Ski Length

Ian Wickham wrote:

Trencher wrote:I think what Dave might have been getting at, is that as a novice, your speeds are low. Therfore you don't generate the force in a turn to flex the ski as a more experienced skier might. Which brings up another question, what is the flex of your boots ? At your size, the average ski boot of 80 to 100 flex would be like a wellington boot.


Trencher

I think you are just confusing him now :evil:

What just him I thought it was most of us :shock:

It may be a bit confusing to start with, but if nothing else, you get the idea that there are questions to be asked, and not just to accept a shop sales person's opinion. And as I was suggesting earlier, it might that someone phrases something in a way that the light bulb comes on with something that didn't make sense before.

Trencher

Last post on page 2 of this thread.

Interestingly in Austria a couple of weeks ago, the ski hire shop had an Argos style system where we had to put down height weight, skiing experience/level on a form and hand it to the technician.

This was then processed and most of us ended up with shorter ski's than usual, mine came out the usual 160's and they calculated the correct DIN setting etc. at the same time.

You could obviously ask for longer ski's but this was their recommendation, I guess you ski on what you are comfortable with at the end of the day, which is 160's for me though probably should be 165 but mentally I find it an issue moving up.

Go from your 160s to some 175s for a day and you'll soon be fine on 165s. I skied on 178s for a week last season, and whilst they were great at crudbusting and fresh powder, they were too long for me and felt clumsy. My previous skis were 159s and I now feel right at home on 166s.

After 7 years on nothing but 99.9cm snowblades, I switched back to 170cm carvers this year. Thought I'd wobble all over the place, but felt great. I think most people could cope well with quite a variety of ski sizes if they wanted to try. Saying that, I've got some old 2 metre straight skis in the garage, but not brave enough to try them again.

localboy wrote:After 7 years on nothing but 99.9cm snowblades, I switched back to 170cm carvers this year. Thought I'd wobble all over the place, but felt great. I think most people could cope well with quite a variety of ski sizes if they wanted to try. Saying that, I've got some old 2 metre straight skis in the garage, but not brave enough to try them again.

How did you manage 7 years on blades !!! You've been missing out on a lot my friend, i.e POWDER ! :lol:

How did you manage 7 years on blades !!! You've been missing out on a lot my friend, i.e POWDER ! :lol:

The blades come up the mountain with me each week but sit in the boot of the car. Not sure I can let go of them yet.