Carbon Fiber Ski Boots With Dave Dodge

Doing things differently is always a challenge because there's that old saying of, if it ain't broke, why fix it? However, Dave Dodge, producer and manufacturer of custom carbon fiber ski boots, thinks otherwise. I think this is a really interesting chat from someone that has a great amount of knowledge in tinkering and doing things differently. In this episode of the Big Picture Skiing podcast, you'll hear Dave's story behind the beginnings of Dodge ski boots. You'll hear about a World Cup athlete that dropped considerable ranking points by switching to Dave's custom ski boot. You'll hear what the feelings and differences are when you ski in a carbon fiber ski boot versus a plastic ski boot, and this is quite fascinating to hear. Dave also talks about the reasons why big brands wouldn't adopt a carbon fiber ski boot. Dave also goes into alignment of the lower leg and how he adjusts and customizes the boot and then teaches the customer how to adjust their own boots to get that ideal fit and performance. There's an interesting part where he talks about tweaking his boots by a small amount and basically him in the morning feeling like he can't ski, he's very weak, to feeling like superhuman. I really enjoyed this chat with Dave. He's a really interesting guy, and I think you're going to get more out of it other than just carbon fiber ski boots. And on that, if you're interested, go to dodge ski boots dot com to find out more about their process of fitting boots. Now finally, a plug for Big Picture Skiing, my own site. I put lessons, video tutorials, equipment info, online coaching, it's all there. I'm basically trying to deliver everything that would normally happen on snow through this medium. And coming this winter, new will be an app version for iOS and Android, so you can take videos and lessons with you in your pocket onto the mountain. It's all about helping you be able to upgrade your skiing, enjoy it more, and have those breakthrough moments. Let's get into today's Big Picture Skiing podcast episode with Dave from Dodge Ski Boots. Dave, thanks so much for joining us here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick off the conversation. Carbon fiber ski boots, that's, that's what you build. What's the main advantages to going down that road and going against the norm of, of plastic ski boots?

Oh, one of the, one of the big things we've found out kind of by accident that wasn't really planned in the development was that you get a ski boot where the, where the flex doesn't change with temperature. The, the stiffness of the, of the composite materials is is dictated by the fibers, which are inorganic and aren't affected by temperature. Theoretically, it's something like 1 or 2% from room temperature to -20, whereas a typical poly— polyether TPU, which is the, which is the, the better of the two types of polyurethane, is, uh, the stiffness changes 500% from, from room temperature to -20.

Wow.

So it's a big, big difference, and it's, it's, it's something everybody appreciates. You know, you, you've been out— everybody's been out skiing on a, you know, a 40-degree spring day and the, the big huge moguls, and you're just getting thrown all over the place because you don't have any, any support. And on those, uh, you know, 10 below zero days, um, you get, you get back to your car and you can't get your boots off because they're so stiff.

So yeah, so the, yeah, the carbon fiber is, is, is, it's more consistent.

Yeah. So then there are the obvious advantages like weight. Um, we've got a material that has orders of magnitude higher stiffness-to-weight ratio, so we can make the boot and use with a lot less material. The other thing you might not consider is that when we can make the carbon fiber perform very much like the, um, TPU injected plastic by making it thinner. If we make it thin enough, we can get the same flexural properties as, as TPU, but in tension and compression, it's orders of magnitude stiffer. And the lateral stiffness of the boot is dominated by the tensile and compression properties of the material, and how it fits your foot is dominated by the flexural properties. And in a front entry overlap boot, the flexural properties are the way the boot flexes when you're skiing is somewhat dominated by the flexural properties of the material. So what you end up with when you adjust the thickness of the boot to have the right flexural, right feel in skiing flex, you get a boot that wraps better on your foot and has vastly superior lateral edging, uh, stiffness.

And like, I'm going to jump in here. Say I came in tomorrow to get my, my Dodge ski boots fitted. Is the, the, the in— is the entire boot basically, uh, developed to wrap like 3D of my foot? It's not just like the, the the width different? Like, how is, how is it conformed to make this really snug fit and then take advantage of those properties once you've got the, the boot shaped around your foot, lower leg?

