Tele-blading.

[Duker]

Tonight, I out did saucer boy. At work we tend to get a little bored between all the renters going in and come back. Having a ski-grave yard, we dug out some sweet snowlerblades and stole some Rottafellas off our old tele stuff. after a very hasty mounting job, we took to the hill. It was off the sickter scale. Switch was a little diffcult, but handplanting off the catwalk freaking rocked. So there it is, the next big thing, TELEBLADING.

[MOHSHSIHd]

please make a video! i gotta see this...


were you gettin some crazy looks on the slopes?

[hucksquaw]

that will never catch on. why? because its

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GAY

[Telegasm]

please make a video! i gotta see this...

There already is one! And you're right, you gotta see it. This made me laugh right outta my chair.

http://70.84.235.130/~teleskii/video/TeleBigfoot.wmv

[ak_powder_monkey]

snowlerblades are only cool if you are attached to a saucer of some sort while drinking JD, or the snowlerblades happen to be snowboards

[TeleAl]

That is the shit.
Ranks up there with my Mono-Tele-Ski idea.

Hope you guys get some snow soon.
You seem bored.

[Duker]

I also tried monoboarding on one of our Step-in snowboards, It was very painful.

[ScottG]

That is the shit.
Ranks up there with my Mono-Tele-Ski idea.

Hope you guys get some snow soon.
You seem bored.

Have yo seen a teleboard???

http://www.teleboardusa.com/

[Free Range Lobster]

See UPP Soul Slide, best tele-blading segment ever.

[TeleAl]

Have yo seen a teleboard???

http://www.teleboardusa.com/

Yeah, but that ain't my idea.
It lacks a key component of Telemark Skiing, the feet must move.

I can explain:
Get a board, mount 2 tracks side by side. In those tracks tele bindings are mounted.
This allows the feet to slide back and forth through the turns.
The distance needs to be enough for one knee to be behind the other, like a tele turn.
That's it.

It remains a stupid idea because the question remains:
Why would anyone wan to do it?

Kind of like mono-boarding.

[ScottG]

Ahhhhh, now I understand.
Would be a bit tough to keep from tatering, but I guess thats the fun.

Either:
1) front foot is locked in, and back foot slides
2) both slide, but the bindings are linked so one moves forward when the other moves back.
3) both slide willy-nilly.

#3 seems impossibly difficult.
#2 seems cool and more what youre talking
#1 at least lets you stand up more normally when at rest and gives you some up down motion in the turns.

Whaddya thinking? #2 would be sweet.
Should talk to the teleboard dudes about that one.
The sliding binding plates would be heavy, but its not like your gonna tour with that rig.

Very cool. I like it.
A buddy teleboards, but one main gripe is that he is always locked into the same turn. At the least teleboards should have a quick switch ability so mid-day you can burn the OTHER thigh by swapping the forward binding.

[shmerham]

I'm trying to come up with some common contraptions that would replicate the tele-mono-board, particularly idea #2 courtesy of Scott G. I'm coming up short though. This is yet more proof that I shouldn't have gone into mechanical engineering (hopefully if the grad school thing works out, I won't be in the field for long).

In any case, I'm picturing what it would be like to have sliding tele boards on a single board and trying to arc turns with it. Uber challenging is what I'm thinking.

I'd love to see it though. Such creativity is inspiring, even if the end result is silly.

[ScottG]

If I were a machinist, I would have built something last night.
Mount each tele binding on a sliding track.
put a small pulley at each end. Run a stainless cable from each binding, around the front pulley and to the other binding. Run another cable around the rear pulley.
Then, when one goes forwards, the other goes back.

I think the sliding tracks will be the hardest part.
Must be durable, but not too heavy.
Must not bind up when the board flexes. that's the hard part.

The key is having the two binders linked together. Only way to have control.

[Telegasm]

If I were a machinist, I would have built something last night.
Mount each tele binding on a sliding track.
put a small pulley at each end. Run a stainless cable from each binding, around the front pulley and to the other binding. Run another cable around the rear pulley.
Then, when one goes forwards, the other goes back.

I think the sliding tracks will be the hardest part.
Must be durable, but not too heavy.
Must not bind up when the board flexes. that's the hard part.

I produced exactly the mechanism you are suggesting in 1999. Glad to see someone else had the very same train of thought. I mounted the tele bindings to blocks of UHMW-PE (similar to P-Tex). I was going to have the blocks slide on stainless rods, but I did not have a way to create rods that would flex exactly as the board flexed so there would be too much of a stiction problem there. Instead I used a single central rail of UHMW that was soft enough to flex with the board, and milled opposite rabbets (grooves) into both the blocks and the rail so that the rail would hold the blocks down. I mortised the rail at each end and installed a steel pulley with brass bushing. I then hooked up cables exactly as you were thinking.

