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What if ski boots had a tiny amount of suspension.
I was thinking what if I could put 2-3 air shocks in the foot bed of the boot with .25-.5 inch of travel. Do any of y’all think this could work without major ski control sacrifices?
depends what you're doing i guess but put simply, the point of a boot is to transmit the energy and control from your body as directly to the ski as possible. having play in there would probably hurt the performance of the boot to some extent
what is the purpose anyway? for landing flat as fuck? haha
SofaKingSickdepends what you're doing i guess but put simply, the point of a boot is to transmit the energy and control from your body as directly to the ski as possible. having play in there would probably hurt the performance of the boot to some extent
what is the purpose anyway? for landing flat as fuck? haha
If it was anything like bike shocks, the rebound would yeet you into outerspace on a heavy stomp.
You can get insoles for skate shoes that completely absorb the force. I think that is more the move than something that is springy. If that makes any sense at all.
I mean, they literally do. That's what the flex of your boot is doing. The bootboard/insole/binding interface/camber of your skis all combine to absorb some energy, but also, when you land, or hit a bump, there's a combination of forward and downward momentum. Even if you're hucking to flat, a lot of that impact is coming from your forward momentum as you ski off of the hit. As your weight comes forward on the landing, you flex into your boot, it flexes and absorbs that impact gently, along with your legs. It works really similarly to linkage suspension like on the rear end of a mountain bike or on a Trust or Lauf fork.
The combo of a ski boot+your legs actually works a lot like something like this:
So often we think of suspension in this one dimensional sense as a sliding spring and damper combination like a traditional bike fork, or rear shock, when it's usually a combination of some sort of spring, and a linkage to control it. That's because in the real world, impacts very rarely happen in only one direction. You're never just jumping staight down onto a perfectly flat landing with no speed, you're allways dealing with forces acting on you in three dimensions, and a more versatile suspension system, like boot flex does a better job of absorbing those three dimensional forces than a simple vertical damper floating inside your boot like you're imagining.
On top of that, adding air shocks inside the boot, or in the boot/binding interface would drastically affect stack height, and the laterall loading/play would make it hard to get on edge. People complain about the stack height of Gaurdians, which is like, 1 cm higher than an alpine binding. To get .5" of travel, you'd have to add at least 2.5 cm of stack height, which people would not dig.
And then, finally, because I'm being a total nerd, air shocks are temperature sensitive. So you'd have to adjust air pressure based on ambient temp, and then also, as they heat up, performance degrades. I can feel it happen on medium length descents on my mountain bike which has much bigger shock volume and better heat disipation than any boot shock could ever have. So by the bottom of a long ski run, your boot shocks would be overheated and feel like garbage.
Sorry, that's a very long dorky post, but I'm procastinating from real work. Boot flex is an elegant solution to this problem.
Custom footbeds were a game changer for me. I always thought I needed some sort of shock absorbing footbed for those big impacts, but a good footbed cups your heel and places the fat in your heel directly under your heel bone. Basically it uses your bodies natural shock absorption. I'm guessing thats why ski boot suspension hasn't been done or is necessary.
