Can you guess what I’ve been doing here?
The off-season is a great time to FWIG and I have been doing a lot of it recently. Making sure all my gear is up to par and working correctly, as well as remembering what I didn’t like, or thought I could improve (at least for my needs), in regard to function and design of certain products. Some mods are risky, as far as over-modifying something to a point where it doesn’t even work anymore, so it’s always nice when the first flakes start to fly so you can test thing out in the field. Well…feel free to fly any day now flakes…cuz I’m ready to see how my mods are working. 🙂
trimming the fat off some quandrants?
yeah…you could say that. but i’m mostly just trying to free up the upper cuff to allow for more range of motion…mainly backward range of motion. i think i have succeeded in a big way and i hope they still ski just as good as they used to.
That’s funny bc I did the same mod with my Primes. Also ended up modifying the liner- which was to small for the shell to the point of ruining it. So I molded a pair of intuisions for the boots but thought they didn’t ski nearly as well as the stock liners due to lack of reinforcement in the upper part of the liner.
My problem was solved when I found a demo pair of TLT5 which I had my intuisions molded to. But I’ve ben thinking of getting another pair of liners for my primes since I’m told by BD that this years liner is not to small.
Curious How you went about your quadrant mod and how it worked?
trevorb…not sure how well my mod worked yet, but the cuff moves very easily now with little resistance across the entire range of motion…with a bit more backward movement.
i ground down some of the plastic on the bottom on the back of the upper cuff, raising the bottom of it up a bit and i also ground down some of the material at the base on the inside. i removed some of the plastic on the outside of the heal area, around the inside cuff rivet and cut off some of the plastic on the top front of the lower cuff in front of the shin. keeping my fingers crossed that is still skis well.
what did you do?
Trimming something……………
I presume FWIG means find ways to improve gear? One thought a friend and I had regarding cuff range of motion was it’s really more important for folks who have long, lower angle approaches. We see pictures of you on Jenny Lake all the time so I can appreciate your need for larger range of motion.
Here in the PNW on the other hand, at least for me, most of my BC adventures involve very little low angle travel. You could have all the cuff movement in the world and it really wouldn’t be maximized. I would think folks in the Wasatch would be in a similar boat. I can still see huge cuff movement as a plus on any boot you were going to walk in a great deal or climb more technical ground with crampons on. I guess I just see some people wondering about the cuff movement on Factors or other beef boots and don’t see the point.
I’d love to see the finished product of the Quadrants and your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to get out with them.
Thanks.
So, if you get them for free and then spend hours cutting, grinding and modifying them, they actually work? Sign me up! 😉
ryan…i see your point and there is often an hour or so (each way) of flat terrain on gtnp tours, so a lot of range of motion to increase stride really nice. BUT, i also notice huge gains when booting up glory in boots with lots of rearward travel as well.
i think once you taste how efficient and comfortable it is to tour with boots that have a large range of cuff motion, it’s hard to go back to boots with less. BUT, it is also nice to ski in boots that are beefier than the lighter weight/less stiff options that tend to offer the most cuff movement when in walk-mode.
sup with the alias straightchuter? i’d think you’d want total credit for every bd/rs jab you can get in…no? i sure have missed you around these parts. 🙂
FWIG= F*$k With Gear.
I began knawing away on my primes after I lost a toenail- presumably after hiking down the whitney portal trail for miles after skiing down as far as we could. My toes were getting thrust forward in the toebox on every downhill stride due to the lack of rearward travel.
So I took a mini 6″ carpenters saw or japanese saw and carefully sawed away material on the inner bottom part of the upper cuff. I slid the saw upwards into the upper and lower space and sawed and sawed sawed- removing about an 1/8″ of material throughout that whole area. Also used a file to take knock down the lower outside heel area as well.
It’s hard telling from your picture but it seems like I removed quite a bit less material than you.
gotcha trev…sounds like we did similar things there. i also lopped off a bit from the front of the lower cuff…in the shin area. it seemed to me the upper cuff, with the buckles clipped but open, was being restricted from the contact there. the big chunks in the photo are from that area.
Damn, why did they send me a size 6 to demo when I ordered a size 12?
Feel better RandoSteve? 🙂 You should try Scarpa boots – they work right out of the box. No FWIG required, although I understand the allure.
i can now sleep at night…thank you.
i’ve used many scarpa boots, denali, matrix, spirit3/4, f1. they were all good boots, but i got tired of carrying around spare parts for when the rivets, buckles and tongues fell off, so i tend gravitate towards other boot manufacturers now. i don’t think any of those scarpa models (except the f1’s of course, but i, as well as many others, ground plastic off of that boot to make them tour better as well…for rando racing purposes) had any more range of motion in the cuff than the quadrants…and i often swapped out parts to make them ski better.
for the record…i think there is room for improvement (whether it be increased stiffness, range of motion in the cuff, durability, decreased weight) in just about every boot model out there and i’m grateful that i have the opportunity to be able to tinker with some of them. it’s not about making the boots work…it’s about making them work better.
skiing pow down there yet? still raining up here.
I’m just too busy cutting the metal tags of my zippers to get to other modifications ;-).
of course you are ptor. are you replacing all those zipper pulls with fox-40 emergency whistles?
Ok…now I see where those big chunks came from in your photo. That’s a bold move removing that frontal section but I agree that part of the boot restricts the upper from flexing back further and more freely…but how about flexing it forward?
will you post a view of the boots, post mod?
yeah dick. let me test drive them first to see how it all works out. who knows…maybe that will happen this weekend.
After another FWIGing session w/ primes I’ve found the problem- at lease on my boots.
The interface between the upper and lower part of boot in the center- where the ski/walk mode is bulges out on both. I initially did not try to jap saw out that area on both inner upper and out lower bc it seemed like that was an unlikely area to bind. But after examining the gap- by looking down into the boot from above- when the upper is flexed all the way back you see NO daylight/gap in that center ski/walk mode area.
So with a utility knife and a jap saw I got after the inner upper in that section and then took a file to the lower in that same area that houses the ski/walk lever. Also filed the metal on the most lower part of the lever until I saw the light. You’ll need to pull forward that little achilles flap on the inside back part of the boot to view down in this area but it’s easy to bend.
I happy to say that the upper now is now able to go through its full range of motion with very little resistance:)
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