Dynafit Bindings are fustrating.

Here's a pic of a couple of home made accesories I carry snapped to my belly pack that I've found quite convenient. Just a bit more refined I hope than the rusty nail carried in a pocket.  

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, based upon Larry_R testimony I rest my case. If you need to carry a tool, Dynafits do not rule, the toe piece does not fit and therefore you must acquit.( To paraphase Johnny Cochran)

Larry_R. The dyanafit prison chiv tool picture is a classic man! Absolute classic! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
Super stuff , keep it coming man!

Hmph... Well I won't apologize for not liking Dynafit bindings. Not only are they finicky, but the fact that you have to bend over and carefully hold the ski while attaching the toe piece reminds me of my 3-pin days. And I don't know how many times I was more than uncomfortable with that maneuver while on steep terrain or some precarious position in a chute. So now I just shake my head while my buddies do the hairy scary to mount up while I just step in and go...seems like I'm always waiting for those too pound smart usability foolish Dynafit'ers!

If you need to carry a tool, Dynafits do not rule. The toe piece does not fit, and therefore you must acquit.

Great closing argument, counselor!   

It dawned on me that Dynafits have taken the place of the much loved and maligned Ramer binding. (R.I.P. Paul Ramer.) The Ramers were trailblazers, but they were finicky too. Perhaps we backcountry skiers have a repressed need for such gear.



As evidence, here's a picture of one of my first alpine touring bindings, a pair of Ramer Model R's bought in 1979. In a fit of nostalgia, I mounted them (appropriately) on two-by-fours for my attic museum. Beneath the binding are accessories that came with it, from left to right:

+ Grease for the ball-and-socket hinge
+ Bolt wrench
+ Heel piece shims (helpfully labeled "SHIM" - thanks Paul!)
+ Heel lift extender

Larry's excellent tools brought the old Ramers to mind and I couldn't resist hauling them out.

Prison shivs can be fashioned from virtually anything: TV antennas, bed springs, or my personal favorite, a sharpened toothbrush handle! Don't even think about booting up a skin track near me (or Larry for that matter).

I carry this to clean out the snow that can get packed under the heel piece of my Freerides preventing them from locking into ski mode.



I made it myself.

I carry this to clean out the snow that can get packed under the heel piece of my Freerides preventing them from locking into ski mode.

I made it myself.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Verry funny. ;D

Lowell, I also used Paul Ramers binding in the "old days" and remember greasing the sockets. After the Ramer binding, I switched to the Dynafit TLT and have a couple pairs. I have been fortunate that the bindings have performed well for mny yeaars. My only minor problem is the icing under the front spring that Sky explained well.

You guys are making me nostalgic for my two generations of Rainey tele bindings - the original Super Loop with the big-ass rubber bungie around the heel which needed for the toeplate to be tuned with a chainsaw file so the toeplate wouldn't slice the cable (among other fiddling required), and the third generation SL with the delrin throw piece with the funky gear and pawl for adjusting cable length which had a tendency to fail utterly in year one. Generation one was alluring in its simplicity and worked pretty well with lace-up leather boots, but...

No wonder I've been so happy with my Dynafits!

Ah, my hat's off to you, Scotty.

Anyone that can take a poor understanding of basis mechanical simplicity and turn it into a major "federal case" with over 800 posts deserves special recognition.
 
Please forgive me for noticing, but your banishment from work and and machinery may be having a deleterious effect on your mechanical skills.   Others seem to be doing much better with simple machinery.  It's evident that Sky, Tim and others have quickly picked up on the more subtle quirks of this engineering marvel and adjusted accordingly, to their benefit.

I, myself, also not being as quick on the uptake, only switched to Dynafits many years ago at the suggestion of the techs at Marmot Mtn, after breaking and/or prematurely wearing out several pairs of Fristchi's.

Since then the only trouble I've had with the several pairs of Dynafits centered around my lack of patience or understand of the design, an affliction which may have somehow migrated to you

Now I'm not particularly bright, just lazy.  But that attribute has helped me figure out how to put my skis on without bending over and how to avoid carrying extra gear to keep my bindings on my feet.  A small dollop of white lithium grease in the boot toe cups once in a while seems to make it easy for the pins to "drill out" any persistent ice and a spritz of slippery stuff here and there before leaving home and an occasional cycling of the toe piece cross bars seems to do the trick for me.

It will be sad to see you go back to work because you then may not have the time to craft and coax these lengthy threads out of almost nothing to work with... a pure work of art to be sure.

Good to know more of the story behind this thread - thanks Ron!