Um, well, we developed our own last, which is started out kind of similar to a Lang last, and then when we fit the boot to you, we customize the shape. We can punch the boot and shape it, and we try to achieve a shell shape that's close to your foot shape so that the pressure is the way it should be.

Even.

Even. Not necessarily even. You don't really want even pressure everywhere, but the way it should be, the way we believe it should be. It doesn't really wrap any better than a polyurethane boot at room temperatures, but at colder temperatures, I'm pretty sure it does wrap better.

Okay, cool. Yeah. And so once, once the boot is created, can you modify it further if, uh, for sore spots.

Oh yeah, we, we modify 100% of the boots that go out of our shop. They're all customized to the person's foot.

Yeah. And is it a different process to, to modify and punch a carbon?

Obviously you apply pressure and heat, but the way you do it is different. If you, if you use a typical process that most, most boot fitters use with a Scott press, which applies a lot of force, and then you heat it up with a hot air gun, you're going to destroy a boot because if you heat it in an area where there's no pressure, it'll tend to delaminate.

Okay.

And so you want to only apply the heat exactly where the pressure is. So we came up with a, with a system like, um, um, it's a heated ball. The ball that goes inside has a heating element inside the ball.

Yep.

Inducts the heat at the contact point with that ball rather than allowing the heat to spread out over a larger area.

Great. Okay, so winding back, what— how did this— how did Dodge Ski Boots start?

Uh, it's— that's a pretty good story. Um, back in the— when was it? Early 2000s. Probably 2000, no, it was earlier than that. I think it was actually back in, you know, 1988, 1998, '99 era. Roberto Cristoforetti, I don't know if you know who he is. He was the Rossignol Racing, Rossignol-Lang Racing Department Chief. And he built some carbon fiber boots. Had a helicopter company make them out of thermoset carbon fiber, you know, hand laid up. They cost about $10,000 to make, and he put them on a couple World Cup athletes' feet and they loved them, but they'd only last for one day before they fell apart. So I, I had a— at the time had a business called Composite Developments, and I did product design for composite things, mostly, mostly skis, tennis rackets, snowboard bindings, stuff like that. And they came to me because I'd worked for them previously. I wasn't working for them at the time, but I'd worked for them previously. And they came to me and said, hey Dave, you know, we want to try to make these boots practical so we can supply our World Cup racers with these boots because they say they're a second faster. And so I started— so we started working on it, and that was right when Rossignol got sold by Quicksilver— got sold to Quicksilver. And Quicksilver didn't want to put any money into the development, so we had no money. And Laurent Boivive, who was the founder of Rossignol, said, well, I'll fund it for a little while. So we got started, and then finally he said, no, I can't do it anymore. So it just never went anywhere. We built a couple prototypes out of thermoplastic composites, but we needed a way to reduce it to practice. And there's all kinds of other problems we had to solve. And I told them that I would work on it on my own. And when I found all the solutions, solved all the problems, I'd come back to them. And so I did. This is about 6 years, 5 or 6 years later, and they say we still don't have any money. Okay, you know, my, my non-comp— I had a 3-year non-compete. It's been 5 or 6 years. I'm going to do this on my own. And, uh, off we went. At the time, that was right when we started this, right when the, the, uh, 2008-2009 economy kind of went to hell. All the product development money in the world just, just vanished. So my composites development business was, uh, had no clients and no prospect for clients.

So it's a good time to start afresh, time to start something new.

And I had some patents that paid, paid enough, gave me enough income that I could live without an income for 3 years. So, and I had a friend who had just moved up to to Vermont from Connecticut who had worked for a Fortune 500 company and was sick of the rat race. And he had enough money to live for a few years without any income. So we said, hey, let's do something fun. We don't have to make any money. We're just gonna do something fun. We'll make carbon fiber ski boots. So we did that and grew from there.

And do you still have, like, do you ever ski in some of the first iterations?

