DPS Lotus 120 Spoon

[foreal]

Are these still in the PNW? Could do some 190 120 F3 comparo's potentially this week for anyone that can fit into a small duke...

[pfluffenmeister]

Is Spooning for you?


After putting a couple of days on the 189 DPS Lotus 120 Spoon I'm thinking that for me, the answer is yes.

A little background on me:

I've been skiing for about 30 years (recently ~30-50 days / season).
I like to charge and ski terrain as quickly and fluidly as my meager skills will allow.
Big GS pow turns or poppy porpoise pow turns are desired.
I prefer above treeline open bowls with spiney / rocky features & modest cornice drops.
Loosely spaced trees are nice and I recently found out that skiing tight trees is cool too (as long as they're aspens).

One speed: Hair on fire or go back to the car.

Skis that I love: 190 DPS Lotus 120 Flex 3, 191 Movement Goliath, 188 Kastle MX98, 191 PMGear Lhasa Pow Fat
Skis that I didn't love: Volkl Gotama (Japanese nights), 186 PMGear Lhasa Pow

The Lotus 120 has been my go to pow stick for the past few year and I have ridden three different versions of the 120:

190 Hybrid Flex 2
200 Pure Flex 2
190 Pure Flex 3 (currently own this one)

So when I heard that the mad-men at DPS were Spooning the 120 I knew I had to get me a taste.
The 120 Spoons arrived the day before I left for Silverton for the first week of unguided. (whew! just in time).
Initial reactions consisted of cat-calls and a bunch of "Oh Yeah ... ".
The Spooning was much more subtle than I was expecting.
The build quality is impeccable.
The new topsheets are going to be muuuuch more durable than previous year's; they're almost like cutting boards.
If you're familiar with Movement's topsheets you'll know what I mean.
The 120 Spoons hand flex stiffer than my non-Spoon Flex 3s, have a bit more camber underfoot, and have a stiffer tail.

Dimensions have altered slightly from:

140-120-125 ~48m radius sidecut; 7# 4oz/ski mounted with Atomic FFG14 + SollyFit plate
to
140-122-126 ~35m radius sidecut; 7# 2oz/ski mounted with Marker Griffon Demos


While I was hoping for a pow-fest (yeah right), a corn harvest was what I got.
While the number of runs I put on the 120 Spoons was limited, the conditions I took them through were extremely varied.

From mashed potatoes, to corn, to slushy corn, corn with breakable refrozen crust, refrozen corn, and straight up refrozen gloppy ice.
Plus a few runs in ~ 6" of dense windblown pow (@ Copper).

At Silverton I hiked up to Rope-Dee 1 with my (non-Spooned) 120s for a control run.
The drop in was very steep on refrozen corn, after about four steep jump turns the conditions softened slighty to mixed corn / not quite warm enough to be corn for the remaining ~1500-2000'.

I then took up the Spooned 120s to the same drop in point and skied the same face; and then continued to ski the Spoons for the rest of the day.
The snow temperature had risen slightly but conditions were marginally better but basically the same as on the control run.

Essentially the Spooned 120s were more fun in anything soft.
More stable at speed through mixed conditions (ie nice soft corn at speed into refrozen bumpy/scrapy corn).
Was poppier and livelier; easier to load up and spring off like a trampoline.
Had a more robust tail; a couple of times I got a little back and that tail is one stiff MF, it straight up threw me into the next turn (in a good way, but serious tail-gunning will definitely get one in trouble).
The shorter turning radius of the Spooned 120 was most noticeable on groomed cattrack runouts, the Spoon felt more stable (but the runout was icy on the control run and had warmed considerably for the Spoon run and had more grip).
While the non-spooned 120 maintains speed in low angle powder the Spooned version is even faster; in a long flattish runout with ~4" of powder everyone else was sticking to the established skied path while I just planed up to the top in the fresh and watched the cool boat-like spray from the spooned tips (BTW this spray made feet cold as fuck).