Yeah, I've never had to bend to put the skis on - that one surprised me. Not even to pull up the toe lever when in tour mode - my BD pole grips have a little lip that seems to have been designed to assist with this manouver.

You bring up a good point re:Fritschis. While skiing with a few guides from Canada, who get to see a lot of different gear go through a lot of torture testing, I asked which bindings were most reliable. They said "3 pin and Dynafit," and then rattled off a list of failure cases for all the other bindings folks in our group had, including the Fritschis (something about having the heel lifter in the wrong position for whatever you were trying to do with the binding at that moment whihc struck me as not that hard to accidentally replicate..."

You guys are making me nostalgic ...

After thinking about it, I remembered that the wrench shown in my Ramer photo above didn't come with the original Model R binding. (The pictured tool came with a later version of the binding, called the Ramer Classic.)

The tool that came with the Model R was more interesting. Here's a sketch of it:



This tool was both a bolt wrench and a clamp. The clamp was used to lock out the lateral release function of the binding. You slipped the clamp over the parallel bars with the hex-shaped notches nestled over the place where the toe bail was installed. Its function was the same as the toe-piece lock of the Dynafit binding. Some people found it necessary to lock the binding while touring. I never had much trouble with this, so I carried the clamp/wrench as maintenance tool only.

Do any old Ramer users out there still have a pair of these clamp/wrenches? I'd pay good money to add them to my collection. After I quit using my original Ramers in 1987, I gave them to my brother Gordy (with the clamp/wrenches too). He used them for a few years and passed them on to another friend. I got the bindings back a few years ago, but I don't seem to have the clamp/wrench tools anymore.

====

Edited to add:

In the 1970s and 80s, most AT bindings were designed to work with just about any boot, including leather mountaineering boots. Paul Ramer provided two different toe bails with his bindings, one that was angular (for use with DIN-style ski boots) and one that was rounded (for use with mountaineering boots). At about the same time, plastic mountaineering boots (e.g. Koflach "Ultra" and Kastinger "Reinhold Messner") appeared on the market. Remarkably, some of the first plastic climbing boots were not designed for step-in crampons, because their were almost no step-in crampons on the market. (Maybe none.) So, the first plastic climbing boots had almost no notch in the toe that you could clamp a binding on. For this reason, I made my own toe bails for my Ramer bindings, which fit my plastic mountaineering boots perfectly. I used some steel rod stock from the neighborhood hardware store. Those toe bails never broke. You can see one of them in the Ramer photo above.

Talk about fiddly!!

and the third generation SL with the delrin throw piece with the funky gear and pawl for adjusting cable length which had a tendency to fail utterly in year one.

I hated that gear thing. Don forget the lifters with extra long screws that would gradually tear the core of your skis to shreds and rip out miles from nowhere. Or the cable guides that would spontaneously blow off the side of the binding. Thankfully he redeemed himself with the Hammerhead, although the HH has its quirks to be sure.

Q for the Dynafit abusers among us. Has anyone ever broken the toe-pincers? They seem pretty stout. That guy in Canada hung upside down from them in a crevasse (he was locked in tour mode) so theres one data point. I ask because it would seem trivial to build a block that inhibits forward pivoting of the boot to effectively create a "tele mode" for boots like the F3 and TX.That would be putting quite a lot of stress on those pincers, but it sounds like they might be able to handle it. I would love to have a tele mode for rolling tours or that perfect field of corn that just begs for a tele turn.

It will be sad to see you go back to work because you then may not have the time to craft and coax these lengthy threads out of almost nothing to work with... a pure work of art to be sure.

Thanks for the acknowledgement Ron but it's not that hard. Just combine the follwing nouns SUBARU, DYNAFIT, CRYSTAL SKI AREA with the follwing adjectives SUCK, FRUSTRATING, DANGEROUS etc. and all hell breaks loose.
Alas I will be going back to work soon and all this fun will come to an end.

As to the Canadian guides comments regarding the dynafit and 3 pin being the most reliable . I guess I defer to their superior knowledge but I find that surprising. Never, ever had a problem with Fritschi's. Could it be that the Fritschi users that the guides are basing their opinion upon are hucking and skiing harder because they are not on Dynafits and therefore causing more breakages?
Are large hucks possible on Dynafits?
THE BIG QUESTION: ARE DYNAFITS HUCKABLE?

Didn't Huckable already drop out of the race?

I hated that gear thing. Don forget the lifters with extra long screws that would gradually tear the core of your skis to shreds and rip out miles from nowhere. Or the cable guides that would spontaneously blow off the side of the binding. Thankfully he redeemed himself with the Hammerhead, although the HH has its quirks to be sure.