Yeah, I skied in the first one, or some of the ones that Rossignol built, and I built— I also skied on some of my own, some of the— well, all of the first ones I made. I made a— I think it was a right boot in 2009, and I went up to Stowe. It was during the UVM Winter Carnival, so there's a lot of racers around, and I had one, one of these, one prototype boot on one foot that I'd made in my basement, and I was skiing around with it. A lot of people asked questions, thought it looked pretty cool, and it skied. It definitely felt different in a good way. So I said, I think we have something here. So I built, um, I built another boot, a left boot, so I had a pair. And I went to the Cochran Ski Area. They have a Thank God for Snowmaking race in March. And because the Cochran family and the NORAM race schedule happened to coincide, you ended up with pretty much all the NORAM racers racing there for this kind of fun race at Cochran Ski Area. And I was standing at the top of the rope tow talking to Marilyn Cochran. And Werner Nickerson skis up. He looks at the boots and says, what are those? So I give him a little spiel and he says, let me see you make some turns on them. So he follows me down, says, get to the bottom, he says, I want to try them. So we're standing at the bottom of the T-bar and I take my boots off and he gives me his, and we're about the same size, so he gets his boots on, takes off up the lift. And I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. He doesn't come, he doesn't come. And I said, I'm gonna have to go up and find out what's going on here. So I tried to put his boots on. There's no way I could get them on. And so I'm standing there in my stocking feet in the snow, and all of a sudden he comes down the hill. He's in the racecourse. And he raced at him and did pretty well.

That's cool. Yeah, wow. So, um, Back to a question that got me. You, you skied in a, in a, in a Dodge boot and then a regular boot. Can you try and describe— and it doesn't have to be technical, whatever— like, how would you quantify the feeling? Like, if I did that, you'd go, oh, I'm probably going to guess Tom would say these things.

Okay, um, probably the first two things I noticed— the first— well, the first one was that the dynamics felt different. And the way I described it to myself, it's when you make something stiffer, the frequency that it wants to respond at or vibrate at, as you make it stiffer, the frequency goes up and the amplitude goes down. And when you make something lighter, the frequency wants to go up and the amplitude wants to go down. Think of a tennis racket. You make a tennis racket stiffer, it's going to vibrate at a higher frequency at a lower amplitude. And as you make it stiffer and lighter, that gets to be more and more the case. So when you put the— so when I noticed on really hard, aggressive snow, when you put the boot on edge, there's no ch-ch-ch-ch and then turn. It's instant. And you don't feel any chatter. No chatter because it's— you've moved the frequency of the chatter up so high that you can't feel it, and the amplitude's so low that the liner absorbs it all.

Yeah, wow, that's very cool. Yeah, I get that. So because I— would it be similar to going like the step when you go from, say, like a 130 Advanced Skiers boot into a proper like 150 Race Plug boot and you go, oh Yeah, and you go, oh, similar, usually on this hard snow. Yeah, similar sort of to that, a step beyond that. Yeah, wow. And did Warner Nickerson sort of say the same thing?

Well, um, he skied on them a little bit that spring, and then, you know, when the World Cup started up the next season, he went back to his head boots because, you know, didn't want to, you know ruin the deal.

Yeah, yeah.

And so about halfway through the season, he was training out at Sun Valley on some really steep trails and kind of soft snow, and he was booting out all the time. And he had the, had the Dodge Boost. And he said, these are a lot narrower because the wall thickness is only 1 millimeter thick on each side, so maybe I won't boot out. And he put them on and Voilà, he wasn't putting out and they were skiing pretty well. And he decided, oh, well, you know, I don't have any more World Cup races. You know, I'm not— at the time he was ranked 60th in the world and he'd occasionally get into a World Cup race. So he had some NorAm races coming up. And so he decided to use him in those. And he did, he had a race, I think at Burke, where he did pretty well. But he came to us and said, I think the boots could be a little stiffer. They're a little too soft. So overnight we made him a stiffer pair of boots and he went to a race at Waterville Valley. And my brother called me up after the first run and said, holy shit, Warner just won the first run by 2.5 seconds. And everybody wanted to know what those boots were. And in 2 races, he lowered his world ranking from 60th roughly 60th in the world to 30th in the world and got an automatic start in every World Cup GS race.

Wow, wow. So did he ever do— did he ever start in those boots in a World Cup race?

Oh yeah, he skied on them for 2 or 3 years.

Amazing.

