Let's talk turn radius (short vs long)

[François Pugh]

I think most skis were and are dual radius skis, just not marketed as such.
The side cut radius is just the radius of the circle that best fits (it's not an exact fit!) the skis edge. I'm pretty sure if you fit one circle to the front half of most skis and another to the back half of most skis, you would get two different sized circles.

 

[MarkP]

I'm an engineer who tries to follow the "close enough" rule. How many decimal places in a dimension do we really need? The amount that makes us feel good, of course.

For those who want to get the utmost in that radius calculation...

has been calculated to over 22 trillion decimal places!

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...with-9-trillion-more-digits-than-ever-before/

Pi day is less than 4 weeks away... a good day to see if you can feel all those digits.

 

[trailtrimmer]

Other than the little light up gizmo, what changed, other than much more drastic side cuts? Any suggestions for a ski like you describe, for a 6'1" 230lb guy, that'll do great at holding an edge on midwest ice?

Head Rally, Fischer Curv, Vokl Codes (curious about the new Deacon as well), K2 iKonic80, Stockli AX, etc would all fit the bill for carving hard with a bit of float. For really hard conditions, a cheater GS ski or something 72mm or narrower under foot is hard to beat. The harder the snow and ice, the narrower the ski should be.

 

[HateBoilerplate]

Head Rally, Fischer Curv, Vokl Codes (curious about the new Deacon as well), K2 iKonic80, Stockli AX, etc would all fit the bill for carving hard with a bit of float. For really hard conditions, a cheater GS ski or something 72mm or narrower under foot is hard to beat. The harder the snow and ice, the narrower the ski should be.

For the conditions here, it's usually best to gear up for ice. The one hill in Michigan that seems to get any reasonable amount of snow that doesn't get turned to a few bogs with ice between them by mid-afternoon is Mount Bohemia, and it's further away than I care to travel on a regular basis. The rest of the hills, even the "good" ones (Boyne Mountain/Highlands, Nubs Knob) usually end up with boilerplate ice on most of the fun slopes by the end of the morning session. "A bit of float" really only happens if there's just been a dumping, and you're making first tracks - but even then, they've run over everything with the cats before the lifts start up. There's no real "off-piste" skiing around here, because at most you'll have about 100 feet or so between two runs that you can in the trees, unless you ski straight off the back of the hill.

I've been looking at the K2 Super Charger (which is really well reviewed here), but it's...almost impressively hard to find a shop here that has them, no less has them to demo. It seems like the spiritual evolution of my Merlins. I wasn't at all a fan of the Ikonic - it annoyed me the same way the Volkl RTM did when I demoed it. It decided it wanted to be done with the turn, and bucked me out of it, no matter where I tried to put my weight (fore/aft). They seemed to be happiest skied like slalom skis, rather than flat-out carvers.

If I'm not looking directly at full-on race skis (which I am, but I want to consider stuff I can actually demo, rather than just pulling the trigger on a used ski purchase and potentially hating what I get, to at least have my bases covered), would I do best - given what I've described about hating and liking about the skis I've tried, looking for a ski that gets described as "damp"? Do the suggestions you posted still basically stand for that, or would you recommend something else if that's what I'm looking for?

 

[trailtrimmer]

If I'm not looking directly at full-on race skis (which I am, but I want to consider stuff I can actually demo, rather than just pulling the trigger on a used ski purchase and potentially hating what I get, to at least have my bases covered), would I do best - given what I've described about hating and liking about the skis I've tried, looking for a ski that gets described as "damp"? Do the suggestions you posted still basically stand for that, or would you recommend something else if that's what I'm looking for?

Go see Pat @ Nubs and demo like crazy. They have the Curv, Codes, Head Rally, Magnum and the Dynastar Speed zone. Also, don't discount trying the cheater GS skis, nothing sticks to hardpack like they do. They have Racetigers, Fischers, Heros, and Heads. Demo all you want all day long for a flat fee. They will also be selling off the demo fleet pretty soon, you may get the buy the skis you like the best at a hefty discount.