Using a teflon "dry lube" spray to decrease friction between the topsheet of the board and the binding blocks, I was able to get the feet to slide pretty well when testing on the living room rug. It looked as if the standard motions of telemark skiing would come to life on a snowboard, for better or for worse.

Out on snow, of couse (this was at Sierra-at-Tahoe, got some very strange looks) I had problems. There still was too much friction even with my slick materials. When the board wasn't flexed at all the blocks moved freely, but when it was flexed even a little, they stuck. At first I figured that was okay because the board is unflexed in transitions and that's the only time your feet need to be free to slide by each other, right? So what if the feet are semi-stuck during the power phase of the turn. But as it turned out, the stiction was just too much.

I had a backup plan for that. Since the board had this long block of UHMW screwed lengthwise down its middle, there was plenty of material to screw other stuff into. I put in a couple of eye screws and rigged a low-tech bungee system that exerted a strong pull on the binding blocks to return to a center position. This almost solved the problem well enough to use the rig for more than a test run or two, but not quite. Unfortunately no matter how I set the bungee tension, it was either not enough tension to prevent the feet from getting stuck at the end of the track motion, or it was enough tension to do that but then the tension itself added too much to the track friction and the whole deal locked up for that reason instead.

At that point I decided that the only way I could see making this work would be to get rid of the binding-block-to-board contact (and accompanying friction), and go back to the original idea of having the binding blocks "float" above the board, riding on stiff metal rods. Instead of trying to have the rods flex we'd make them stiff, and one end of each rod would have to have some sort of floating attachment to the board while the other end was more fixed, so that the stiffness didn't interfere with the board's free flexing.

...Which, as you can probably see, begins to turn into a matter of completely suspending a very strong (and ultimately terribly heavy) mechanical system above a board, and by the time you achieve that, you'd sort of have the properties you want, mechanically speaking, but all elegance or simplicity would be gone and you might as well be mounting a bicycle drivetrain and paddlewheels to the monoboard instead.

So just to have some fun on the thing, i rigged it so the binding blocks were stuck right parallel to each other at mid-board, and rode the thing as a goddamned TELE MONOSKI (thinking the whole time, "i will burn for this!") for a few more runs. I managed to avoid injury.

That ends my engineering review of the concept. As for the mechanical side of whether it will ever really be a good thing to do: I realized a few things only later that day after I switched back to skis. Think of yourself teleing on a monoboard, feet going forward and back. Realize that only the foot/leg on the side that you're making a turn on right now has any power, and your other foot & leg are basically way up off the snow like an outrigger. That's not all that bad in itself. But now think about where the power foot is on the board. If you're doing regular tele technique on the thing, the power foot is slid back, right? That means that you're driving the turning edge from somewhere much too far back. In other words, the whole concept we're discussing here is doomed because it commits the rider to always overloading the tail end of the turning edge. It might sort of work in pure powder conditions but in edgeworthy conditions I don't really think it will.

There was yet another thought that crossed my mind and further doomed the project. When you twist your body to steer out of one turn and into another, what controls how much of your steering motion goes into sliding the bindings around, and how much goes into actually steering the board? I could never figure out a mechanical solution to that. As a result i got the feeling that on almost any version of this rig, you'd have a nastly lack of steering precision during turn transitions because the board would never steer solidly or predictably until you had made it all the way through the foot shuffle and maxed out the sliding positions of the feet.

I'd be interested to see what other thoughts you guys have about this subject because I remember being pretty amped up about the idea when it was fresh in my mind in 1999. But I'd have to say my attempt failed.

[teleboardlawstudent]

sorry to resurrect this but incase the guy is still around who wants to create a sliding binding for a single board teleboard device:
http://www.tele-ride.com/

[sandytheskier]

What? No pics! I don't believe you. I need pics for jongable evidence.

[The Sneak]

I saw a guy doing this at Taos. He looked like he was having a blast. I'll stick to my splitboard.

[iceman]

Wow, I missed that first time around, telegasm, interesting stuff. I was thinking "well what about a rail system?" about five seconds before you got into that. well done.

Just curious why you guys thought the bindings should be connected by a cable system, wouldn't it be better if the feet could move independently?

[wanghoeby]

There already is one! And you're right, you gotta see it. This made me laugh right outta my chair.

http://70.84.235.130/~teleskii/video/TeleBigfoot.wmv

Hi-larious!