Scored his only points on them.

Yeah, that's really cool because I can imagine, like he said, he knew what he needed. Like, there was lots of things that were right in the boot, but then he just needed to tweak it to get what he felt out of the boot.

Yeah, because he was used to, you know, a head plug boot, very stiff. And, uh, at that point you would have made the boot to my taste. What I—

yeah, which is—

which I consider 150, because I used to ski in a Lang, uh, ZI, which is the stiffest shell they made. I have very small feet though. I'm size 7.5 foot and I'm weight 210.

Okay, right.

Yeah.

Wow. So what's that in it? Like A very small point.

Um, that would be, uh, 25, 24, 24 and a half, 25.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Hey, I gotta ask about skiing moguls in these boots because I love skiing moguls. Uh, we've talked mostly about kind of carving and race turns. How, how do people find it in, in moguls?

Well, let's— everybody asks that question, um, because you think you're gonna— you want— you're gonna have to flex the boot a lot more in moguls, and you probably do when you're off balance. But if the forward lean is set properly, you can go from full chest on your knees to full extension without flexing the boot and still keep your center of mass in the, in the proper position over the ski. So you really don't have to flex the boot to, to, to, to absorb the moguls. You only need the boot to support you when you get thrown off balance.

Yeah, to bring you back to that sweet spot, right? Like, like, contain you there. Yeah.

If the forward lean is not correct, you have to flex the boot to get your center of mass in the right position, and then you're screwed. Every, every time you go to absorb the bump, it's going to throw you in the back seat.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So it's def— it's, it's like a, like a very strict coach if, if you're trying to work against the boot, it's like, no, no, no, no, this is where I'm set up to work in this range. So, so I guess that's probably down to the initial fit. You make sure that for the person's kind of mobility and range is, is set right.

And we've found that the, that the boot is very, very receptive to, uh, very small changes. A few years ago, I set up a new pair of boots for myself for the first day of skiing at Stowe. And I went up there and I felt really weak and I'm going like, man, I must have let my conditioning go to hell. I just feel like my skis are trying to kill me. And so I was a little bummed out and I'm sitting in the octagon at the top of the mountain going like, I'm just going to try moving the cuffs in half a degree. So I had the bushings. I took the bushing out, moved the cuff in one half degree, felt like Superman after that. Amazing, the transformation.

I, I think that, that brings up such an important point that I don't think probably 98% of skiers realize is how, how important it is to get that boot customized to your anatomy. Like you just said, you felt weaker, and all that was going on is you're working your body against a tiny leverage point, but, but down in that, in that boot it's, you know, levers, the length of it and all that stuff, and the material. Obviously it's just— it makes it— you're working harder. Levers can work for you or against you.

I couldn't get into a position where, where I was strong and have everything be in balance. When I was in balance to make, make the turn, I was in a weak position. Yeah, he wasn't, wasn't lined up with the lines of force, you know, and it just just felt scary.

So yeah, I watched some of the Warren Nickerson series where he sort of goes through the whole process, like, of getting boots. And, and part of that, so it's like, okay, we've identified now, and you, you say it's really important to get this, like, dialed in to the person. How, how is that process, uh, like, because it looks like you do some stuff on snow as well as in shop.

Uh, we, we sometimes do stuff on snow. Um, yeah, it's fairly rare because people can be all over the world. Yeah, yeah, we try to give— we try to show our customers how to do it themselves and encourage them to play around with it. And it's, uh, it's— we've reduced it to a pretty simple process. That's pretty understandable. A lot of boot fitters, you know, will try to get the person's knee over their big toe or something like that. That works fine if you've got straight legs and, you know, but if you don't, it's sometimes, or not just sometimes, quite often, is the absolute opposite of what you should do.

Totally agree.

Forcing someone into a position where they have, if they're going to have a flat ski, they're at the end of their range of motion in their knees. And there's no way they can finish a turn or start a turn because there's no range of motion left in their knees.

Yeah.

