Great point! The word skidding repeats also in the original quotes (from stephen and riel). It certainly is essential here. It could be added to the list of assumptions:
3) Could it be related to skidding, ie. sliding on a surface? With stiff double camber skis, a carved turn would have a loooong arc. Pressuring the back of a front ski makes the front ski skid (ie. side slide), which helps to make tighter turns. Yet you do not want the tail of the front ski to cut into the snow, but rather to slide across the snow.tkarhu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 04, 2023 3:40 pmI also weight the inner rear edge of my front ski in deepish (10-40 cm) snow, too, with my Gammes. I am just wondering, what is the mechanics why and how that works? I can repeat the trick, but understanding the mechanics could let me use my skis in more creative ways.
I have a few initial assumptions, what could be the reason.
1) Could the trick work because that weighting helps carving? I think pressuring is not that important in deep snow because skis really do not carve there I guess. So if that would be a hard surface trick, it would sound more like a carving thing I guess. Well Gamme nordic rocker for sure might do something there, but is that enough to carve?
2) Could it work through weight placement against an external force? Many sea kayaking techniques use such tricks. For example, you lean your body weight towards the front of a kayak, if you want to turn your kayak towards a wave. Similarly, when you put weight on the back of your ski, the rear part of your ski starts to press towards the external force (ie. downhill snow), and its front end will move away from the force. You could think of this also as two rows of men pushing against each other, like in some sports. At places of the row where your own team pushes hard, it will move towards or through the opposing team’s row. At places where you push less, the opposing team will push through your team’s row. Likewise, the less weighted end of a kayak will move away from a wave, and the less weighted end of a ski will move uphill, away from the friction that you are facing. (This idea feels somewhat counter intuitive to me, but it really works at least for the sea kayaking part of it because I use it in practice.)
This really helped me to think of this in terms of skiing. If you pressure a pole instead of edges, you would land on your face, so sliding is essential. A sticked ski pole has no float. For learning, thinking in skiing terms is certainly more helpful than thinking in terms of kayaking
Still one more analogy with kayaking. You turn a kayak by edging and leaning, too, but kayak "edging" is probably somewhat different from ski edging. For example, you cannot bend a kayak with your body weight, like you bend a ski. Also, leaning (bracing) and edging are two different kayaking techniques. In the edging, you compensate with your upper body and keep balance point above boat. However in bracing, you lean out and take support from water with your paddle, with balance point outside boat. It looks like ski edging is leaning outside balance point, so it would be more similar to bracing than edging in kayaking techniques.
One thing that might work the same in kayak and ski edging, kayak edging makes the swimming hull (body) of your boat shorter, which helps you to turn. Swimming hull means the part of a kayak that is touching water. I would say pressuring the back of your front ski might create some rocker, at least in the sense that the front of a rear-pressured ski raises towards the surface of snow.
By the way, some river kayakers do kayak on snow, too. FYI on following video, they use bracing, when a paddle points towards a side more than backwards. If a paddle points backwards, the kayaker is most probably using a stern rudder.
I need some time to digest all other information given. Maybe this was just a short comment to Stephen's first point Let's see what more is coming!