Bye Bye Pro Tongues!

[jbotti]

I posted this info in a post about the WCR boots. Intuition has redone their entire line and they have discontinued the Pro Tongue liners. For those that loved this liner (myself included) this is disappointing news. But, the replacement may work for many. Its called the Downhill Tongue High Density 9mm liner. According to Diana this is a little lower volume liner than the pro Tongue was, but also quite stiff and with a decent amount of bulk to take up some space in the shell. The WCR 93 last line has a very thin heel pocket. These have a shot of working with those shells (might have to grind out the heel pocket more and possibly may need to bake and mold them more than once as they lose volume on each baking).

Here is the link to the new liner:

https://intuitionliners.com/product-cat ... stiff-flex

[jbotti]

So I got that liner, baked it and skied it. Excellent liner and it took up a lot of instep space I had in my new boots. They are not as stiff as the pro tongues but they also take up less space than the Pro Tongues. It’s still a firm liner, just not super stiff.

They also make this liner in 3 thicknesses. Mine were 9mm. The next thickness up is 12mm which is the same thickness as the Pro Tongues. The next thickness up is 15mm and I’m guessing this takes up a lot of excess space.

They also make a less stiff version of all three thicknesses, called the dual density vs the High Density. I would not want anything less stiff than the HDs but others might.

Lastly they still have Pro Tongues for sale in 22,23, 24, 29 and 30 sizes. It’s discontinued so when these are sold they will be no more.

[jbotti]

I have been skiing the Downhill Tongue High Density 9mm liner now for maybe 6 weeks and probably 30+ ski days. This is an excellent liner. It definitely took up some space in my boots but after skiing it some I still needed to add to some foam padding in some spots. This is mainly due to the fact that the new Head WCR boot is not a perfect fit for my feet and has a lot more instep room than would be ideal for my foot. Having said that, I have these dialed in so I have a nicely tight glove like fit. These liners have say 75% of the stiffness of the old Pro Tongues, but the snow feel in these liners is definitely higher. I just spent a week skiing with Harald mainly working on perfect BPSRTs (his are always perfect and mine were by the end perfect maybe 85% of the time) and they require lots of analog movements and large amounts of snow feel. These liners were great (and I have already raved about the WCR boots in another thread).

A big positive to these (the DTHD 9mm liners) is that mine were perfect after 1 bake. Every pair of Pro Tongues I had required at least 2 bakes and sometimes 3 to get the right fit (the first bake was always way too tight to ski more than and hour or so). Because these are less stiff these may pack out faster than the Pro Tongues (my original pair of Pro Tongues which I baked 3X to get right lasted well over 150 ski days before I noticed any packing out). But I have 30+ days in these and I have not seen a hint of packing out yet.

Lastly, warmth wise, these may be even warmer than the Pro Tongues. Certainly indoors my feet swell more in these liners than they did in the Pro Tongues. I have skied them in temps as low as 8-10F and my feet never got cold (which I might have a little in the pro tongues). I do not have a feet getting cold problem, so not necessarily the best person to opine on the warmth of a liner. But to me these seem warmer than the Pro Tongues.