Eye ye ye! This makes me appreciate all 3 of the companies these guys represent. Nice work Blister. Keep pushing the industry into its own problems for the benefit of the commonwealth👍🏼.
Hoji's point about weight is a really good one - if I weighed what he does I would probably use "pure" pin bindings more than I already do (I use a mix of ATK Freeraider and Fritschi Tecton for touring). I feel somewhat conflicted about Lars' arguments around ISO/TUV standards compliance. Those standards were "written around" the conventional alpine binding design, and don't allow for the possibility of other ways of achieving similar bottom-line safety that might be more appropriate to AT bindings. Unfortunately there aren't very good safety statistics for the various designs, which leaves us with no way of assessing how effective those other approaches are and therefore TUV is all we have beyond personal/anecdotal experience. Lars' point about pin/socket tolerances ignores designs like ATK that can adjust clearance. Also I'm not sure I agree with his assessment of the Tecton. It's clearly not as bomber as a CAST-mounted Look 18, but I think it's at least in the game in terms of safety IMO. At least we finally seem to have killed off frame bindings for the most part, so that's progress. I would rephrase Hoji's point about DIN > 10 to something like "Above DIN 10 there is an increasing probability of breaking bone in a fall", i.e. once you get into that range you're basically trading off that breakage risk against the risk of other injuries due to pre-release. I do think that there is value in such settings (and that's why I use them) in the sense that you can achieve a better overall risk of injury at those settings than at lower settings even if the risk of breaking bones is higher. As Lars says the underlying problem here is that the forces and kinetic energies involved are such that injury is unavoidable using mechanical bindings. The human body didn't evolve to handle the forces involved in modern high-level skiing, and it seems to me that there is simply no way to implement a binding that releases at low enough forces to avoid ACL tears or even tibial fractures while avoiding pre-release. Maybe in the distant future there will be AI-powered uber-bindings that monitor the skier's body kinematics in realtime and proactively release when injury is imminent, but short of that sort of "predictive" system I'm skeptical that any solution can exist. Put another way, the forces involved in normal skiing with "ideal" body position are much higher than the force required to snap an ACL if the user happens to be falling with their knee in an "unfavorable" orientation and loading. There is no way that a binding can tell the difference between the two based only upon the forces it is subjected to.
We are handcuffed by standards because DIN is looking at force needed to release. I think we have to think about a standard that sets and measures energy needed for release. The force is important but I think the energy (force times the distance the boot moves within the binding before release) is more important. I don't know how this can be measured or how binding can be designed around this.
If y'all would just tele you wouldn't have these problems!! 🤣 #freetheheel #bondagebindings #icarethatyoutele (JK, the state of the tele binding cottage-industry is actually the same/even worse than the problems outlined here)
Jeff Cambell's boot/binding compatibility discussion that Lars was talking about ~32:00 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XZ7Y5EzCiEg.html
I’m not an engineer and have absolutely no clue if it could work at all but here me out… An electromagnetic boot and binding that adjusts the magnets attraction based of speed and other variables in real time with some sensors Mostly a joke btw