The sensation of riding a ski that's been Spooned is difficult to describe.
The Spooning in the tip rocker makes it so one can drift into a turn, sliding or carving into the desired radius then springing out of it with the mid-section and tail of the ski.
It gives one a high degree of discrection over the size and shape of a turn, as well as giving one the ability to adjust those turn shapes to one's changing desires on the fly.
I read another review that likened the spooned turn to powersliding a rally car: one can drift the car into a corner and then apply the throttle to shoot out of the corner at the desired angle.

There were a few instances in which I missed the toe edge such skiing the refrozen half-pipe runouts at Silverton or traversing/edging on steep refrozen crap, and they felt a little squirelly on the poma lift.
It's my understanding that the production version of the 120 Spoon will have the spooned section moved slightly forward so that it is only under the tip rocker and will alleviate these issues.

This ski likes to go fast and this penchant for speed cannot be overlooked.
Combined with my desire for speed it got me into a little trouble at the bottom of Union Bowl at Copper Mountain.
I came down the face that was covered in about 6" of pow made a few playful turns, then a few hard charging bigger turns and ran out fast into a flatter area that had a little double roller feature ~8-10' tall and ~20-25' long.

I punched forward, yelled out "whoo-hoo!!" and then cased into the lip of the second roller, did a full forward somersault yardsale: skis, poles, helmet, goggles.

It was pretty funny, guess I should have been going faster.





So, in summary, if it's soft I think I prefer the Spooned 120.

[shroom]

I read another review that likened the spooned turn to powersliding a rally car: one can drift the car into a corner and then apply the throttle to shoot out of the corner at the desired angle.

I have a memory I keep re-living of myself acting this out. It was almost like a hydroplane effect. I distinctly remember this one section of un-cut where I would straight-line for ~100 feet then lay all my weight into one huge smear. To me, it was different because I was initiating at the tips, and letting the rest of the ski follow, rather than pivoting over a flat/rev portion underfoot. fuck that was sweet.

[Mofro261]

A pair of proto Spooned Lotus120’s made their way into the PNW and ended up under my feet for a range of snow conditions from sunny spring slush, some icy spiciness and whiteout snowstorms at Blackcomb, and back home for mid-April insanity of 36” in ~36hrs at Alpental this last weekend.


Short form version: The Spoon 120 is a soft snow killah with design upgrades that just work like they were intended to. Long version below…


Testy tester info- learned to ski in the same calendar year I learned to walk, old enough to have grown up with straight long skinny skis, extensive ski racing background, 100+ days/yr of resort/touring over the last decade, and have never experienced a winter without sliding on snow. My skiing style is geared towards the 3F’s- fast, fluid, and always in the fall line. Too many serious knee injuries and age have tempered my desire to take to the air as a primary objective, otherwise I still like to get after it pretty hard. I’ve been using DPS Lotus 120’s as my go to soft snow ski for the last ~5 seasons, with ~200 days on the older 07/08 190cm bamboo side wall F3’s, and another 45 days or so this season on pure 10/11 190cm F2’s.





First impressions: wow these are teh sex! Build quality is top notch and the new top sheets look bomber- I’ve had a ton of people comment on them in lift lines, and they appear be way less prone to chipping than some of the older DPS models. Flex wise, my very subjective hand flex has them quite a bit stiffer than those F2’s, but maybe a tad less than my (R.I.P.) F3’s, though the Spooned L120 F3 has a more “damp” ride than either of those pures- the weight and ride of a full carbon layup but without much of the “feedback” that the pures can sometimes generate in not so ideal snow.


A bit more than just the spooned portion of the base has changed- the dimensions have been tweaked from 140-120-125 to 140-122-126, the radius has lowered from 46 to 35 meters, and the tail has been flattened as well. Some strategic weight addition in the tip and tail puts them ~100g heavier than the older generations, but still amazingly light for a ski that size.