Q for the Dynafit abusers among us. Has anyone ever broken the toe-pincers? They seem pretty stout. That guy in Canada hung upside down from them in a crevasse (he was locked in tour mode) so theres one data point. I ask because it would seem trivial to build a block that inhibits forward pivoting of the boot to effectively create a "tele mode" for boots like the F3 and TX.That would be putting quite a lot of stress on those pincers, but it sounds like they might be able to handle it. I would love to have a tele mode for rolling tours or that perfect field of corn that just begs for a tele turn. 

Check this out Jerm:

www.wildsnow.com/?p=572#comments

So, yeah, entirely possible.  Pretty slick.  Not going to be a production binding, from all that I can see, but it's an interesting idea.

THE BIG QUESTION: ARE DYNAFITS HUCKABLE?

I watched a guy huck one of the cliffs on the Headwall in Tuckerman Ravine a few years ago.  It was probably a 40 footer onto medium hard corn.  He landed somewhat ugly, but his skis stayed on and he skied away to lively cheers from the lunch rocks audience, whose full attention he'd captured.  When he skied by, I was checking out his set up -- K2 AK Launchers mounted with TLT comforts.   I wondered if he'd put them in tour mode before launching, but couldn't tell.  Pretty impressive...

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread so far that might be relevant:

If the sole of the boot wears down under the toe (too much scree walking etc) then it will not press down on the plastic "trigger" in the middle of the pincers and will fail to accomplish the desired clamping action. I believe Wildsnow has something about this, including a fix with, what else, duct tape!

Ahh yes, here it is: www.wildsnow.com/articles/dynafit_faq/dy..._faq1.html#wingclose

Snowboy, I checked your suggestion and that's the problem with mine. There are so worn down at toe that they are not always fully engaging toe plate and pincers.
Thanks for the suggestion and fix!

I've always wanted a pair of bindings that relied upon duct tape to work. ???

Cool! Glad we nailed it down for you.

Never, ever had a problem with Fritschi's. Could it be that the Fritschi users that the guides are basing their opinion upon are hucking and skiing harder because they are not on Dynafits and therefore causing more breakages?

Dunno for sure, as it was a relatively quick but memorable discussion, but two things make me think this is at least not the full answer:
1) The guides have a tendency to try to limit hard-hitting hucking opportunities with most groups as they seem to enjoy not having to deal with body or gear damage if they can help it
2) Here's where my memory is fuzzier, but my recollection is that w/the Fritschis, the breakage happened while mucking around with the heel lifter and locking portions while standing not skiing - that there was a "stupid combo of steps" that caused breakage.

I figure that of anyone I've skied with, these guys had the most statistically significant data, and they seemed to make a point of memorizing issues w/different gear so they could be on the lookout with each new group of clients.

And regarding the followup comments on Rainey's last generation of SuperLoops, the guides indeed mentioned multiple failure modes for those heel lifters (including screws ripping out of skis as well as the wire bail levering the heelplate until it cracked in half and became useless).

I seem to recall that Sky hucks in Dynafits but would have to search the site to confirm...

Yesterday I was out and about and had a marvellous day at Paradise and skied Nisqaully Glacier to the bridge and lots of powder and had no problems with my Fritschi bindings. Lots of people I met who know who I am, commented on this thread and gave me some well deserved shit!

BUT , one of my group had dynafits, other three all had Fritschi's. He shall remain unnamed unless he chooses to share.
He is a great skier and very experienced.
Towards the end of the day, his binding malfunctioned and for about 15 mins he could not get his toe pincers to engage. He tried everything , opening and closing the toe, the dynafit prison shiv, the dynafit toe boogy, and eventually cleaned the mechanism sufficiently to get his binding to work. I DID NOT CAUSE THIS MALFUNCTION.

After apologising for the delay he caused the group( and I knew how the d00d felt man! :'( :'() we BOTH agreed that Dynafits CAN be FRUSTRATING! ;D
Q.E.D.

Scotty- after "he who will not be named" got himself together we then...

...watched your son eat it and then consoled ourselves with some powder turns and called it a good day out! High Five! Verrrry Niiiiccceee! Mazama Face was awesome!

oh yeah, dynafits are like women- finicky and high maintenance at times!

chris

Dynafits CAN be FRUSTRATING!

No argument from me there. They are clearly not optimized for casual convenience - I'd say that was traded for simplicity of mechanism and lightness (and, anecdotally, for reliability - at least in terms of not being as prone to catastrophic failure as many bindings).