shape. For flex you have three primary directions, longitudinal, torsional, and width-wise. Longitudinal is the flex you typically know about, you feel it for butters, you feel it initiating turns. This is the flex you WANT. Torsional flex and width-wise (I don't know a better name for it) are different. You can't show either one in the store and you can't feel them without applying huge forces. They create really small deflections. You can deflect the board longitudinally inches, torsional flex is on the order of a few degrees, width-wise should be 0. Torsional is a measure of the twist of the board - you see this a lot more in skis than boards because they are longer and torsional bending is an angle over a length. So if you have a torsional flex of 2 degrees per meter, on a ski you will have 1.5 degrees less edge angle on the tip than under foot, and on an oil well you might have the bit several full revolutions behind the motor since it is thousands of meters under ground. Since you only have a foot or so behind your back foot and in front of your front foot, torsional flex is low, but you can feel it. Width-wise flex is basically the amount the board flexes under foot when you put it on edge. Here your bindings add a lot of the stiffness because in most setups the bindings run all the way across the board and are connected to each side of the board and create a solid platform. So back to EST. Lets talk about longitudinal flex first. The flex on a beam is dependent on the shape, the material, and the force. The shape primarily means the cross sectional moment of inertia. Basically every shape cross section has a different resistance to bending. That is why they make I-beams instead of just rectangles. The cross sectional moment of inertia of an I-Beam is way better than a solid rectangle. In fact, a solid rectangle is really bad at resisting flex. That is why a snowboard bends so damn well - which it needs to do - and a boat made with an equal amount of fiberglass setup with stringers and I-beams will flex very little for the same weight. The cross sectional moment of inertia for a rectangle is defined as (1/12)*width*height^3. For something like a board where the width is in several inches and the height is a fraction of an inch, cutting out a slot in the middle of the board a fraction of an inch wide for an ICS track does basically nothing. It won't weaken the board in this direction or change its flex in any appreciable manner because it is 2-5% of the total width of the board., Torsional is basically in the same boat. You have no appreciable change. However when you start looking at the board from the edge, ICS/EST falls flat on its face. Lets go 1" off the edge of the board. You have the full length of the board, and its height intact on any board. Your cross sectional moment of inertial is (1/12)*length*height^3. Now lets move to the inset line on normal board. You have (1/12)*(length-8*(width of insert holes))*height^3. Here, the moment of inerita is less, but not much less since you have only a few inserts. Maybe 5% less stiff on a normal 4x4, 10% on a 4x2 setup since you have 16 inserts in a row or whatever it is. Now go the centerline of the Burton board. You have two slots running nearly 30% of the length of the board. Now on your cross sectional moment of inertia it is something like (1/12)*(1/3)*(length)*height^3. You are talking 30-50% less stiffness there. OH SHIT this thing is going to break, or at least bend. But the engineers at Burton aren't dumb, they know this, so they reinforce the track out of metal. But oh shit there are stress concentrations around the radii at the end of the track, crack prorogation is defendant on crack radius! Shit! Its a small radius and there is a lot of stress here! But again, Burton engineers aren't dumb, so they reinforce that area. But wait theres more! Before you had two connects on the binding on each side of the centerline. This created something called a couple moment - you pull up on one side and push down on the other evenly. The board rotates around centerline and it distrubutes the forces nicely across the board. On ICS, you can push down like usual, but you only pull up in the middle where it is attached. So your couple moment is now centered halfway between the edge you have down and the centerline, so the force is unbalanced. Better reinforce that shit again. Again, Burton engineers know what they are doing so they handle all o f this, and as you said it lasts without breaking. So what ends up happening is to make it work there are 3 new stress concentrations that don't exist on other board -with the associated reinforcements to make it work which adds weight and complexity. Even if Burton makes this all work perfectly - which it might have, what is the advantage? You added weight and complexity in exchange for vendor lock in since your bindings and board are not compatible with anyone else, and the ability to what? Set the bindings at the spaces inbetween a 4x2 pattern? Really? To me it is a giant marketing scam forced on the engineers for no solid reasons. Everyone had worked out the 3 hole scheme so they wanted to make a new proprietary system to make people who don't understand this stuff say WOW THATS GREAT, it probably works like a built in binding system on skis! Well guess what - it DOESN't work that way - meaning allow more flex in the total system. And even if it did look over at the ski wall - what is the new trend this year? Going back to flat skis, cut the complexity, cut the weight. Why is Burton going in the opposite direction of all of these manufacturers? Do you really think that they know better than 10 other manufacturers? You have to credit Burton for their innovation, and ICE/EST might turn out to be the REAL DEAL, but don't jump into it yet unless you buy gear every year. It is just as likely that it will go the way of the Fusion binding or the SI binding or the Forum track as it likely to turn out to be the new high back. This is a great place to answer the question about mange-traction too. Magne traction adds little complexity, little weight, and has a REAL positive effect on performance. Is it right for everyone? Not really. I like it on my free ride boards but not my park boards (yet). But compare that simple change to this drastic one from Burton and ask yourself which one will have a greater impact on your riding (cutting through ice or being able to adjust your bindings a tiny bit better?) and ask yourself why you want to lock yourself into the Burton system over the Mervin one.

Well I've owned several Burton boards and several non-Burton boards and the Burton's always fall flat. "I've ridden just about every board out there" - ok if you rode every board from K2, Salomon, Ride, Arbor, Rome, GNU, Lib Tech, and Burton over the last few years then you would have ridden 50+ boards a year. We carried those brands when I worked at a shop for 5 years, and it WAS a full time job, and none of us had ridden EVERY board. Among the 5 who collectively made the purchasing decisions, we had ridden 90% of the boards, but not a single one of us had every ridden more than 70% of the boards. We definitely had all ridden all of the Burtons. Not a single one of us marked our favorite board as a Burton. We all had a lot of Burton gear because of the pro-forms, but we all agreed that our other boards were better. Specifically, our favorites were the GNU Altered Genetic and the Arbor Mystic. All 5 of us had one or the other as our favorite board. All 5 of us had the GNU Altered Genetics and 4 had the Arbor Mystic (I'm the one who didn't have one, but either the Rome Mod or the Arbor Mystic is my next board), and the debate was between which one of those two boards were better. I'd be interested to hear what Burton boards you think can top an Altered Genetics with magne traction. Of course when your name is "Burton71" I guess there is a psychological factor in what you feel, but objectively, I have yet to meet someone with one of those two boards - including all those I see on the hill because I do go out of my way to talk to those with these two boards to see if they agree - and no one has ever said anything other than "This is the best board I've ever had". Now if you want to hear a technical discussion on why ICS/EST sucks, I can bust out my mechanical engineering degree side and show you why the entire concept is fatally flawed from the start.

No I only hit the first one but that had everything to do with me being a pussy and nothing to do with my speed. But I would figure the hard part is getting enough speed for the first one, I always felt like I was booking it towards the second jump.

From the other thread:

Do you wax? I never have a problem but I ride a pretty big board for my size - 159cm and I only weigh 180 lbs.

I'm betting we're about a month away so time to get this forum moving in a more positive direction. November 23rd 2007 - been open a few weeks and starting to get the whole mountain blanketed What pictures do you guys have?

It really does. Wide, straight, steep. Bonus points for a sick background with the Lake behind it and also bonus points for being able to see it from the lodge and across the way.

Ha I believe I'm on said wall for all my complaining 2 years back. I don't care what makes them tick, they put out a great park so if us complaining in any way helps further that, I'm stoked.

This might be the first thing I ever buy on Blue-Ray, it seems worth it in HD. Glad my room mate has a PS3.