BraceMaker

take 2

If you like skiing 36 mph, why not do some drills at 36 mph as a warm up, then take some tries at the course at 36, and back the speed down towards the end?

Eh, midwest, Menards is way bettern than HD. Point stands.

For an easy rack, if you have basic welding skills, get an angle iron from menards, get some round bar or allthread. Weld the rod at the angle you want so that it displays the bottom of the ski. Finish the rack by slipping a large rubber or plastic washer over the rods down to the end, then slip rubber hose or heat shrink tubing of appropriate length over the rods. If you want the angle irons to look cool, paint them black, then take the mesh rubber drawer liner stuff from walmart, and use it as a mask to spray silver over the black. FInishe with clear and it looks like carbon fiber. Cover the rods with colored rubber for pizzaz?

I was curious how they got the 3 bits to secure together accurately, must have had beautifully fitted edges to each peice to pull that off.

@skoot1123 The one issue with Chicago, all the lakes are really not really near Chicago, Nationals were down by Wilmington, IL which is ~hour or two depending on traffic from Chicago.

Ya, I don't know about wakeplates/trimtabs, I meant more like above the waterline on the sides, wakes seem fine. But in a head wind it is hard to line up where you want to unless you like getting shot in the eye.

With hull marbles.... why haven't more people come up with some sort of bolt on product to knock down hull spray on some of the decently waked vintage boats?

@sunvalleylaw, I had some older skis that did that as well, they all seemed to have aluminum or other topsheet laminated onto a molded ski. Very different to laminated products of the recent years.

I think it is an interesting year for midwest waterskiing in general, mad props to GVSU. Also note, in midwest collegiate skiing, Wisconsin Lacross, Purdue, Miami Ohio, Cincy and IA State Cyclones, all went Division I, and wild cards MI for div II, I think we should all note that collegiate skiing has HUGE strides to make in the northern states, the more exposure we can get for some of these schools, particularly in WI, MI, IN, IL, and IA the more the sport stands to grow. Imagine if you could mobilize a Chicago ski industry like they have in the southern states. Everyone buy those Collegiate Team T-Shirts and wear them. You will get the "________ has a ski team? My son is going there, he skis!" all the time.

What I don't get is the concept of "foot on the ski" = "control" frankly, if the boot is giving support you are transfering control/force from the leg to the ski, not the foot to the ski. Would seem like the ideal way to transfer force to the ski is to eliminate padding/play between the shin and ski, not the foot and the ski. If my foot transfers forces to the ski I'll always be loading the left edge, as I cannot roll my forward foot onto the lateral side (soccer sprains), so I rely on the upper boot cuff to do the force transfers.

HO could probably use some refining on the PR side of things. Skiers don't always represent the products as well as marketing folks would.

What length are you looking for? New skis I believe the wisdom is go long when in doubt, and demo it either way. If ski-it-again you can always try to resell the ski!

Figure you want to have your hip less flexed, less internally rotated, and less adducted for safety. Unfortunately slalom stance has some flex, has adduction, has internal rotation. So be careful!

Or remove the allen and leave the mount? Do you have a bimini top that could attach there?

Keep the Big Dawg and have a 34 mph Open Coed division?

There were some threads about this in regards to junior skiers, with the MC being a firmer 15 and 22 wake, fairly fierce debate, think the concensus was the Malibu's have pretty nice wakes these days, but then again, I'll ski behind anything that's on water. You have some water?

Ya I am of the same conclusion, only reason I balance side to side is when I have a kid spotting and the boat rides crooked. But you never know, people add stuff to boats over time, 99's are a 13 year old boat.

You could take it off to test? Also check to see if that 93 has any ballasting up in the bow.

