In @Ron ‘s excellent recap of the new K2 boot I must admit I got a little anxious - okay a lot anxious. I’ve seen that boot in the shop along with the offerings from Head & Salomon for 2019. Now I’m a 25, so I’ve not skied any of the 26’s. However, I’ve got about 50 days in a Dalbello Lupo Factory.
Now the Factory is a Grilimid / Walk Mode / GripWalk mastery:
My worries with this boot started one day when I met a group to skin up dawn patrol style & accidentally forgot my skins. No worries I just strapped my skis to my back and walked up. But what I noticed though was that the clog flexed an incredible amount while boot packing.
Fast forward to the middle of the season and I noticed that when I was testing skis for ExoticSkis.com, unless they had really dialed in the mounting point (something that is usually not the case & a lot of what we actually help determine with the testing), I greatly struggled with skis over 180 and wider than 100 mm. Once we got the mounting point down, it got a little bit more manageable but I really needed to finesse the turns. This was really the case with the Renouns - apologies to @Cyrus Schenck.
At about the same time I noticed that the Intuition liners that I usually love, had developed an an usual characteristic of just completely going to mush. I had never seen an Intuition “shit the bed” in so few days. My solution was to take a well molded Pro Wrap - burly liner & slap em in the Factory to improve my skiing/feel.
This really didn’t help-what I noticed in soft spring snow was that as I was 2/3 of the way through the turn the outside ski would actually run into the uphill ski. This is never happened! It was if I had no control of the uphill ski without a ton of weight on it.
The final straw for me in my cautionary tale came when @Eric Edelstein tossed me some proto 196 big mtn chargers from Liberty that were > 110mm.
Now it’s the end of the season, the snow is pretty soft and I’m not skiing hard-but I was full on ripping out of the binding. Basically the clog would just flex out and release. Now before I said anything about this I wanted to double blind the scenario so I grabbed my usual 104 mm trusted Renouns and completely went over the bindings (different from the Liberty set) and set the forward pressure, DIN and toe height PERFECTLY. Same scenario.
When I took them back to the shop and discuss the situation I was told two things:
1) “We were wondering when this would happen-pushing the envelope with these lightweight boots has been questionable. More so with skis over 100mm.”
2) “ this is a trend you’re going to have to be wary of-I would not put you in anything other than a solid sole PU boot moving forward.”
Now the shop has agreed to warrantee these in the fall and before anyone goes jumping off a cliff saying this is just N of one, I am 145 pounds and in my mid 40s-my charging days are behind me. There’s visible shear on the toe / heel lugs & most are skiing in a larger shell than mine & will have more of a moment arm to flex the clog.
I’m really fortunate that I get to test gear and regularly have a bunch of boots laying around, but if you were the average Joe you don’t have that luxury. Please consider this a cautionary warning.
I will say that the Factory for a soft snow uphill downhill boot is absolutely superb and I wouldn’t have any issues on my 85 mm touring skis in new snow, but most people are looking for that crossover boot which covers the entire quiver and if you tend to be on longer skis, charge or like to rip turns on fatter boards-it’s worth considering some of the possible issues with these sub 2000 gram boots pairs with GripWalk.
Discuss / Flame as needed.
Now the Factory is a Grilimid / Walk Mode / GripWalk mastery:
My worries with this boot started one day when I met a group to skin up dawn patrol style & accidentally forgot my skins. No worries I just strapped my skis to my back and walked up. But what I noticed though was that the clog flexed an incredible amount while boot packing.
Fast forward to the middle of the season and I noticed that when I was testing skis for ExoticSkis.com, unless they had really dialed in the mounting point (something that is usually not the case & a lot of what we actually help determine with the testing), I greatly struggled with skis over 180 and wider than 100 mm. Once we got the mounting point down, it got a little bit more manageable but I really needed to finesse the turns. This was really the case with the Renouns - apologies to @Cyrus Schenck.
At about the same time I noticed that the Intuition liners that I usually love, had developed an an usual characteristic of just completely going to mush. I had never seen an Intuition “shit the bed” in so few days. My solution was to take a well molded Pro Wrap - burly liner & slap em in the Factory to improve my skiing/feel.
This really didn’t help-what I noticed in soft spring snow was that as I was 2/3 of the way through the turn the outside ski would actually run into the uphill ski. This is never happened! It was if I had no control of the uphill ski without a ton of weight on it.
The final straw for me in my cautionary tale came when @Eric Edelstein tossed me some proto 196 big mtn chargers from Liberty that were > 110mm.
Now it’s the end of the season, the snow is pretty soft and I’m not skiing hard-but I was full on ripping out of the binding. Basically the clog would just flex out and release. Now before I said anything about this I wanted to double blind the scenario so I grabbed my usual 104 mm trusted Renouns and completely went over the bindings (different from the Liberty set) and set the forward pressure, DIN and toe height PERFECTLY. Same scenario.
When I took them back to the shop and discuss the situation I was told two things:
1) “We were wondering when this would happen-pushing the envelope with these lightweight boots has been questionable. More so with skis over 100mm.”
2) “ this is a trend you’re going to have to be wary of-I would not put you in anything other than a solid sole PU boot moving forward.”
Now the shop has agreed to warrantee these in the fall and before anyone goes jumping off a cliff saying this is just N of one, I am 145 pounds and in my mid 40s-my charging days are behind me. There’s visible shear on the toe / heel lugs & most are skiing in a larger shell than mine & will have more of a moment arm to flex the clog.
I’m really fortunate that I get to test gear and regularly have a bunch of boots laying around, but if you were the average Joe you don’t have that luxury. Please consider this a cautionary warning.
I will say that the Factory for a soft snow uphill downhill boot is absolutely superb and I wouldn’t have any issues on my 85 mm touring skis in new snow, but most people are looking for that crossover boot which covers the entire quiver and if you tend to be on longer skis, charge or like to rip turns on fatter boards-it’s worth considering some of the possible issues with these sub 2000 gram boots pairs with GripWalk.
Discuss / Flame as needed.
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