So what we've, we built a machine with a 3D inclinometer. And so we can measure how the skis wanted to go when you flex forward and when you went back and when, went side to side. And we learned a lot from it. It was initially very confusing, but we ended up learning a lot from it and deciding that the way where you do the least harm anyways is to just stand on a flat, level, hard floor. And for lateral alignment, you just rock back and forth slightly like you're edging, just slightly. Your edges should change at the same time. Your boot should go click, click, click, not click, click, click, click, click, click. You want that edge change to be exactly the same time when the person is relaxed and looking forward and not really thinking about what they're doing. A really good skier will adapt really quickly and their boots will go click, click, click, click. Yeah, you know, after just going rocking back and forth a few times. So if you've got a really experienced good skier, you got to pick that out really quickly.

Like they can almost— because they're so used to, oh, I need— yeah, you almost need to tell them, don't do that, don't fix it, try and— yeah, don't let them adapt, try and get them.

Yeah, but you got to get them before they adapt.

Okay.

And you know, that's not a very— it's not super precise, but it, it's, it's, it's a way of doing it where you do no harm, really. It's always going to get you into the ballpark.

And that— so that part, are you just changing the cuffs to get that part right, or do you change the soles?

Uh, well, we started out— we actually made all our shells that actually have extra material on them, so you got to router them when you do— when you're to plane the soles. And but we found out very shortly that 99% of the time we can do it with a cuff.

And I love that. That's what I've— okay, sorry.

It's with, with a plastic boot, it's not quite the same because the cuff is kind of floppy when the boot's not buckled and you got your foot in there, then you buckle it, the cuff goes wherever your foot is, wherever your leg shaft is. So you can change the cuff alignment and it doesn't really change the way the boot, you know, the boot's going to adapt to your foot as you buckle it. Where our cuff is so much stiffer, when you buckle it, it forces the leg shaft to go where the cuff is. There's no— yeah, there's no—

there's no give.

There's no give.

Yeah, yeah.

So we've found that changing the cuff alignment is very, very effective, and we can do As long as they're within 3 degrees, we do it all with the cuff. The only time we'd have to do the sole is if somebody's way out like 4 or 5 degrees, which is pretty rare.

Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, that's— I, I would agree with that. I used to have to go into canting the soles of my boots, and then when I moved to a boot, this Fisher boot, that I could really move the cuff, I just didn't need to adjust the sole, uh, sole canting at all. So yeah, that's, that's interesting.

And then the thought I always used to have is that we spend all our life walking around with our feet parallel to the ground, and now we're going to go skiing and we're going to make our feet not parallel to the ground anymore.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking with some— yeah, when I've spoken with some World Cup coaches working with athletes at that level, they do the, the canting more as, as a performance thing. So to help, like, whether it's someone's technique or their style or whatever, just change the hookup point earlier or later. And so it's not so much to do with the knee. And, and they also say, like, don't muck around with, like, this, this knee over second toe thing. No, that's not, like, a good target. That's actually going to throw different people's body off. And, um, so it's interesting you say that too.

Yeah, they do it by feel, what feels good.

Yeah.

And that's— we kind of went through the process with Warner because that's what he wanted to do. We wanted to— until it, you know, to increase the edge angle or decrease the edge angle until it felt right. But what happens is when you're checking that, you're, you're not skiing at 100% effort, so your edge angles are lower. The loads are lower. And you see this on the World Cup when you watch the opening races, opening GS races, especially GS races on the World Cup. You'll see people whose boots are set up too strongly. Their knees are out. They're trying to de-edge the ski while they're in the middle of the turn, you know, so they're getting themselves into dangerous positions. And after a couple races, it's It's gone because they figure it out. But it's because they set up their boots just out free skiing or skiing gates at, you know, 50-60% effort. And now when they're going 110%, they don't perform the same way.

Mm-hmm.

The edge angles are so much higher and the turning radius of the ski versus the edge angle is not linear. So as you go to higher and higher edge angles, the turning radius decreases quite quickly.

Yes.

So suddenly you're going, you know, you're running a GS course with 10 degrees more edge angle. The skis want to turn a lot sharper, but you can't get your center of mass inside enough to resist that load. So you end up kind of dialing your knee out a little bowlegged, and you're in a weak position where you're going to injure yourself, or you're not going to be able to withstand the loads. And I've seen that, seems like every year, especially with the women, they— you can see they're over-canted in the first couple of races, and the good ones, you know, the next race they're, they're fixed.

