swbca

@BraceMaker  Thanks for your input.  Because our bed has to be so low to deal with shallow water, there is no room for a 3" PVC mounted on top of the cradle.  The prop is 7" from the rear cradle cross member when the front fin hits this 4x4 bumper.  The keel of the boat clears the 4x4 by 1/8".

This solution doesn't have any flexibility like a 7 foot long piece of PVC but the lift itself is low mass and flexible if the boat is only going slightly too fast.  I had the 4x4 and lag bolts on hand so this is what fits and it works.     (It was easier to photoshop than take a picture this rainy morning.)

Thanks

@skimtbYES.  For three years I have been the only person to drive our boat into the lift because I don't want a damaged prop.  My wife has become a good slalom driver, but can't judge when the boat is exactly stopped when landing at a dock.  She doesn't leave it in reverse long enough or too long after 100's of landings.  I manually position the boat in the boat lift using visual markers, but sometimes strong wind conditions make it difficult.  If other people were landing our boat in the lift, I am certain there would have been contact between the prop and the lift.

@BraceMaker   Because of chronic shallow water problems and almost ZERO slope as we move further from shore, our Bed is a low as it can be on the lift, so the keel clears the front cross member only by 2".   As an alternative what about fastening the 3" PVC to the vertical bed supports so the PVC just clears the keel.   The 2 vertical supports are about 3 feet apart so it would be a stiffer hit.  The boat would stop with about 10" clearance between prop and rear cradle member. 

1 hour ago, BraceMaker said:

Skip the laminated wood - we've always just done this with PVC pipe across the lift cradle using a U bolt.  ours is 3" has enough give that if you come in a smidge hot it isn't a hard stop. But is stiff enough to prevent too much forward motion.

 

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.