Thank you, Bill and Harald, for taking the time to provide those detailed explanations.
Just to summarize for my own understanding: On the outside ski, a plastic boot deflects medially when put up on edge, which lessens edge angle; to compensate, the manufacturers offset the hinges to make the boots track laterally. On the older Dodge boots, there is also lateral tracking but, without the medial material deformation to compensate, edge angle is increased when the boot is pressured. In practice, this is principally an issue at initiation on steep, icy terrain, where the tracking causes the angle to increase a bit too abruptly. This is much less of an issue on softer snow, because of the latter's compliance.
Bill, I'm curious about the implications of this for the inside ski. At least in principle, this would seem to give Dodge boots an advantage over plastic: On the inside ski, a plastic boot deflects
laterally when put up on edge (once it's pressured), which lessens edge angle; unfortunately, here the lateral tracking offset will, instead of compensating, further reduce edge angle. The new Dodge boots will not have this issue (and the older ones will have less of an issue, because they'll have the lateral offset but not the lateral deflection). But how much effect will this have In practice, since the inner boot is not pressured as much as the outer one? [I should add I'm assuming here that it's not a good thing to have reduced edge on the inside ski, but maybe that's not the case....]
Also, and please forgive my curiosity (it's in my nature
), what was the design rationale for including this lateral tracking in the first place? I'm assuming that you were aware of this issue, at least in theory, from the start, and probably also checked it with some prototypes. Is it that this issue is a subtle one that didn't initially reveal itself in practice, or did you think there would be some advantage to an earlier edge?
[Just to avoid any confusion, I'm using medial and lateral in standard anatomical sense: lateral means away from the center of the body, medial means towards the center.]