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now, one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is simply the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day it tells me exactly how many turns I've done and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns, and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me. And I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition. While the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start the turn. So these can be different. You can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers, and it's great at the end of the day being able to check that or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million. So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach. And thank you, team, for sponsoring this episode.

Yeah, that's a really interesting, interesting observation. Hey, so Dave, on, on that topic of kind of setting things up naturally, I know one of, uh, one of my online coaching students, he, he loves his his Dodge boots, and he was sort of talking about even your philosophy on, on the foot area. So like how the side of the foot and, and then even the footbed, uh, what sort of approach you, you think about there. Can you, can you go into that, what your ideal is? Uh, how do you like people's feet to be sort of set up? Are you like, okay, put the subtalar joint in neutral? I'm not this stuff, or what's your philosophy?

I'll start off with the one thing is you don't want to completely fix your foot because all those joints and nerves serve a purpose. There's proprioception and load sensing, and you want your foot to— and shock absorption. Your foot's an excellent shock absorber. It's a million years of evolution. Millions of years of evolution to be able to absorb those shocks when you're running away from a lion or something. So you want your foot to move in certain ways, but obviously there's other ways you don't want it to move. So our boots, we always tell our customers that the bottom buckle— it's a 3-buckle boot, so the boot that's on your— the buckle that's on your instep should only be buckled tight enough that it stays buckled. Should be very loose. The middle buckle, which is the first, the next one up around your ankle, should be tight because that's what, that's what creates the heel hold. And the top one is, uh, whatever feels comfortable. In other words, if you want to really ramp up the the reaction of the boot, buckle it up tight. And if you want a bit more play, more play, just leave it loose. You know, it's sort of the tuning buckle. So I, because I had very small feet and had a hard time getting enough support out of my boots when I skied on Lang and other boots, I always had to buckle the boots as tight as I could get them. I mean, When I was racing, the first thing that would go across my mind when I went across the finish line was unbuckle my boots and then look at the time. So I still find myself, I get to the top of the lift and I go, ah, the boots feel a little loose, I'm gonna go one notch tighter. So buckle them up one notch tighter, take 5 or 6 turns and go, nope, it's not better. Because, you know, you basically, when you, when you, especially when you do the lower buckle up really tight, you turn your foot into a hoof and there's no— all those joints and nerves are just sitting there doing nothing.

Yeah, yeah. And so you, you'd like to, to help people, like, explain that to, to people that get a boot and then set them up so, so inside they can, uh, they that they can have that, that feeling. Like, do you do it? Do you do— do people bring their own insoles? Do you do an insole? What's the story there?

We do an insole, just a basic insole, um, pretty similar to what anybody else would do. In our boots, it's a little different because the sidewall of our boot comes down and then there's no boot board. It curves and forms a platform you stand on. So that—

yeah, okay.

So that, that's actually good because you have the— let's see if we can—

continuity sidewall of the boot. Yeah.

And the platform you're standing on are connected, so they— yes, together. There's no— none of this. It's—

yeah. So that must be a big reason to why you feel more, I guess, positive reaction straight away, because yeah, there's, there's another element in there that's not two bits. It's, it's So wow, that's actually just one piece. Yeah.

A lot of people when they first look at it, so you can't modify the boot board, I can't change my ramp angle. And frankly, in 10 years, we've never had anybody ask after they scanned the boot, I want a lower ramp angle. And no one's ever said that.

Interesting. Yeah, okay.

I'm surprised no one has because all kinds of boot fitters adjust it. Yeah, for various reasons.

And I would imagine you probably had people that, that, uh, historically do— they kind of go, oh well, I like to drop my ramp angle, or I increase, or whatever.

Yeah.

So, so then the fact I can say, well, what can you do? Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?

Just goes to say there's nothing you can do.

Yeah, yeah, that's sort of like— it's kind of interesting, perhaps leans towards like it's a symptom of other things, as opposed, you know, or you need to do that because of the design in the first place. Yeah, okay, interesting.

