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SwedishFish

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Thanks. Do you get into the boots racer style? How did you secure the Carv soles / wires to make sure they don’t get damaged when you’re getting in and out if the boots?

I have zipfit liners and slide my foot, with liners on, in and out of my boots each time with no problem.

I installed my Carv units like this:

 

Lorenzzo

Be The Snow
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Mine said November 15 also, but I got a shipping notice yesterday. Their website now says they have units in stock.

No shipping notice yet. I'd guess they received a whole lot of units at once and they're trying to get them process and shipped. Or they don't like that I'm in UT and it's snowing.

I have zipfit liners and slide my foot, with liners on, in and out of my boots each time with no problem.

I installed my Carv units like this:


Do you have boot heaters too?
 

mikes781

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Thanks. Do you get into the boots racer style? How did you secure the Carv soles / wires to make sure they don’t get damaged when you’re getting in and out if the boots?
I just moved to zipfits and from what I’ve seen it shouldn’t be a problem. I have the wires secured to the inside of my boot with Gorilla tape.
 

VS_Power

Booting up
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Mar 31, 2021
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Palo Alto, California
Thanks.

Racer style = putting the liner on to your foot and lacing it up and then putting your foot and liner into the boot shell.
Thanks for the note! I don't put my boots on racer style, I just do it the old fashioned way. With the tape I wouldn't worry about the unit moving even if doing things racer style. I'd probably add extra tape to the footpads though for peace of mind
 

Wade

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My Carv package showed up today.

First impressions of the quality of the components is very good - it seems well made and feels like it could be pretty durable. I test fit one of the footbeds and have my ski boots on (one with Carv, one without) and I can definitely feel a small difference in fit, but it doesn't seem like it will bother me at all and while I hadn't noticed it skiing last season, maybe there was a small amount of volume above my instep and the top of my foot that I could stand to have taken up, so maybe the Carv is a positive for boot fit for me.

The battery unit attaching to my booster strap is a pretty tight fit. There's not a ton of room between the buckle and where the strap attaches to my boot, so the battery only has a quarter inch or so on either side of it, but I guess that's all it needs.

I do have a question for existing Carv users though. What do you use to secure the section of the cable that protrudes from the boot when you're not using it? While I'm hoping I'll get to use Carv reasonably frequently, I won't want to use it every day, particularly if I'm mostly going to be skiing off piste. There's a pretty good length of cable sticking out of my boot with a somewhat fragile looking connector on the end of it which seems like it should be secured somehow to avoid flopping around and getting damaged. Maybe just tucking it under my booster strap or under my gaiter will be OK, but I'm not really sure at this point.
 

mikes781

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I just wrap the cable back under the booster strap when I’m not using it.
 

Zirbl

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What do you use to secure the section of the cable that protrudes from the boot when you're not using it? While I'm hoping I'll get to use Carv reasonably frequently, I won't want to use it every day,
Can't they be taken in and out the boot? (Not a suggestion, a question from the curious and ignorant.)
 

Wade

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Can't they be taken in and out the boot? (Not a suggestion, a question from the curious and ignorant.)
The insoles are taped to the boot board and the cable is taped to the inside of the shell. You could theoretically take them out, but they'd need to be reinstalled with tape each time you put them back in. The cables aren't detachable from the sensor in case that was what you're asking.
 

SkiSVLikeAgassi

100% proud ski and tennis bum
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I do have a question for existing Carv users though. What do you use to secure the section of the cable that protrudes from the boot when you're not using it?

I just leave the trackers/batteries on the strap all the time, so the cable is always always plugged in and never loose.

Whether I use them or not doesn't change a thing, only whether I charge them or not the night before... ;)
 

Wade

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I take them out regularly. And I don’t worry about tape.

No issues with not taping them down? Do they need to be recalibrated when you put them back in? I’d love to only have them in when I want to use them?
 

Wade

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I used my Carv inserts for the first time over the last couple of days.