@popof - one exception I would probably make here, sprung mass ie. a wheel is reacting primarily vertically from the ground. Your car is turning, your wheel is bouncing, your goal is to keep the rubber of the wheel planted such that you can corner, and the reaction of the tire bouncing off the ground must be absorbed, reduced, and the tire returned to the ground. This to me is very similar to the ski, when the ski is closer to under the skier. That being the more upright the skier-leg-knee-hip the more similar it seems to the unsprung weight concept. But how does this change through the various stages of the slalom skiers stance? Essentially we have a skier - 200 lbs, we have two ski packages of identical configuration, that is same stiffness, width, length, bindings. Package A has a ski that weighs 3 pounds and 5 pound of boots, package B is 5 pounds of ski, 5 pounds of boots. From hook up through the wakes we have a ski that is on edge (same skier so same form/edge changes etc). While on edge, we have his weight + ski weight + dynamic weight (pull from boat) transferred against the water by a ski that is on edge. Skier encounters a water imperfection midway from ball to 1st wake. Regardless of ski weight we have quite a bit of "load" in the system, and the system is reacting against this water imperfection through a diminished ski surface area (edge). Combined with this we have a relatively rigid suspension on our system, as the skier has the legs and core engaged to combat the pull from the boat. Does this skier have the same concept of unsprung weight? Does 2 pounds of ski matter much against the weight + hundreds of pounds of load? Same skier punches through the wakes and begins the edge change, now his body weight is not on the same lean against the line, his load is diminished, the ski is flatter as it switches edges, and the skier lacks the load for his core to be engaged on, so the suspension system is less rigid, more supple. In this stage a water imperfection is acting almost vertically through the flatter running surface of the ski, through vertically oriented legs, against the skier who is not adding the load of the tow line through his legs on the system. Now we can check that same 2 pounds? Probably meaningful?

@h2oski - you mean the bindings can be moved 1/8" at a time. Which is the same as most binding systems. The advantage to the sequence plate is more universal fit, the tail section fits D3's, it fits Obriens. Both front and rear screws have these step washer buttons so the plate "floats" on the ski, in theory this means that the ski can flex under the plate, and there is a thin plastic protective layer under the plate to protect the top of your ski. The set up of the plate fixes the front binding in space, and allows front binding rotation arounda central point. The rear mount also allows rotation, and has slots spaced by about 1/4, so you can set up your rear binding, and set rotation on that. Assuming you set your bindings up rear as close to front as you can get, and at the rotation you find natural, then once bolted ot the ski you can slide it forwards and backwards as referenced, by removing the two central screws and swapping to a different row of holes. Although personally I don't get why not just slots and some finish washers so you could slid it less than 1/8". This would be easy to do at home. My book is that it would be quite convenient if you really liked the bindings that sit on the plate, and had a desire to swap your boots to different skis with a minimum of set up but I am unsure if you actually benefit in comparison to a regular type of binding plates.

Biggest issue with the old MC's is until you get to 89 you get rope wear. http://i46.tinypic.com/fd60kj.jpg Now you take an old boat like these, figure out an easy way to implement zero off, or just do stargazer. Take the pylon and get a delrin cap that bolts onto the pylon. Oh and the final improvement would be to have a fiberglass guy blend some chines in to blast down some of that spray.

@shaneh - you see that with the FM products too, lots of them have chopped rear boots to get the larger shells together. My large shells on 66's have ankle to ankle measurements similar to where my Large Wiley's boots go if I set them up as close together as possible, so while they could be "closer" with my foot size, they are not more than other comprable product.

The malibu's are pretty good, the wedge does work. Our neighbor has a CC 196 so I feel your pain on that. In my book any of the boats with more freeboard allow you more safety margin when you are weighting the boat. Meaning you then have more leeway to tune for firmer wakes. Unfortunately I believe it is the way the ski hulls try to feather out the wakes to not be firm that you are struggling with.

@bbirlew - biggest issue weighting down a DD ski boat is freeboard. The older boats just don't have much. My Prostar with a good hunk of weight will throw a respectable wake, but if you aren't paying attention you can get water over the back of the boat when you drop off plane. It just isn't all that safe, and if you are public waters with waves and other boats you don't want a swamped ski boat. For all around most of the more recent open bow direct drives have a good amount of freeboard ('94 is too early for this, great ski boats regardless), the more modern ones however have given enough height to the designs that you can weight em up and not be too overly concerned about waves over the back. That is the single reason to go modern, I prefer the 90's boats myself when you do the price/feature analysis, there's not 50K in the budget for boats.