Dynafit Bindings are fustrating.

I carry this to clean out the snow that can get packed under the heel piece of my Freerides preventing them from locking into ski mode.

I made it myself.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Verry funny.

Lowell, I also used Paul Ramers binding in the "old days" and remember greasing the sockets. After the Ramer binding, I switched to the Dynafit TLT and have a couple pairs. I have been fortunate that the bindings have performed well for mny yeaars. My only minor problem is the icing under the front spring that Sky explained well.

You guys are making me nostalgic for my two generations of Rainey tele bindings - the original Super Loop with the big-ass rubber bungie around the heel which needed for the toeplate to be tuned with a chainsaw file so the toeplate wouldn't slice the cable (among other fiddling required), and the third generation SL with the delrin throw piece with the funky gear and pawl for adjusting cable length which had a tendency to fail utterly in year one. Generation one was alluring in its simplicity and worked pretty well with lace-up leather boots, but...

No wonder I've been so happy with my Dynafits!

Ah, my hat's off to you, Scotty.

Anyone that can take a poor understanding of basis mechanical simplicity and turn it into a major "federal case" with over 800 posts deserves special recognition.
 
Please forgive me for noticing, but your banishment from work and and machinery may be having a deleterious effect on your mechanical skills.   Others seem to be doing much better with simple machinery.  It's evident that Sky, Tim and others have quickly picked up on the more subtle quirks of this engineering marvel and adjusted accordingly, to their benefit.

I, myself, also not being as quick on the uptake, only switched to Dynafits many years ago at the suggestion of the techs at Marmot Mtn, after breaking and/or prematurely wearing out several pairs of Fristchi's.

Since then the only trouble I've had with the several pairs of Dynafits centered around my lack of patience or understand of the design, an affliction which may have somehow migrated to you

Now I'm not particularly bright, just lazy.  But that attribute has helped me figure out how to put my skis on without bending over and how to avoid carrying extra gear to keep my bindings on my feet.  A small dollop of white lithium grease in the boot toe cups once in a while seems to make it easy for the pins to "drill out" any persistent ice and a spritz of slippery stuff here and there before leaving home and an occasional cycling of the toe piece cross bars seems to do the trick for me.

It will be sad to see you go back to work because you then may not have the time to craft and coax these lengthy threads out of almost nothing to work with... a pure work of art to be sure.

Good to know more of the story behind this thread - thanks Ron!

Yeah, I've never had to bend to put the skis on - that one surprised me. Not even to pull up the toe lever when in tour mode - my BD pole grips have a little lip that seems to have been designed to assist with this manouver.

You bring up a good point re:Fritschis. While skiing with a few guides from Canada, who get to see a lot of different gear go through a lot of torture testing, I asked which bindings were most reliable. They said "3 pin and Dynafit," and then rattled off a list of failure cases for all the other bindings folks in our group had, including the Fritschis (something about having the heel lifter in the wrong position for whatever you were trying to do with the binding at that moment whihc struck me as not that hard to accidentally replicate..."

You guys are making me nostalgic ...

After thinking about it, I remembered that the wrench shown in my Ramer photo above didn't come with the original Model R binding. (The pictured tool came with a later version of the binding, called the Ramer Classic.)

The tool that came with the Model R was more interesting. Here's a sketch of it:



This tool was both a bolt wrench and a clamp. The clamp was used to lock out the lateral release function of the binding. You slipped the clamp over the parallel bars with the hex-shaped notches nestled over the place where the toe bail was installed. Its function was the same as the toe-piece lock of the Dynafit binding. Some people found it necessary to lock the binding while touring. I never had much trouble with this, so I carried the clamp/wrench as maintenance tool only.

Do any old Ramer users out there still have a pair of these clamp/wrenches? I'd pay good money to add them to my collection. After I quit using my original Ramers in 1987, I gave them to my brother Gordy (with the clamp/wrenches too). He used them for a few years and passed them on to another friend. I got the bindings back a few years ago, but I don't seem to have the clamp/wrench tools anymore.

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Edited to add:

In the 1970s and 80s, most AT bindings were designed to work with just about any boot, including leather mountaineering boots. Paul Ramer provided two different toe bails with his bindings, one that was angular (for use with DIN-style ski boots) and one that was rounded (for use with mountaineering boots). At about the same time, plastic mountaineering boots (e.g. Koflach "Ultra" and Kastinger "Reinhold Messner") appeared on the market. Remarkably, some of the first plastic climbing boots were not designed for step-in crampons, because their were almost no step-in crampons on the market. (Maybe none.) So, the first plastic climbing boots had almost no notch in the toe that you could clamp a binding on. For this reason, I made my own toe bails for my Ramer bindings, which fit my plastic mountaineering boots perfectly. I used some steel rod stock from the neighborhood hardware store. Those toe bails never broke. You can see one of them in the Ramer photo above.

Talk about fiddly!!