experiment with canting

[Jaakko Hyvönen]

The season is over for most of us but just wish to share my positive experience with canting. If you feel like not getting a proper edge hold on injected snow or comparable even when you’ve really sharp edges I would warmly recommend experimenting with canting. With many bindings it is straightforward to do: simply insert a thin piece of plastic, say, from an old wax-box, between the binding and the plate and you can easily check the effects. For me this has worked great. I have now 1,5 and 2 degree cantology cants in my boots and I feel comfortable now even on steepest and hardest parts of the slopes as compared to uncanted boots previously. The coach of our masters group was quite surprised to learn that I’ve such a considerable canting. He commented that max that he knew from real racers was 0,5. I replied that there is a very natural explanation: junior racers with other than optimal configuration of their legs are weeded out early on. At least this was given as an explanation in a thread couple of yrs ago in now long gone epicski-forum. So, experimenting highly recommended. Naturally there is some routing to do afterwards but that isn’t a major investment and well worth it.

 

[Sidewinder]

I’ll second this. A few years ago I took my son (a national level racer) to be fitted by PJ Dewey (well worth the nine hour drive). While there I asked him to have a look at my alignment, and he played around with shims of varying degrees and all of a sudden liked what he saw. He ground and plated my boots to match. The next day, I skied for the first time that season on tricky November snow at Sunday River and felt like I just had a month of lessons. I honestly skied better that first day on snow than I had at the end of the previous season. I know there are critics, however I wasn’t expecting anything great, so no placebo effect, but I was blown away by the results. YMMV.