A couple of questions that I've been pondering as I've been mounting various skis recently:
1. What is the minimum amount of fore/aft deviation necessary to have a discernible effect on ski performance or character? Asked another way, if you start with the factory recommended mount position as the baseline and move fore or aft of that in 1mm increments, at what point will the change in position have a discernible effect? I realize that there are both objective and subjective elements to this and that it will vary from ski to ski taking into account shape, design and length, but I'm curious because a lot of people state their preferred mount points on various skis in .5cm increments, which would suggest that at least those people can feel .5cm differences in position.
2. Related to the first question, what is the acceptable installation tolerance for a binding mount that you are having done or being asked to do - i.e., if a shop is asked to mount a binding at a particular position, how much deviation from that is acceptable? On the one hand, if you can tell differences down to .5cm, then anything more than perhaps a mm would arguably be unacceptable. On the other hand, expecting precision down to 1mm (or even 5mm) on a 1700-1900mm ski would arguably be unreasonable.
Personally, having spent a couple years using demo bindings on my skis and constantly adjusting the positions, I'm certain that I can't tell a .5cm difference and I'm not sure that I can reliably tell a 1 cm difference either, but at 1.5-2cm it starts to become really noticeable.
Thoughts?
1. What is the minimum amount of fore/aft deviation necessary to have a discernible effect on ski performance or character? Asked another way, if you start with the factory recommended mount position as the baseline and move fore or aft of that in 1mm increments, at what point will the change in position have a discernible effect? I realize that there are both objective and subjective elements to this and that it will vary from ski to ski taking into account shape, design and length, but I'm curious because a lot of people state their preferred mount points on various skis in .5cm increments, which would suggest that at least those people can feel .5cm differences in position.
2. Related to the first question, what is the acceptable installation tolerance for a binding mount that you are having done or being asked to do - i.e., if a shop is asked to mount a binding at a particular position, how much deviation from that is acceptable? On the one hand, if you can tell differences down to .5cm, then anything more than perhaps a mm would arguably be unacceptable. On the other hand, expecting precision down to 1mm (or even 5mm) on a 1700-1900mm ski would arguably be unreasonable.
Personally, having spent a couple years using demo bindings on my skis and constantly adjusting the positions, I'm certain that I can't tell a .5cm difference and I'm not sure that I can reliably tell a 1 cm difference either, but at 1.5-2cm it starts to become really noticeable.
Thoughts?