The above meme and a conversation with Ryan (the Owner) about weathers, on which later there will be specifics, got me thinking for the umpteenth time about the function in our society of being right. As in, knowing the correct answer, understanding a certain atmospheric pattern of flow, eating pasta like you're "supposed to", and so on. Spoiler alert, slurping and being messy is wrong, no matter what certain cultures might yell at you from the sidelines. It's never okay to make more noise than necessary while eating. And it's okay to cut your spaghetti. It's just food.
Anyhoodles (quoting our local weather pedant): getting it right. I've been constantly reminded of this sorta thing over the years. It's often frustrating to me, because most folks act simultaneously like there is no value in knowing things and that if you make attempts to educate them for not knowing things, then you're the asshole. Which brings us to how ski bindings work.
Thing is, it feels like people are militantly anti-knowing-stuff. Take the simple and not-so-humble binding. It locks your boot to the ski. With minimal exception, it uses some sort of vertical lock on the boot's heel that engages and disengages in an arc, a spring to exert forward pressure through the boot's sole in a consistent fashion throughout the various compressions and extensions of the ski, and if it's the most common variety of binding, has at least two sorts of releases governed by springs that can be compressed or relaxed to stiffen or ease those two release types in case of a crash. The obvious one is the heel piece that like goes up and down and stuff, and the less obvious one is a rotational release at the toe, managed either by a rotary motion of the entire toepiece or flappy wings that spread apart. Marker useta make this binding with a turntable heel that hip folks back in the late 80s would get out of by rapidly twisting their boots rather than hitting the eject button that Marker engineers didn't really make all that accessible. I'll find a picture if I can. Otherwise, you pretty much push down on the heelpiece and step out. At any rate, there's not much more to it. Thing is, to my endless and constant consternation, it's the last thing that folks focus on and misunderstand. DIN Release value refers to an adjustment that governs how easy and/or hard it is to do said twisting and/or ejecting upward out of said binding. If your eyes glazed over, bear with me.
I wish I could get paid for every time someone has yelled "CHECK YER DINS" from the chair when somebody fell and their skis came off. Or every time Unofficial says somebody gots ta crank up his dins. Or for every comment on some silly internet reel when somebody does a backflip off a sweet jump and their skis just go straight without them. Release value--the name the law goons require us mechanics to call DIN instead of calling it DIN, even though customers all say and know(ish)what DIN is and get confused by me saying "release value"--is only one part of the equation, just like how many inches of snow fell compared to what was forecast. Folks will get het up when three days ahead of a small storm the forecast said 6-8" only 5" fell. Never mind that these same folks can't forecast what time they'll finish dinner when they just started eating. It took xijillions of whoserwhats of comprurtering power to make that forecast, and given all of the various variables the weather gnomes overshot by 1-3". They knew that it would be cloudy and not sunny, they knew that it would be cold enough to snow, they knew when within a few hours, and they even knew within a few millimetres how much water would be available 300 air miles from the ocean after crossing every sorta ripple-inducing (and therefore precip-inducing) mountain and deserts that encourage frontal regenesis, and yet this very accurate forecast is somehow seen as a complete failure.
Which brings us to a point of sorts. First day on the job, 1 December '007, Brad's telling me about bindings. This is before my Legacy got stuck. That's a story for another day. This is after I froze my fingers helping Murphy install the awnings Ty traded for a lifetime storage pass. He says there's forward pressure, which does all the heavy lifting, and there's DIN. Then he's like "but the law trolls will tell you to call it release value." Anyway, he says, and I subsequently verify through daily interactions, that folks will always be confused and that for the next however many years, you'll just be Abe Simpson yelling at clouds. Most undesired releases are incorrectly set forward pressure. Super boring, not a marquee word that everybody knows, but like that annoying cat at the top of this page, the truth. That yellow-booted Look binding user I posted 55 years ago at the not-top of the page is a learning experience. He could have twisted out of his bindings in a situation where he applied too many rotational yanks on the toepieces--given where he's (frantically checks DIN chart) likely set, at least 105 Nm, but probly closer to 140 or more--which is what the dang toepieces are for in the first place, or his ski mechanic was like "Forward pressure? What?!" and then they be havin words.
