Run of the Day

[carpathian]

[skinipenem]

"More of a hockey guy, not a jibber guy. If not a skier." Hah!

The devs are not so good on refrozen scrapes, but surfy once it's a little softer.

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[carpathian]

^^ I could tell they will be fun in the pow, notice I didn't completely complain about them, lol!

[carpathian]

Wow, Black Diamond Zealots are a real Man's ski. No speed limit, try to keep up!~

[carpathian]

[carpathian]

[carpathian]

[carpathian]

These Jerry Launchers might be 20 years old but are still a real hoot! Sloppy and predictable

[ticketchecker]

Guess I need to rustle up some clamps for my Jerry Launchers


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[Alaska-RWC]

You were about four chairs ahead of me on Saturday on GBX, and I was going to ask what you thought about Volants but you disappeared by the time my chair unloaded. So have you skied the steel?

[carpathian]

Guess I need to rustle up some clamps for my Jerry Launchers


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I don't know if you ever caught the story of these Launchers from ROD last season... I got them from the dump here in Girdwood in about 2012 and then never skied them until 2017 or so then fell in love with them! So fun, so easy to ski! Skied them almost full time for a couple seasons there, now they on back bench rotation. Good to get them out

[carpathian]

You were about four chairs ahead of me on Saturday on GBX, and I was going to ask what you thought about Volants but you disappeared by the time my chair unloaded. So have you skied the steel?

I was honestly wondering about the Volant steel construction just the other as it is similar to the Stocklies...?

[carpathian]

[Alaska-RWC]

I was honestly wondering about the Volant steel construction just the other as it is similar to the Stocklies...?

Possibly similar, but aluminum (titanal) does not equal stainless steel. And Atomic is still producing stainless skis under the Volant brand, so they've retained the intellectual property for Volant which precludes other manufacturers from using stainless. (When it was in Colorado, they pursued patents all over the world.) The original Volant concept was to make a complete stainless steel torsion box ("cap" ski days), so the sidewalls of the made-in-Colorado Volants are also stainless steel:



Manufacturing costs haunted them, and they ended up having to hand-make every ski. I think the "V2" designs originated with the Colorado engineers (we should ask Peter Turner, but now I have a potential connection for a former Volant vice-president that I need to have a beer with), but that iteration of Volant folded and the V2 skis were made in Austria. Those probably saved on manufacturing costs somewhat since the tooling to produce the cap was probably less involved, and they used an aluminum/fiberglass sidewall (with a red plastic coating):


They still retained two layers of stainless steel, with some bend in the "cap" in the middle of the ski.

Here's some tips from some made-in-Austria Machete Fat Bastards that I wanted the clean tips from, and the seller just hacked them off. I'll probably sand them up to make it a little cleaner to see the layers, but there's definitely two sheets of stainless steel throughout the ski:


In my experience, the Colorado Machetes still have superior torsional rigidity versus the Austrian Machetes, but the stainless steel in the Austrian Machetes still give them the incredibly dampness through crud that comes with that material. The Machete Gravity (Colorado) is my daily-driver when it's icy. I brought them with me today but didn't get to the mountain until around 1:00 at which point South Face/High Silver/High Traverse, etc., was soft enough that the Fat Bastards were perfect, and Christmas had older/cold snow in the shadows that hadn't been through a freeze/thaw cycle.

[carpathian]

Good info on the Volants, you don't see them around as much as you used to.