Going back to your, your first question, one of your first questions anyways, um, is, uh, what, what did I feel when I first started skiing on some of the prototypes? And one was that when you, when you set the edge angle, it's kind of a— the feeling is you set it and forget it. Because with a, with a, um, a soft boot that's laterally softer, as the load builds up, it deflects. So then you have to compensate for the deflection, and then the load builds up some more and it deflects some more, and you got to compensate. So you're always chasing the optimum edge angle. But if you have that lateral stability and you set it right to begin with, it doesn't change with the load, so you're never chasing it. You know, it's, it's kind of a set it and forget it.

Yeah, cool. That's very cool.

And we've had some, some, some other racers say that that's the case. I mean, my brother was coaching a skier who switched to our boots, and they said that there was one particular course that, that where he noticed it, where it was kind of soft snow, then it went over some, some frozen ice, you know, boilerplate ice. Halfway through the turn and then back to soft snow. And he said you could see his track didn't vary as it went from soft snow to boilerplate ice to soft snow. It's just a constant arc, and everybody else was, you know, either skidding out or overturning and underturning. And, you know, you could see in the tracks.

Yeah. So, uh, back to like the, like the customer can do their own adjustment and you give some guidance on, on what to go and play with. They can, they can change the cuff 3 degrees in either direction? Yes, either direction, in and out. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, okay, great. And then is there also forward lean?

And there's a— you can change the, uh, change the forward lean with the same bushings in combination with the lateral alignment. So it's, you know, it's basically plus or minus 3 degrees laterally and plus or minus 3 degrees Um, and then you can add a spoiler to get, you know, another 10 degrees or 5 degrees or whatever further forward.

Yeah, okay, interesting, interesting. And what's the process to— again, uh, I go in, I go, right, Dave, I want these boots, when can I get them? How long does it take from start to finish?

It's evolved over the years, but Now what we do is we say download the app, follow the instructions. You take 3 pictures of each foot in the— this app is kind of genius because it's very lightweight, runs well on a phone. But it sends a small set of data to a server that then generates a 3D model of the foot. And it's amazingly accurate. We had one customer who worked for an aerospace company, and he said, I don't believe this could be accurate just taking 3 pictures. So we sent him the 3D model, and he— they had a, a laser scanner, you know, created a gigabyte laser scan file of his foot and then compared the two. And he says, I don't believe it, it's within a millimeter everywhere.

Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, just with an iPhone.

So we tell them to, you know, just do this, follow the instructions, and, you know, most people get it the first try, but seems like everybody gets it after 3 tries. You know, it's easy enough. Um, and then we download the 3D model of the foot, assemble it into a 3D model of the interior of our boot, and you can see exactly where the shape needs to be modified and how much. And we prep the boots. And then when the boots are prepped, we tell them to come in for a final fitting if they're local. If not, we send it to them with instructions on how to do the lateral alignment for, for aft alignment. But when they come in, basically 9 times out of 10, all we do is adjust, adjust the alignment for aft and lateral. Yeah, no, okay, no further punching or, or or padding to, to be done.

Yeah, you know, one thing we— I realized we haven't, uh, you haven't talked about is the liner. What's the liner? Do you have a— your own liner built for that, or—

we have, uh, basically 3 different liners. You have a high-volume liner, a low-volume liner, in a kind of a hand-lasted typical, you know, what other companies have basically, with some memory foam. We used to use a— we used to have a— well, actually, the liners we use are made in the same factory that ZipFit liners are made out of, so it's kind of the same materials, same foams. But we— and we used to use a cork flow pack like the ZipFit flow pack, but we had some problems with leakage. And we found what happens, especially with our shell, is when the when the flow conforms perfectly to your foot, you have kind of a one-to-one foot, one-to-one fit around your ankle. And because there's no stretch in our shell, it starts to feel loose. And then you buckle it up a little bit and it's too tight. When you loosen a little bit, it's too loose.

It's okay.