I'm typically up there every Sunday, but I'm on-call this weekend and can't be an hour and a half from work.

 

[HateBoilerplate]

Go see Pat @ Nubs and demo like crazy. They have the Curv, Codes, Head Rally, Magnum and the Dynastar Speed zone. Also, don't discount trying the cheater GS skis, nothing sticks to hardpack like they do. They have Racetigers, Fischers, Heros, and Heads. Demo all you want all day long for a flat fee. They will also be selling off the demo fleet pretty soon, you may get the buy the skis you like the best at a hefty discount.

I'm typically up there every Sunday, but I'm on-call this weekend and can't be an hour and a half from work.

An hour and a half from Nubs? Lucky! I'm down in the D, so that's a 4 hour drive for me. I see that their demo sale is this weekend, though. That's....tempting. I don't have good boots yet, though, so unless Nubs also demos boots, I would be hindered a bit by the rentals.

 

[HateBoilerplate]

Go see Pat @ Nubs and demo like crazy. They have the Curv, Codes, Head Rally, Magnum and the Dynastar Speed zone. Also, don't discount trying the cheater GS skis, nothing sticks to hardpack like they do. They have Racetigers, Fischers, Heros, and Heads. Demo all you want all day long for a flat fee. They will also be selling off the demo fleet pretty soon, you may get the buy the skis you like the best at a hefty discount.

I'm typically up there every Sunday, but I'm on-call this weekend and can't be an hour and a half from work.

I said screw it, and went up to nubs today. Quite a day trip! So glad I did, though. The prices were nice, and I got to demo all the race skis, and the other stuff they hadn't sold yet. I found the best ski in terms of versatility and utility on Michigan's snow was the Supershape I.Magnum - so I snagged a pair at a price tjat was too good to pass up. Even with it's short radius, it was still happy to carve out long turns.

I LOVED the world cup rebels GS ski, but it was suuuper cranky at low speeds, so it just isn't practical for Michigan hills.

 

[Scruffy]

I said screw it, and went up to nubs today. Quite a day trip! So glad I did, though. The prices were nice, and I got to demo all the race skis, and the other stuff they hadn't sold yet. I found the best ski in terms of versatility and utility on Michigan's snow was the Supershape I.Magnum - so I snagged a pair at a price tjat was too good to pass up. Even with it's short radius, it was still happy to carve out long turns.

I LOVED the world cup rebels GS ski, but it was suuuper cranky at low speeds, so it just isn't practical for Michigan hills.

Excellent! What size 177? How do you like them in comparison to your old Merlins? What about your boot situation?

 

[trailtrimmer]

Nubs is always worth the trip! Did it have a 2 degree on the side or a 3? There may be more to be had

 

[HateBoilerplate]

Excellent! What size 177? How do you like them in comparison to your old Merlins? What about your boot situation?

It was a bit crowded, so I couldn't open them up much. My Merlins are definitely more stable in chop, but the probably weigh a ton more. I got 177. I was hoping to try the i.rally in it's longer length, but the guy who demoed th one pair they had in that size bought them

 

[HateBoilerplate]

Nubs is always worth the trip! Did it have a 2 degree on the side or a 3? There may be more to be had

That I'm not sure about. Any easy way for me to tell? If I had to guess, I'd say it could get sharper. They didn't have the best bite on ice.

 

[karlo]

Black Crows measures numbers to the 10th decimal is that they design each model of their skis to be length specific. You can see from the numbers below, different lengths of the same model, Camox, have the same waist width and turning radius, but slightly different tip and tail widths.

So, it appears that Black Crows believes that radius is a critical parameter

 

[James]

Some makers keep the radius and mid width constant and adjust tip and tail size to do it. I think this used to be more common than it is today, but don't really know. It just seems it's become much more accepted that longer skis will have less sidecut.

I'm not a big fan of longer skis with lots of sidecut.

Oh, Black Crows just lists length to 1 decimal of a cm, 0.1cm = 1mm. Not the tenth decimal, 0.0000000001 cm, - one 10 billionth of a cm. That would be something.