J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by Brucie

SwingBeep wrote:Ski bindings were designed to protect the tibia, not the knee. There have been no appreciable changes to the design of the mechanisms since 1980. So reducing the release setting will have little or no effect on protecting your knee, but could lead to serious injury due to inadvertent release.

It's very important to know what your release setting should be and how to check that the forward pressure has been set correctly, as ski shops often make mistakes. It's reckoned that about 50% of skiers ski with incorrectly adjusted or defective bindings.

In France they tend to adjust them in accordance with the AFNOR FD S 52-748 standard, which is a modification of ISO 11088 specifically designed to reduce binding release values particularly for women and for individuals with a body weight of less than 55 kg. http://inpes.santepubliquefrance.fr/CFESBases/catalogue/pdf/Ski-Dep_Fix.pdf as you can see there are lots of permutations so it's easy to make a mistake.
To make the setting easier to work out somebody has produced an online calculator http://www.reglagefixation.fr/index.php?lang=eng

The rest of the skiing world adjusts the release settings in accordance with ISO 11088 (Assembly, adjustment and inspection of an alpine ski/binding/boot (S-B-B) system) and ISO 8061(Alpine ski-bindings - Selection of release torque values) All the manufactures produce charts to assist with the selection of the correct settings http://www.salomoncertification.com/manuals3/EN_ADJ_CHART_17.pdf and guides on how to select the correct skier type http://www.salomoncertification.com/manuals3/EN_SKIER_TYPE_17.pdf Again there are online calculators http://www.dinsetting.com/#

Bear in mind that the release setting indicator is just an indicator and there is an allowable tolerance of 15% and that the only way to check whether the bindings are functioning correctly is to test them on a torque-measuring binding test machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpyWsocjEEM