I would love to be able to share more pictures with you, but unfortunately we have lost all the snow due to abnormally high temperatures. It was +5°C and raining this morning! In January!
Luckily, I was to ski around a bit with S Bounds on central Finland during the Christmas time.
lilcliffy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 9:36 pm
Verskis-
Great to hear from you!
Wonderful to hear that you finally bit on a waxless-scaled XCD ski and that you are enjoying the S-Bound 98!
What is the snow like that you are using it on? Warm I take it- but is it warm and soft or dense and consolidated?
What length 98 do you have?
How are you prepping/waxing the base?
Are you using the Easy-Skins with this ski?
I have the 179cm length (it is actually shorter than that, roughly 176cm). I glide waxed the entire ski, with hot wax on the smooth sections and with liquid wax on the scales. I don't have the Easy skins.
I was able to ski in different conditions during Christmas:
First it was about 30cm deep very soft, warm and wet snow. The grip was fantastic, glide was alright, and I was surprised how easy the skis were turning in this kind of heavyweight snow.
Next day the snow stayed soft under the surface, but there was a slight crust on top of the snow. The skis handled this slight crust better than I would have thought, even if the turning was a bit more difficult now.
Then we got some colder temperatures and more snow. There was now a very hard base with approximately 5 to 10 cm of soft, cold, fluffy snow on top. These were my favorite conditions, even if the grip suffered a bit. There was still enough grip for my bunny hill skiing, but I felt that in these conditions a properly grip waxed ski would have been better. Nevertheless, the glide stayed surprisingly good, and turning on these conditions were almost effortless.
Then we got back home and lost all the snow.
Nevertheless, I was more than delighted about the performance of the S Bounds. I was afraid I would get a ski with bad grip, slow glide and inferior turning performance (compared to Åsnes Rabb), but it seems none of this was true!
They even seemed to track much better during kick and glide compared to the Rabb. Could this be attributed to the central groove on the S Bounds?