Tune-ability. This demo pair had seen a few days when I picked them up so I gave them a 1deg base/2deg side bevel to clean up the overhanging burred edge, and gave them a few coats of wax. Like all DPS bases, they are freaking lightning fast when waxed, and very slow if not tended to. Tuning/waxing through the spoon is easy by hand and won’t be an issue for any remotely qualified shop person. Of note, it’s not just the base that is beveled where the Spoon is but the whole edge width/topsheet along the spooned portion is pressed, the sidewall thickness remains the same through the beveled portion.

Test drive 1: PNW sunshine 40F, slush bumps, soft groomed, isothermal glop in the sidecountry and some hard pack bumps in the shade. To be more objective, I took my L120’s out for a few laps to get a feel for the snow before switching to the spoon because personally, 120 under foot is passable but less than ideal for some snow conditions. With the baseline established, it was Spoon on. Similar to the older models, the Spoon L120 allows for effortless directional changes in the fall line, roll the ankle, pressure the tip, and bam! you’re there with speed. The 35M radius carves a more traditional GS turn on the soft pack groomers and I had minimal tip flap while hitting close to ~70 mph on the GPS; that added weight in the tip and tail works as advertised.

In the isothermal glop they skied like… skis in isothermal glop. Sorry, there’s no cure for that pain. Because I still dabble in beer league racing, I took them through some gates for kicks. Still fun even if not nearly as agile as a skinny GS ski on a tighter fixed radius, as expected. They were a little twitchy on the icy bumps in the shade, but part of that may have been from needing to detune through the contact point on the tips. Also, these are prototypes, and the actual spooned portion for next year moves back in the tip ~2” above the widest contact point in the shovel so if the Spoon is contributing to the twitchiness that should likely go away.


Test drive 2: Whistler Blackcomb, white out above tree line skiing. To truly experience what the Spoon is about, it really needs to be tested in the conditions it was made for: 3D snow. Blackcomb had been dry for a week but a series of small storms and wind transport gave us increasing fresh snow to play all 3 days, though the vis was so poor it was hard to see what we were dropping into much of the time behind our tour guide P11’s, and the uber steeps remained bullet proof. Even after an aggressive detune on the contact point of the tip, the Spoons were less than confidence inspiring on the icy fall away rollovers, though admittingly a major part of this was the forward pressure of marker griffon bindings not playing nice with the lugs on my couple seasons old Solly Impact Pro boots that have been repeatedly slammed into Barons. No problems in the soft, but laying the ski over on edge with speed and hitting hard ice left me with the phantom turn/ thrown a shoe 4 times that first morning. To remove the slop in the heel I had to crank the forward pressure to where I could barely step into the binding, but I never got back to the point where I trusted it enough to open it up full throttle in the poor vis where the transition between soft and ice wasn’t apparent, and occasionally the skis felt like they wanted to splay at the wide contact point in the tip. Lapping over Spanky’s and into some fun variations in Diamond/Ruby areas it was getting deep enough to play with different turn shapes, and the bases were un-beatably fast on the long road ski out without any hookiness; the Spoon rides a flat ski very well. I did get one good deep run down the Couloir Xtreme where I could engage the slarve/drift qualities of the spoon, and it left me wanting more.

Mid-day the next day Zbo pulled a binding out of his Fat Bro’s, so I loaned him SpL120’s and went back to my L120’s, which I had switched up for touing with dynafits. I wouldn't normally rally in bounds on dynafits + TLT5p’s but I felt way more confident on the boot-binding interface on hard snow; for now I’ll still give the hard snow performance nod to the non-spooned version but really I still prefer something 95-110 under foot and with metal in it for those conditions.

Z-bo’s take- The line I was told would be center for next year was about +1.5cm from the currently marked center line on the ski( kind of visible in the above pic). He took half a run and thought they had way too much tail, then moved the binding back as far as it would go with his 330mm Cochise, which was back to the old center line. On the center line he said they were awesome and a sweet mix of light and damp and effortless to turn, but said he’d consider going back another cm as well. The flat-ish tail puts a lot more ski behind you compared to previous L120’s which can make it hard to release unless you are really driving forward; I generally ski ball of foot/pressure the tips and tried it on the old line (which still looks +1cm compared to the line on the older L120’s) and I liked it further back as well.