Even if you fiddle around with the micro, micro adjustment on the, on the buckles, you never, you never seem to be able to get it right. So what we did is we eliminated the cork and we put a very thin 2mm layer of a very soft foam that pushes back on your foot all the time. And that increased that tolerance for that right kind of snug feel. Made it more tolerant, so you didn't have to fiddle with the buckles all the time. That's, that's our hand lasted upgrade liner, is, is that. And then we have a thermoformable liner, like an EVA, you know, Intuition style, Intuition style liner. Yeah, that, uh, some people like. I like, I like, that's what I ski on. I like that liner.

And my business partner, he can't even ski in it so bad.

Okay, so it's kind of a personal taste. So we have, we have the Intuition type liner, we have the a hand-lasted thermoformable liner in a high volume and low volume versions.

Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, it just goes to show, like, I mean, yeah, things are quite personal, aren't they? Someone could say this is great and fantastic, but someone else doesn't like the feel of it. And it's right down to the, the feeling someone likes and is looking for in their, in their ski turns. Okay, Dave, anything, uh, like what are you looking forward to this ski, this ski season? Were you, are you going to be stuck making boots all season or you get to ski a lot?

We spend all summer making boots. We've got a, we, you know, we made, made everything we expected to sell, and then in December we'll probably see some sizes that are getting oversold. We have to do a little mini production run to fill in. In a few areas. So in December we might have a little mini production run, but we're, we're done making boots. And, um, when they're done, they're done. And we tell the customer, hey, you missed it, come back next year. Yeah.

So do you do a lot of skiing?

Try to. Yeah, I'm going to be skiing a lot more, uh, weekdays this year because Stowe's, under the operation of Vail, has become extremely crowded and almost dangerous, you know. Yeah, trails are just too crowded. And it's trying to figure out how to avoid that. Those, those downfalls basically involve skiing on Tuesdays or something, Mondays or Tuesdays.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you on that one.

That's the plan this year is to ski Tuesdays. Yep, then we have a ski bum race on Thursdays.

So cool. And, and, uh, so if we're sort of wrapping up, is there anything else we didn't cover that— I know at the beginning we were talking about like how even on myself I had this preconceived idea, well, ski boots have been working, you know, this way, and and, you know, if other people aren't doing it, like all the big brands, then why to go to something different? And so we tried to cover some of the common misconceptions and questions like, okay, it's too stiff. Any ones we, we've missed?

I think it was conversation.

Say, well, well, if this is so good, why haven't the major companies done it? And when we started, there was a lot of interest from the big companies. Um, they liked the boot, they liked the way it skied, but when it came down to actually doing something, well, one of the companies we met with, one of the, um, guys in the meeting said, well, if we give this to our World Cup racers and they start winning races on it We'll never sell another plastic boot again. We've got €300 million invested in injection molding machines and injection molds. It's a little scary.

Fair point, isn't it?

So yeah, yeah, they're gonna do it until they have to.

Yeah, yeah, a bit like— I mean, you also mentioned you bought an electric car recently. Yeah, yeah, you know, there's a lot of investment in, in non-electric cars now. It's starting to switch. But, um, you know, back then there was no reason.

So why would Tesla to, uh, to convince the major, major car manufacturers that they had to, they had to adapt to this disruptive change?

Yeah, yeah. And I bet you're enjoying that. Yeah, I bet. I know when I got to drive one, it's, it's pretty enjoyable how instant your pickup is. It's, uh, it's amazing.

Yeah, it's been crazy.

Yeah, Dave, it's been, it's been great chatting with you. Really, really interesting. And, um, I hope it maybe convinces some people to maybe try, you know, something different, or at least have some understanding of what's going on instead of just putting something in, in one corner and something else and not really considering the, um, you know, all the, all the different things that go into it.

You have to want to, want to change, try something different.

Yeah, yeah. And so you're, you're there offering—

part of what held Warner Nickerson back for a year from switching to our boots is that it did— they didn't feel the same. But I kept telling him, if it doesn't feel— if it feels the same, it is the same.

Yeah.

The only way it's going to be better is if it feels different. Yeah.

Yeah, it's so true, so true. Dave, thank you so much for your time.

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now, one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is simply the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day it tells me exactly how many turns I've done, and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns, and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me. And I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition. While the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start the turn. So these can be different. You can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers. And it's great at the end of the day being able to check that, or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million. So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach. And thank you, team, for sponsoring this episode.