I think it works pretty well. The feedback I got focused on areas I’ve worked on in the past, and given it was my first skiing of the season, I wasn’t surprised that those were the areas that need some attention. The common themes were getting to my new outside edge earlier, smoother application of pressure to the new outside ski, and being more conscious of driving my inside knee into the turn.

in terms of actually using it, I really enjoyed it in the couple of hours I skied by myself. I got sucked in pretty quickly to the gamification side of it and found myself wanting to improve my scores in the various modes I tried. I wound up staying out for a few more runs skiing by myself than I probably would have without it. The tips were decent and it was good to have a prompt for a specific focus on each run and be able to both feel the changes and see metrics for how if affected my skiing.

Where I didn’t love it was skiing with friends and family. I love skiing for a lot of reasons, and pursuing technical improvement is only one of them. Having it turned on while I was really focused on other things just felt distracting and I turned it off after a couple of runs.

I wound up taking the installation tape off so I can take the Carv inserts out of my boots when I’m not planning to use them and it seems to work fine without the tape. I have some shims that are the same thickness as the Carv inserts that I put in when I take the Carv inserts out, and it worked out great - I couldn’t tell any difference in boot fit with Carv in or out.

In summary, it‘s a winner. I’ll use it during times I’m skiing by myself (usually when the kids are in their programs and my wife is done for the day) and treat it as a tool to help me to focus on the things I need to work on to be a better skier. I often try to work on stuff during those times anyway, and I think Carv will make sure I’m working on the right stuff and maybe push me to stay out a bit longer.
 

Wade

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Carv told you what to do with your knee, or you deduced it from what it was telling you?

It was implied in the tips more than directly stated.

Inside ski angle lower than outside ski suggests some A-framing, and being conscious of driving that inside knee into the turn has been helpful for me in the past with that issue.

There were some tips in there as well about keeping knees pointed in the same direction (imagine lasers projecting from your knees and don’t let them cross).
 

RSTuthill

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I dunno, I have come late to this discussion. So let me apologize in advance for not reading 17 pages of discussion. But, FWIW, I have communicated several times with Carve folks regarding their product and have never gotten satisfactory answers.

I am an engineer and so I want more answers than most before I make a $250 purchase (or whatever the price is these days). My first reservation is that I think that the concept has one significant flaw. That is, the important thing is how the skier is loading the ski at any particular point in time. That cannot be measured with a footbed. Shin loading on the boot, shell transmitted to ski, is too important. It has to be measured at the sole bottom interface with the ski, but even there the influence of the binding would introduce large error. Shin loading cannot be estimated unless done empirically with an extensive database generated with a large amount of instrumentation and including skiers of widely differing ability and stiffness and temperature of the boots. I would need to see data to substantiate their claims of accurate estimated shin loading.

I also asked to know how they measure ski angle perpendicular to the sagittal plane. Never got an answer. I happen to have significantly canted boots high to the outside which is why I am on the top step on this issue.

I understand the company wanting to protect their intellectual property and trade secrets, but I am a little dubious when I have doubts about the basic technical approach. Willing to listen to discussion with an open mind, however.
 

Wade

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I dunno, I have come late to this discussion. So let me apologize in advance for not reading 17 pages of discussion. But, FWIW, I have communicated several times with Carve folks regarding their product and have never gotten satisfactory answers.

I am an engineer and so I want more answers than most before I make a $250 purchase (or whatever the price is these days). My first reservation is that I think that the concept has one significant flaw. That is, the important thing is how the skier is loading the ski at any particular point in time. That cannot be measured with a footbed. Shin loading on the boot, shell transmitted to ski, is too important. It has to be measured at the sole bottom interface with the ski, but even there the influence of the binding would introduce large error. Shin loading cannot be estimated unless done empirically with an extensive database generated with a large amount of instrumentation and including skiers of widely differing ability and stiffness and temperature of the boots. I would need to see data to substantiate their claims of accurate estimated shin loading.

I also asked to know how they measure ski angle perpendicular to the sagittal plane. Never got an answer. I happen to have significantly canted boots high to the outside which is why I am on the top step on this issue.

I understand the company wanting to protect their intellectual property and trade secrets, but I am a little dubious when I have doubts about the basic technical approach. Willing to listen to discussion with an open mind, however.
A couple of points on this.

You're obviously completely within your rights not to purchase because you didn't get a satisfactory answer on the engineering behind the product. I don't think it's particularly realistic though to expect your potential $200 purchase to to give you access to someone who has a deep understanding of the engineering.

