Fritz Barthel
Marker tech binding rumors spread for a long time, but they eventually faded out on the rain soaked pastures of my misty home mountains here in Austria, between the ignorance of gawking pooping cows… Hey, can anybody stop the rain, this year is so bad!
20 years ago, Fritz worked on a non-pin heel for the classic Dynafit TLT Low-Tech, looks tight and light, doesn’t it? We suppose it could still happen. Who will be first?
But now the news floods even my mailbox despite my being the laziest, most ignorant media dummy. The empire strikes back! Kingpin has landed! As I found out quickly this King is not a Cambodian warlord but Marker´s answer to Dynafit. Cool name I thought, remembering that someone told me that they call the massively protruding Marker heel piece “The Anal Intruder,” referring to the position freeriders are in after big jumps. “King-Pin Intruder”, tsk tsk, dirty business the binding business…
Hmm, in the thin light of my faint memories, just an edge before sweet amnesia takes it all, was there not something? Around twenty years ago? Upon viewing the Kingpin, I feel as if I have seen something like that already. A mild sensation of deja-vu enters my brain. Somewhere in the attic there must be a box with old ski touring binding prototypes. I wipe off the dust of decades and there emerges…ah, now I remember. There it is, a kind of pre-release, so to speak.
Funny mechanism, one spring for front and side release, a screw to change the ratio between those two, low and high heel riser, forward pressure load, lightweight, Patent EP 0519243 (1995)
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(WildSnow guest blogger Fritz Barthel invented the tech “pintech” binding system about 30 years ago. While he claims laziness was the mother of his invention, we constantly berate him to accept the fact that he is the king and any tech binding is his scepter, even the latest intruder.)
Beyond our regular guest bloggers who have their own profiles, some of our one-timers end up being categorized under this generic profile. Once they do a few posts, we build a category. In any case, we sure appreciate ALL the WildSnow guest bloggers!