Test drive 3: Back home @Alpental for nuclear winter mid-April 13-14^th with 16” new for Sat morning, nearly 12” during the day and another 8” O/N for Sunday. THIS is where the new Spoon really shines and where despite my intention to swap out for my older L120’s, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. Tight trees, chutes, fall line airs, wide open slopes, the Spoon gobbles them all up and defies speed limits, rewarding you for charging hard by offering an arsenal of angles and turn shapes to play with.

The sensation of riding a ski that's been Spooned is difficult to describe.
The Spooning in the tip rocker makes it so one can drift into a turn, sliding or carving into the desired radius then springing out of it with the mid-section and tail of the ski.
It gives one a high degree of discretion over the size and shape of a turn, as well as giving one the ability to adjust those turn shapes to one's changing desires on the fly. I read another review that likened the spooned turn to powersliding a rally car: one can drift the car into a corner and then apply the throttle to shoot out of the corner at the desired angle.

I’ll echo those sentiments, with one caveat.

For strong skiers who have full command of their abilities, all of this is achievable on the non-spooned L120, it’s just that the Spoon makes it that |....| much easier to do so. For some it may subtle, but it’s there. Especially at the release point, where the Spoon has the ability to re-engage out of the powerslide and change direction quicker and at lower speeds than are needed to make the same transition with the regular non-Spoon. If you can’t get this feeling out of your current powder board set-up, chances are you will with the Spoon.


Bottom line, in anything soft and particularly in true 3D snow, the Spooned L120 kicks serious ass with an amazing combination of light and damp with the only price to pay being, well, the price.

[pfluffenmeister]

^^^ nice review mofro.


i just got back from a 3-day trip, each day with at least a foot of new snow (WOO-HOO!).

closing day at Copper with 13" of heavy pow (Spooned 120)
Winter Park/Mary Jane with 13" of medium pow (non-spooned 120)
Winter Park/Mary Jane with 12" of heavy cream cheese (non-spooned 120)


As previously noted, the 120 Spoon hauls ass.
i didn't notice it at so much when i skied the 120 Spoon at Silverton with ~2500'+ descents, but on "regular" inbounds untracked stuff the 120 Spoons just eat that face up with big fast turns ...

which is great.
the turns are fantastic, but damn i was down fast and almost didn't even have that "hair on fire feeling".

i think that i prefer my non-spooned 120s for inbounds shenanigans.

but for times when one has access to a bunch of vertical in 3-D snow Spooning is very nice.

[GoldenBC]

Just got these the other day. I am very excited. Going to be my daily driver for Kicking Horse. If anything is going to make that mountain faster, I think these will do it. Very excited.

[hoarhey]

Just got these the other day. I am very excited. Going to be my daily driver for Kicking Horse. If anything is going to make that mountain faster, I think these will do it. Very excited.

Very nice looking skis.
Which length are those?

[pfluffenmeister]

Just got these the other day. I am very excited. Going to be my daily driver for Kicking Horse. If anything is going to make that mountain faster, I think these will do it. Very excited.

very sexy.

daily driver?!? that place must get the fresh stuff often.

and yes, they will make the mountain faster.

[Back Scratcher]

Just opened a package from DPS today and Im stocked to get my first pair of Lotus 120 carbon pure 3's. Got the dream time top sheet and ready to rock on these.. Let it snow , let it snow, let it snow.

Review to follow.

[SlayinpowNW]

Just gotta say the super-jealousy is flowing outta me,

spoons make me cream meeself.

=-)

Out of curiosity, due to the new shape of tip, what kind of challenges are the tuners facing with this ski? Is there much of a learning curve for fine tuning them? Too soon?

[Breck]

I got the 190 pure spoon lotus in with the Barney purple top sheets. I figured it would reduce likelihood of theft.... Going with a tele setup with Axl's. Anyone done the spoons with tele?

