Telemark Talk / Telemark Tips Forum

I have a pair of three pin hardwires mounted to Altai Koms and have found them to be a little overpowering when the spring tension gives a 4-6 mm gap as is recommended. So, today I experimented with them at lift served skiing (I hate taking fish scaled skis to the resort but it really is the best place to experiment with tweeking things for downhill skiing because you can get so many runs in to test ideas out) by putting just enough tension to keep it on the boot (< 1mm) and it worked great. On recommended tension it felt like I had to really force my heel up to get in the telemark stance with a plastic boot and I was better off doing fakees. It's a little better when just using three pins but I find that plastic boots are a little too tip toe feeling without some kind of heel resistance.

Is there any potential unintended consequences from keeping it low. As a bonus, touring becomes easier if I don't want to remove the heel piece at the end of a run or in flats between runs.

No, I'd just set it as you please, no issues.

I'll add a caveat: Make sure you push the 3-pin toe bail down as much as possible, e.g., two clicks, when you're going downhill. If you have it down only one click, and you also have very low pre-load on the hardwires, then you could damage the pin holes on the duckbill in a hard fall, etc. And, really, you should always push the toe bail as much as possible for the downhill, assuming you went uphill with it down only one click (which I sometimes do).