Originally Posted by
Wes Mantooth
Quick question for those of you who do this a lot:
I tried mounting some Solly's on a pair of broken skis I have and I kept hitting a problem where the screw expansion in the hole would offset the mount job. I used the center punch, measured that out, everything was spot on, drilled, measured the holes, spot on. But when I lined up the first hole and screwed into it, the binding of course moved around a bit as the screw expands the hole but it offset the entire toepiece. I always screw in on diagonals (meaning if looking down on the binding, i screw in the top left screw, then bottom right, etc...not actually on an angle) just to limit this but since these were beater skis I experimented by mounting the 2 front screws first.
By the time the 2nd screw was in, the back 2 holes were almost covered and the binding was sitting at a ridiculous angle, I measured the back plastic and it was about 4mm's off center. I feel like there's a lot of uncontrollable room for something to go wrong and get a completely offset binding. My holes were straight and in the right spot yet the screw expansion of the hole made the toepiece completely fucked up
I'm sure there's a system for preventing this...I quadruple checked my holes and everything lined up, even checked them with a square to see if they were at the right angle relative to the ski. This is the only thing holding me back from drilling into a brand new pair of boards...but seems like if it goes wrong it's really bad
The only other pair of skis I've freehanded was with a metal topsheet so there wasn't room for movement