Editor’s Note. The question is being asked, Obewhanskinoobie will attempt a few minutes outside his hermit cave to answer “How does a Kingpin ski touring binding hole pattern match up with standard Dynafit Radical drilled ski?” Today, at the hour of 9:00 Nepalese time, Obe will meet with those acolytes who can bring him small quantities of dates and tree nuts to break his two year fast during which he lived on snowballs alone. A free coupon for knee replacement surgery will be accepted in lieu of the tree nuts. The full lotus position is hard on knees. He should have been doing more ski touring. In any case, Obewhanski will now reveal: what’s the overlap?
Here is the deal. This ski has a standard Dynafit Radical jig mount marked with yellow dots. If you wanted to swap on a Kingpin, you don’t have to worry about heel position as Kingpin has enough forward-back adjustment in the heel to compensate a few millimeters and avoid any overlap. As you can see in the image, avoiding overlap with the new Kingpin toe holes will require moving your boot position back about 5 mm; our suggested Kingpin mount that avoids hole overlap. (The rear dots are for illustration and got shifted a bit off layout when I was creating this graphic; the front ones are spot on.)
To avoid mental dissonance, know that what’s discussed here is a backcountry ski that is previously DRILLED WITH A STANDARD DYNAFIT RADICAL JIG MOUNT COMPARED at the toe with a STANDARD KINGPIN MOUNT. In other words, we are swapping a Kingpin onto the ski.
What’s obvious is that simply doing a Kingpin jig drill on a ski that’s been jig mounted with Radical will result in unacceptable overlap at the front pair of holes. Simply moving the Kingpin toe mount back about 5 millimeters takes care of the problem. Very few backcountry skiers will notice a change in boot position of 5 mm aft. (Competent ski mechanics working on planks with exceptionally strong binding reinforcement plates could actually do this binding swap with no change in jig-drill positions, but doing so would require a careful fill of the front holes, and possibly the use of binding inserts. Better to simply move back 5 mm. In either case, fill old holes with something stronger than simple plastic plugs.)
For the record, Marker Kingpin ski touring binding, mounted.
(Regarding this same type of swap only with Kingpin on ski that’s been drilled for Radical 2.0, it’s more difficult to avoid overlap of front holes and thus not recommended. With ski drilled for Dynafit Beast, you may be able to place Kingpin toe in standard jig position without holes being too close together, but for more confidence figure you’ll move the Kingpin toe back 2 or 3 millimeters. With either swap, again, the Kingpin forward-back heel adjustment can be used to move the heel mount position as desired, just remember you’ll need to move the jig to line up with the heel unit hole position you want. Oh, and what about the now discontinued but ever popular Dynafit Vertical ST/FT? Dynafit Vertical ST/FT toe hole pattern will not overlap Kingpin toe hole pattern given you located boot position same with either binding. Again, heel mount position can easily be adjusted forward-back in most cases.)
While most of the WildSnow backcountry skiing blog posts are best attributed to a single author, some work well as done by the group.