B

[thehaze]

Can someone please take note how wide is the beveled band and how much does it rise on the side?

Thanks!

[userA]

Just gotta say the super-jealousy is flowing outta me,

spoons make me cream meeself.

=-)

Out of curiosity, due to the new shape of tip, what kind of challenges are the tuners facing with this ski? Is there much of a learning curve for fine tuning them? Too soon?

mofro answered the tunage ? in his flowing review.
b

[2stix]

Just opened a package from DPS today and Im stocked to get my first pair of Lotus 120 carbon pure 3's. Got the dream time top sheet and ready to rock on these.. Let it snow , let it snow, let it snow.

Review to follow.

Nice. Can't wait to see the difference 10 yrs makes. Mine are still going strong. Stronger then me that is! Haha. I'm sure you'll love them as much as I do. What length did you get?

[matt]

Can someone please take note how wide is the beveled band and how much does it rise on the side?

Thanks!

Beveled width is ~13mm
Rise is ~3mm

Weight of my 189s is 4072g

[auvgeek]

^^Interesting re weight. Little heavier than I expected, but only by a bit.

They are super damp for a carbon ski, but they're also no longer at the magic 8#/pair...

[thehaze]

Thanks Matt!

[SlayinpowNW]

mofro answered the tunage ? in his flowing review.
b

Lessons learned, read the whole thread b4 posting

[Back Scratcher]

Nice. Can't wait to see the difference 10 yrs makes. Mine are still going strong. Stronger then me that is! Haha. I'm sure you'll love them as much as I do. What length did you get?

Picked up the 178's and putting dynafit beasts on them. Cant wait.

[garuda]

^^^ those are hot, too bad they're not 197s tho

[shafty85]

Mounted mine up the other week on the line for dynafits (went with Marshal's stated midpoint location, 80cm from tail or 109cm from tip flat pull, which wound up -1cm from midpoint indicated on the topsheet). Anyone else able to comment on their mount location versus these recommended midpoint numbers (not what is on their topsheet)?

Anyway, they're a very sexy ski. Only taken it out twice for some skinning/cardio and the few turns I did get were on refrozen mank so can't comment on how they ski, but does it look to anyone else like there isn't that much tail? Or, is it just me? I'm remounting with inserts within the week but was wondering if I should go forward 1 or 2 cm? (probably 2cm due to using inserts) Thoughts, anyone?

[GoldenBC]

I am regretfully putting dynafits on them now. Not that that won't make them my daily driver as KH slackcountry is always in the daily forecast. They are 189s and I would love to bomb the hill on them but I can't convince myself to swiss cheese them. The BC is the main priority so that is where they will get the most use.

I obviously haven't skied them but I wouldn't be too worries about banging hill laps on them with minimal snow. The beauty thing about Kicking Horse is that every lap is 4100ft of fall line in 10 minute laps. You can ski most runs at full speed in any conditions because it is just straight down. I also prefer a wide platform on any day.

very sexy.

daily driver?!? that place must get the fresh stuff often.

and yes, they will make the mountain faster.

[GoldenBC]

Very nice looking skis.
Which length are those?

189cm. That tail will definitely make them seem longer though!

[bodywhomper]

... but does it look to anyone else like there isn't that much tail? Or, is it just me? I'm remounting with inserts within the week but was wondering if I should go forward 1 or 2 cm? (probably 2cm due to using inserts) Thoughts, anyone?

since you're going to redrill with binding fwd, why don't you put inserts into the existing holes and holes at 2cm fwd?

[shafty85]

since you're going to redrill with binding fwd, why don't you put inserts into the existing holes and holes at 2cm fwd?

Might. But, I'm wondering what the peoples' consensus is regarding the amount of tail on the skis? I also realize each ski is different, so perhaps the 120 isn't meant to have all the much tail but it sure doesn't look like much compared to my GPOs or the gf's EHPs.