advice on skis

Theres 1 ski that keeps getting recommended to me for this kind of skiing.....Atomic Blackeye Ti

Just to give another view on this. You say you ski 85% on piste, but would like a ski that you can use off piste. The beauty of today's skis is that you can choose different skis, for different purposes. In order to have a ski that will be easier to use off piste, you will have to sacrifice a lot of on piste performance, and ease of use. Unless you are a powerful skier, waist widths above 80mm will be hard to tilt on edge. This will drastically reduce your skill progression on piste. Sure, you will see people carving on piste with 80mm plus waist skis, but you can bet they didn't learn to carve on them. Also, if you take off and land on your edges into a new turn on hard snow, a wider waist will bruise the sides of your calves as you land, and put a lot of strain on your knees.

Unless you intend to ski backwards, don't bother with a twin tip. For most people, it's just a fashion. You loose valuable ski, and edge length.

New types of camber (the natural curve you see in a ski) are make narrower skis more versatile. Not only do tip and tail camber, help to keep a ski up in powder, but will also make carving on hard snow easier. An example of this is Rossignol's auto turn http://www.rossignol.com/index.php?_lang=US&_cnt=ho&alias=rossignol-innovations1&oid=INNOVAT:4jg4mzxt26wi

If I spent 85% of my time on piste. I wouldn't sacrifice too much on piste piste performance, for a few powder runs. If you are going to do a class on skiing powder, rent some suitable skis for that day.

Trencher wrote:Just to give another view on this. You say you ski 85% on piste, but would like a ski that you can use off piste. The beauty of today's skis is that you can choose different skis, for different purposes. In order to have a ski that will be easier to use off piste, you will have to sacrifice a lot of on piste performance, and ease of use. Unless you are a powerful skier, waist widths above 80mm will be hard to tilt on edge. This will drastically reduce your skill progression on piste. Sure, you will see people carving on piste with 80mm plus waist skis, but you can bet they didn't learn to carve on them. Also, if you take off and land on your edges into a new turn on hard snow, a wider waist will bruise the sides of your calves as you land, and put a lot of strain on your knees.

Unless you intend to ski backwards, don't bother with a twin tip. For most people, it's just a fashion. You loose valuable ski, and edge length.

New types of camber (the natural curve you see in a ski) are make narrower skis more versatile. Not only do tip and tail camber, help to keep a ski up in powder, but will also make carving on hard snow easier. An example of this is Rossignol's auto turn http://www.rossignol.com/index.php?_lang=US&_cnt=ho&alias=rossignol-innovations1&oid=INNOVAT:4jg4mzxt26wi

If I spent 85% of my time on piste. I wouldn't sacrifice too much on piste piste performance, for a few powder runs. If you are going to do a class on skiing powder, rent some suitable skis for that day.

Interesting, you can tell Trencher is a piste skier and is "traditional" in his thinking (no offence).
My skis are 82mm in the waist, I have no problem getting up on the edges, in fact I found them a lot easier to handle on piste than any of my previous "carvers".

I think the OP was suggesting that he was likely to spend most time skiing pistes, but would like to have the ability to venture off the piste or hit the powder without having to worry their skis are not suitable. These days, there are a lot of all mountain skis which, for a recreational skier like me, do not give you less performance on piste, but with wider waists etc give you the option to venture where you want without having to have a choice of skis or feel the need to rent.
My Scott Neo's are a perfect example of the so called one quiver ski IMO, which is why I got them.
I mentioned the Atomic's as these have been mentioned to me a lot over the past couple of seasons, and are probably the kind of ski the OP would benefit from.

For reference, I do agree that twin tips are a bit of a fashion, although obviously free stylers use them for landing and skiing switch. My skis are semi twins as they are not fully twin tips, and theres no issue with having twin tips, as long as you realise that you might want to go up a length as the bases makes less contact for the length of the ski.
Personally, I think twinnies look really cool, and they give the average recreational skier who likes to ski where he wants to exactly what I want from a ski.

Hope this helps.

Tony_H wrote:

Interesting, you can tell Trencher is a piste skier and is "traditional" in his thinking (no offence).
My skis are 82mm in the waist, I have no problem getting up on the edges, in fact I found them a lot easier to handle on piste than any of my previous "carvers".

Anything but traditional, though I do spend most of my time on piste, and no offense taken.

Tony, there is on edge, and then there is on edge. While wide skis are great for soft snow conditions, I find that above 80mm on hard snow, there is a lot of lateral stress on the legs.
It also takes a lot more commitment from the skier to do more than just lift the edges off the snow when it is hard packed. I know some people are already doing it, but I think that in the future, abducted stance bindings will become common on skis with waist over 85mm, or so. When I used to ride a skwal with a waist of about 125mm, setting the bindings to angles of just 5 and 10 degrees, made a huge difference to how easy it was to tip the skwal on edge.

You're just showing off now

After a week of tedious searching the web for the right ski for me, I'm still lost.

I think I didn't define what I want well enough, Since so many people recommend differnet skis as the best and I'm still considering all of them.

ski area: 80-85% on piste, the rest off piste.
ski level: on the 9 points system should be at 7...
would that make me an advanced skier?
I like to be active and turn a lot, not going straight.

One thing I'm worried about in the 80+ waist skis, Can you still improve your on-piste technique? by that I mean turning on edge, short and long turns, weight shifting etc.

Thanks,

Trencher, above 80mm waist do you reduce the edge angle?
I use an edge cut of 89 deg. Typical waist on my skis is about 60mm.

Dave Mac wrote:
Typical waist on my skis is about 60mm.

That's so sweet...how do you stay upright, once you stop :P

Skinniest of mine 76mm, fattest 86mm. Both classed as All Mountain ie: not Fat. At least 1 pair has 89 edge angle.

Dotan, frequency and ease of use in short/long radius turns is mostly determined by the sidecut of the ski in use. My Punishers were 172's but had a 15m radius and wanted to turn all the time, which was a PITA on occasions. I now have shorter ski's at 165 but they have a 21m turn radius. Narrower sidecuts need to keep turning, it's not just the waist size on the ski.

The scale you are using to judge your standard, can you post a link?