swbca

I assume the front fin contacts the PC ?

When I bought a 2004 ProStar 3 years ago I replaced all the mechanical parts and the canopy on a 30 year old Shorestation lift with Straight Crossbeams. This old lift came with the house. It has no front limiter to stop the boat so it requires great-care by an experienced person to land the boat without the prop hitting the rear horizontal beam . . . . and then hope the engine doesn't kill when pulling in. Has anyone seen a way to add a "bumper" to limit the boat position on this type of lift ? A simple but probably bad idea is to bolt a piece of laminated wood to the front horizontal beam that would catch the front fin before the prop hits the rear beam. ( its not possible to raise the bed enough to have the prop clear the rear horizontal beam) Our dock is 70 feet long and the lift would have to be 100 feet from shore to get enough water depth to raise the bed enough to solve this problem.

Rotating your rear boot for comfort may be screwing up your skiing . . . . For the last three years I have gone through three skis and was mounting the rear boot angled because it was more comfortable on my left (rear-foot) hip joint. Yesterday I straightened the rear boot and it solved my offside angle problem between offside turn and edge change; a I problem I had been fighting for the last three years. It also solved the crappy pullout for the gates because the ski wasn't rolling enough to pull out with strength. Thanks to @lpskier I am going to test rotating the front boot to see if it provides additional improvement. Can only rotate the front a small amount because the T-Factor boot can't be turned much without adding inserts.

@lpskierHow much did you rotate your front boot to get the change you needed ? With my T-Factor boot I can't move the front of the front boot left or right more that about 1/8" without adding inserts. Are your rotation adjustments within 1/8" of straight or did you need more than that ?

If you are RFF you might find its more comfortable to have the rear boot mounted with your rear foot pointing left a few degrees. LFF you might have the rear boot pointed with your rear foot pointed right. It may be more comfortable but what does it do to your skiing performance. Does it affect the roll of your ski and in turn reduce your ability to get angle in one direction? Have you ever experimented with this as part of your ski setup ?

Are the inserts for the fin blocks standardized like the inserts for bindings ? I don't have a wall covered with used skis to figure that our for myself.

I still have a life-time habit of increasing off-side angle to the wake by shifting weight to the back foot. That worked at 34mph, But now at 32mph, shifting back on the ski to get better off-side angle doesn't work.. It buries the narrower tail on modern skis and raises the tip of ski increasing drag. I recently switched to a KD Titanium. With weight neutral it has the quickest off-side turns of any ski I have used in the last 3 years. Get slightly forward and it snaps a 90 degree off-side turn. And it works the same on both sides. That performance came with the KD after increasing DFT to the most forward position the ski would permit .894 instead of the factory .790. That DFT also allowed me to get further forward between the turn and through the wake, but I still feel like the front of ski is going push away from me if I try to be aggressive and have a balanced position on the ski. When I try to maintain a neutral stance out of turn to maintain angle, I sometimes end up letting go and spinning to a stop rather than crashing ribs first into wake. I know the problem is me. I recently read someone quoting Freddy Winter "point your knees where you want the ski go". Maybe pushing my right knee to the left would help. I would try it this morning if I wasn't forced to be somewhere else for a few days. Anyone had this off-side angle problem and solved it ?

@Wish 80 t0 84

I agree that the larger spherical surface of a helmet would increase the risk of neck or concussion injury.

@water_skier1 It it makes you feel better, many binding installations require modifications. Even cutting the rear binding plate so it fits behind the front binding. I had to drill a new set of holes in my T-Factors because the inserts on my ski didn't allow a forward-enough position for the bindings.

By counting pixels on an enlarged view of your photograph of your T-Factor and mine, it clear the holes in the T-Factor plate are not machined in the right place. As others have pointed out its easy to fix with a drill. Rather than using a larger bit, you could use a drill that matches the size of the other holes and use it as "grinder" by pressuring the drill towards the edge of the plate forcing it to chew its way outward the small amount required.

@UWSkier Last Questions . . When you remove videos from the OG Pixel does that also remove them from the cloud ? On my current phone I use Wakeye to record every practice run every day so I have to USB transfer the images from the phone to a PC avoid running out of storage space every couple of days. Any comments about the quality . . . Vibration? smooth video playback? Thanks for sharing your experience.

@UWSkier Does the Zoom control built into Wakeye control your phone's zoom level ? (It works on my Galaxy) Do you suppose I would get the Free Google Cloud If I bought a 2021 OG Pixel on ebay ? Does you OG Pixel have a problem with vibration ?

@ETskier Wakeye works great on your phone - if its still available

I am still using an 8 year old Galaxy S5 because it's unaffected by the high frequency vibration on the ski pilon and each frame is a good quality zoomed-in image. The downside is the phone can't keep up with high-speed 90 degree panning of a slalom skier and skips some frames in the wake crossings. I have tried a few newer Galaxy phones and they are all badly affected by vibration. Are there any other phones that can provide this relativly close up view of the skier without vibration or skipped frame problems ? And that can be controlled with Wakeye GPS stop-start ? This is @pcan M8 friend showing us how to get angle.

@dave2ball Your suggestion to fill the tank worked. Thanks

Any info on Streaming the Nationals ? Real Time or Delayed I recall Archived coverage of many events other years, but not sure if they were same day or later.

KD Titanium 66 - as someone else said, its performance is symmetrical - left and right. Can carry speed through turns into cross course, even with tight radius turns. If you drop back on the ski, it doesn't turn or get angle to the wake, but with weight neutral its very aggressive. Best ski to date for me.

Warren Witherell cut 1" of the back of our club member's Northland Sabre slalom skis and then extended the fin slot forward with the same carpenter's saw. Some club names that stayed in the Sport Gary Thompson, Al Tolefson. The Northland ski was extinct in the late 60's.

Two of the large holes through my Denali C85 are machined angled back at about 45 degrees through the thickness of the fin. The holes in left foot forward fin and right foot forward fin are angled back in opposite directions. In "Fin Whispering" terms these angle holes could could possibly have the affect of asymmetrical Fin Area, DFT or maybe even Depth when the ski is rolled to extremes. What do these angles do to offset the asymmetric of in your body structure with your feet front and back on the ski ?

The 2004 197 fuel gauge has always been imprecise because the fuel shifts left and right across a partition in the tank. But now the gauge reads random values, most often stuck on empty or stuck on full. Is this a gauge or sensor problem?

I also have preset tension on the bottom laces with a knot top and bottom and no adjustment clip. Same on Front and back T-Factors. For release safety I use a comfortable-fit preset on the top laces as well. This of course requires using a lubricant get into the boots.

@The_MSI have been working with settings on a 66" Titanium. Interested in your comments, but I don't know your boat speed. Thanks.

GPS on your phone will get you within 10 feet with the right app. I use GPS Waypoint Navigator on my Android phone to locate sub buoys on our lake. After recording the waypoint when I am at its location, I can drive up to the spot and usually see the sub buoy on one side of the boat or another. If you water is fairly clear, you could jump in with goggles and you would almost always see your marker after arriving at the recorded Waypoint. The GPS on the phones is more accurate than the often quoted 20" . I have used this for 2 years and its always easy to find the subouys.

The physical abuse makes it hard for the best skiers to even practice 43 off. The 41 off skiers take really bad hits even when they are doing everything right. Was watching Nate carrying speed through ball 2 and made it half way to the wake before the rope was tight. It looked painful. Not even Nate can do that forever without back injury. This makes it hard to even practice 43 off every day because really bad hits are just part of it no matter how good your form. I don't think 43 will be run any time soon. Could take more ski development and taller skiers, though there may also be offsetting disadvantages in being taller.