On the cuff pressure, I think that's a good point. I don't think it necessarily needs to be measured though to understand what the skier is doing in the turn. Carv claims to have data from 150 million turns overall and more specifically they claim to have analyzed turns by high level skiers to understand what those turns look like both in real life and in data. I think it's reasonable to assume that plenty of the turns they analyzed had skiers pressuring the front of the boot. Without being able to directly measure pressure on the cuff, someone pressuring the cuff in the same way as the high level skiers they analyzed will at a given speed / turn shape / edge angle produce similar foot pressure and accelerometer readings as the example turn. I think it's likely they can tell enough about the turn from those readings to understand with reasonable certainty what happened and provide meaningful feedback to the skier. Would it be better to measure all possible variables? Of course. Can you get most of the way there with more limited measurements and good data analysis. Absolutely. This reminds me a bit of golf launch monitors where consumer grade models aren't as good as the commercial $25K models. While the consumer grade products get the occasional shot wrong, their data model is sufficiently good that even without measuring all the stuff the high end models can measure, they still get very close to the right answers - certainly close enough to provide good, solid, useful data to the user.

On the edge angle question, the footbeds are installed and the boots are placed on a flat surface to calibrate what zero looks like. So if your boots are canted, that should be taken into account in calibration. Again though, whether it is measuring an edge angle at 42* or 45* isn't really the point of it. I think it's more useful to understand whether the movement you just incorporated into your skiing increased your edge angle relative to your usual score than it is to understand the absolute number.
 

Mike King

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I dunno, I have come late to this discussion. So let me apologize in advance for not reading 17 pages of discussion. But, FWIW, I have communicated several times with Carve folks regarding their product and have never gotten satisfactory answers.

I am an engineer and so I want more answers than most before I make a $250 purchase (or whatever the price is these days). My first reservation is that I think that the concept has one significant flaw. That is, the important thing is how the skier is loading the ski at any particular point in time. That cannot be measured with a footbed. Shin loading on the boot, shell transmitted to ski, is too important. It has to be measured at the sole bottom interface with the ski, but even there the influence of the binding would introduce large error. Shin loading cannot be estimated unless done empirically with an extensive database generated with a large amount of instrumentation and including skiers of widely differing ability and stiffness and temperature of the boots. I would need to see data to substantiate their claims of accurate estimated shin loading.

I also asked to know how they measure ski angle perpendicular to the sagittal plane. Never got an answer. I happen to have significantly canted boots high to the outside which is why I am on the top step on this issue.

I understand the company wanting to protect their intellectual property and trade secrets, but I am a little dubious when I have doubts about the basic technical approach. Willing to listen to discussion with an open mind, however.
Ok, so here's the deal: you can look for the perfect measurement system or you can purchase a system that is commercially available with support, development, and metrics that translate into skiing tips validated on AI models trained on millions of observations. Your choice.

It's easy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. No doubt that measuring shin pressure would improve certain aspects of the Carv system. But at what cost? A recent academic paper examined the differences between estimating force with pressure insoles versus specialist bindings with force plates. The authors found that the differences in ability of the skier. Expert skiers place far less pressure longitudinally through the cuff of the boot, while intermediate and beginning skiers often pressure the front or back of the boot causing the ski to skid and this element of cuff pressure is not directly measured by pressure insoles. Yet, the authors concluded that pressure insoles with trained AI models may be a useful training device.

The fact of the matter is that there isn't, to my knowledge, a pressure plate or pressure sock instrument system that is available to the general public. Even more telling is that there isn't such a product that is coupled with consumer software that provides the user with insight into what elements in their skiing are contributing to or detracting from ski performance. So, be that Carv is not the perfect product, it is a product that can help most skiers to identify and track issues with their skiing.

Mike
 

RSTuthill

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A recent academic paper examined the differences between estimating force with pressure insoles versus specialist bindings with force plates. The authors found that the differences in ability of the skier. Expert skiers place far less pressure longitudinally through the cuff of the boot, while intermediate and beginning skiers often pressure the front or back of the boot causing the ski to skid and this element of cuff pressure is not directly measured by pressure insoles.

Mike
Can you provide a citation or link to the paper? Authors, journal or technical meeting, society publication, and date?

And is the highlighted portion above your opinion or a conclusion the authors drew from measured data? Is it valid for most surfaces and conditions?
 

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