All of this to say I'm tired. There is so much easily available, correct info out there, and folks instead wake up and choose violence. Focus on one thing, and ignore all the other things. Decide, somehow, that a fairly random number isn't just a representation of ability and human worth and/or manliness, even though they clearly think it is at least that, but the literal, physical embodiment of it all. That running a 7 makes you less of a person, or less of a skier, or both, than somebody stackin 16s on his Pivot 2.0 18s (and cracking them cos he can't use the provided pole cutout like a normal human, which, side note, has the added benefit of not destroying your skis' bases), or bending brakes to get his never-indemnified Marker Comp 30 (go ahead and fact check, I'll wait) to fit his 114mm Big Mountain Comp Destroyers, never mind that to a rational person like myself and most folks I know, having bendy tendons and boingy ligaments is far preferable to brittle ones that have been surgically repaired thirteen times.
You asked for specifics, so I'll give you some. Ryan (the Owner) was talking to his daughter before his work shift and her school shift. She was all excited cos there were some snowflakes falling out of the textbook Treasure Valley Inversion stratus deck. She was 11. I remember 11. Any snow in town at all and I'd almost poop myself. At any rate, Ryan tells her it's not snowing, it's just that the cloud has pollution or dust or something and the stratus (he called it fog even though it was above ground level) is freezing onto the particles and they are collecting ice until they're heavy enough to drift down and appear to us earthlings as snowflakes. Which is, poetically, a succinct and accurate description of snowflake nucleation and snowfall.
The other day, let's call it "yesterday", cos it that makes it immediate even if you're reading this in The Future, I rode Chair 1 at Bogus with a fairly big cat and his lady-friend. Not sure if they's partners or on a date or just ski buddies, but duder was real hard tryna impress her. Falling over himself explaining the concept of damping (killing vibration) and why he "needs" a DIN of 14. If you look at that ever-exciting chart up yonder stairs, you'll notice there is conspicuously NOT a 14 to be seen on the chart. He said, and I'm paraphrasing a little but only cos I can't remember verbatim, "If I run a 12, there's like pressure and I fall out when I land a big trick." The woman unfortunate enough to spend a glorious ski day listening to Macho Man Randy Shrinkage talk about DINs reacted like my 7 year-old niece Abby did when I explained why I rented a 7-passenger Ford Flex when I was only one person. A sarcastic "Oh yeah?" Randy just plugged right along. "Yeah, my buddy and I ran my DIN chart, y'know, like if you were renting skis?" (Italics most definitely his, disdain heavy and judgment dripping.) "I ended up a 12, but like, that was as a Type III." (Again, his.) "I'm a III++."
Now, even if you've never performed the simple task of running a DIN chart for a customer, you can still pick up from my tone that this cat was abjectly full of shit. The lack of III++ notwithstanding, why should I care? I don't, at least not about him, but it's this adherence to a misapprehension that pervades the ski world and at times makes my job harder, or at least more frustrating. I have to waste time, time which I could spend on literally anything else, like breaking down cardboard or, I don't know, rearranging my metal scrapers, explaining DIN again, to another customer who doesn't understand physics or care that physics exists and governs everything. I have to explain how, just like spoke tension vs deflection, DIN is one value and boot sole length is the other, and that on its own, DIN is meaningless. If you look at my handy chart I stole from Salomon, you'll notice that to the left, where the body has more leverage over the boot, there are higher values, and to the right, where the boot has more leverage over the body, there are lower values. Up to 2 DINs lower. All resulting in the exact same amount of torque being exerted on the binding's springs. Such that, if you have a boot sole that is 335 mm long and you just gotta have that 12 DIN cos yer buddies do, but you're only 5'9" and a buck seventy, say good bye to your Achilles' tendons and all of your cruciate ligaments cos that puts you in the same range as somebody who's taller than 6'4" and at minimum 40 ell bees more massive than y'all.
And, icing on the cake, you can't even chart a 12 as a Type III.
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Title from the unexpectedly good and poignant Nashville country song Dear Rodeo by Cody Johnson, made even better by Reba McEntire cos, well, Reba McEntire could make a song about slug eating a mushroom growing out of dog poop good.
Warning: this post is fulla all sorta arcane minutiae and pop culture references you need to know to get all the jokes. Wait. This shoulda gone at the top.
