TLDR, the binding destroyed my boots.
Had the misfortune of testing these bindings for the company that produces them. TLDR, they destroyed my boots.
So, i am a snowboard instructor with 5 winters in the bank. I was sent a pair of the new 2025 season bonebindings. The bindings sure are hard to get used to. As soon as you apply too much pressure on the outside of the feet, you feel the binding shift and take you out of balance. It is ridable, if you know what you are doing, but i wouldn't recommend it. If you are looking to drive the board, creating and releasing pressure from the back and frontfoot when entering and exiting the turn, this is not the binding for you. In this sense, the bindings limit the performance of the rider and makes it hard to uterlize the board to its full extent.
In terms of safety, i dont believe the binding is a problematic regarding tearing the knee. It might actually be safer, as you never create any pull on the knee from weird toqued angles.
The bindings are probably about twice as heavy and twice as stiff as your regular bindings. Olliing is already hard with the binding rotating, but with the added weight its even harder. The stiffness might actually be the worst part though. The base of the binding is a large stiff square. Much larger than any normal binding. This means that you are effectively mounting a large raceplate underneath the feet, agled with your stance. This completely nulls out any kind of intentional board design and structure, and you are left with a board that feels insanely stiff and carvy underneath the feet. At the same time, the bindings act as massive leverage when torsionally flexing the board.
Finally, the design. The company opted for a "one size fits all". this means that they sell it as a large binding, and you then use spacers on the inside of the binding to make it smaller and adjust how the feet are pointing. These spacers are small plastic pieces that bring the mounting of the toestrap in. This is the main problem. the spacers create a small kontact point right right where you have a lot of friction when riding. I only managed to ride with the bindings for 2 hours, and when i got home, i had a hole in each of my boots, right where the spacer sat, right above the sole. Granted, my boots were burton rulers, but still, they were new for the season.
I reached out to the company to give them my feedback and ask if they would help me buy a new pair of boots. This was months ago, and i still havent heard from them.
