Do you have a screw loose? The importance of binding maintenance
One of the good things about being a snowboarder is that you can do simple maintenance on your gear. Most skiers don’t–and shouldn’t–adjust their own bindings. But snowboarders can adjust their bindings all the time.
A lot of these adjustments simply involve changing the alignment of the bindings on the board. Are they pointing straight across the width of the board in a “zero-zero” stance? Are they pointing towards the tip of the board? Or maybe they’re at a “duck” position (think of reversed pigeon-toed). How far apart are the bindings, and thus your feet, from each other? These are just some of the adjustments that a rider can make.
But there’s a more simple task that you should make as a rider: make sure that you don’t have a screw loose. I’m not talking about your mental state, but whether or not your bindings are actually snugly stuck to the board. That’s really important because the binding is what keeps you from flying off the board when you make a turn.
In a less severe situation, if your bindings have a couple of loose screws, your control of the board and where it goes will be sloppy. It’s like driving a car with wheels that wobble from side to side. Not good.
How often should you check the binding screws for tightness? In theory, before every time you go riding. In practice, some of us don’t follow through with that rule, and depending on how fast you ride, where you ride, and how long you ride in a day, that can work out just fine.
But if you’ve been riding long trails at high speeds and it’s been “a while” (you be the judge of what that means) since you’ve looked at those bindings, it’s probably time to check them again.
By the way, it’s very useful to have a pocket tool with you on the mountain. Think of them as the Swiss army knife of the slopes, equipped with screwdrivers and wrenches of various sizes.
You can usually find a bench somewhere at your favorite ski area, provided by the patrol. But sometimes the necessary screwdrivers aren’t there, or they’re on the lift on the other side of the mountain and you just realized that your bindings are wobbly. Time to bring out the pocket screwdriver!
If you’re traveling on an overnight trip, be sure to pack a long-handled screwdriver in your bags. That way you can give the bindings a good once-over in the lodge before heading out to the slopes.