The Head Kore105 is a very clever combination of some Old School principles, a few features that are de facto standards in the Big Mountain genre and technology that is on the cutting edge of ski design. Head is the only ski maker with a license to use Graphene, carbon in a one-atom thick matrix, which allows its engineers to stiffen or soften flex with minimal affect on mass. To maintain this weight advantage, the heaviest component in the core is a slice of poplar next to the sidewall; the rest of it is a synthetic honeycomb called Koroyd and a quotient of Karuba, an ultralight wood commonly found in Alpine Touring skis.
The Kore 105 gets its power and energy from the carbon, fiberglass and Graphene that are laminated around this exotic core. To further trim grams, the topsheet is a cap made from polyester fleece, another dampening agent that’s only downside is it’s difficult to decorate, which is why all the Kores look murdered-out.
This recitation of low-mass components makes it sound as though the Kore’s only selling feature is its lightweight chassis. There’s no question that the Kore design is laser-focused on keeping the ski light, but if that were its only accomplishment it wouldn’t be such a big deal. What makes the Kore construction remarkable is that it’s light but never wimpy. Once you ski it for a few runs you forget about the lightweight and just ski as you would normally, only with less labor and fatigue.
The Kästle MX99 should not be mistaken for a set of training wheels. If you’ve never owned a ski this wide before, this is probably not the best place to start. The MX99 expects you to be good. Very good, actually. If you’re an imposter, the MX99 can and will detect your fallibilities. This is your final warning. If you continue reading this review, you’ll end wanting a pair, and I’d feel better knowing you were qualified.
The MX99 is unlike every other ski in the All-Mountain West genre. It’s the only ski in the category that evolved from a Frontside template, namely the exquisite MX84. It makes no attempt to dumb down its principles. Far from trying to disassociate the front of the ski from the rest of the chassis, as is the norm among AMW models, the MX99 tries to connect to the turn starting in the shovel.
The Lighter is Better trend, whose influence is evident elsewhere in the AMW category, is just background noise to the MX99 to which it pays no attention. Instead of subtracting material, Kästle added a sheet of braided carbon to its usual all-wood core and two sheets of .5mm Titanal. With all this shock-damping material onboard, the MX99 could collide with a Sequoia and only the tree would feel it.
For the 19/20 season, Kästle completely re-formulated its FX series of wide, off-trail models. To create its first-ever women’s model in the FX family, Kästle choose to work off the FX96 template, as the 96mm waist width optimizes the strengths of the new design for female skiers.
One of the goals of the new FX series was weight reduction, so Kästle engineers concocted Tri-Tech, a trifecta of design features all aimed at keeping weight off. Tri-Tech is essentially a core-within-a-core; a central channel of high-density woods is wrapped in a glass torsion box and braced on either side with lighter wood laminates. The torsion box rides higher than the outer sections, creating a 3D top surface, which is the first weight-saver. Second is the concentration of hard woods in the center, so lighter woods can be used in the remaining 2/3 of the core. Third is using a thicker core profile in the central torsion box, which gives it more power without adding more materials.
K2 completely changed every core model in its 19/20 line, without straying one centimeter from its core values. True, the new Mindbenders are built differently than the Pinnacles of yesteryear, using all wood cores in their Ti incarnations (say ta-ta to Nano-tech), and more Titanal in the tail section to increase rear support compared to the passé Pinnacles.
Even though the new Mindbender Ti series, of which the 90Ti is the narrowest, aims for a better class of skier (if you’ll pardon the expression), they’re not so stout they can’t be controlled by adventurous intermediates. The Mindbenders’ Ti Y-Beam construction puts Titanal over the edge in the forebody but moves it away from edge in the tail. This adjusts the skis’ torsional rigidity requirements to create more bite in the forebody and easier release of the tail, without affecting their even, balanced flex longitudinally.
The Mindbender 108 Ti tries to win the war against crud by caressing it instead of crushing it. It has a gift for rolling to the edge that makes it feel quicker than the norm among skis of its 108mm girth. To execute a truly tight radius turn requires overruling its roughly 30m-sidecut radius and foot swiveling a flat ski, a move the Mindbender 108Ti has down pat. Its impressive 9.25 score for drift speaks to its ability to brake according to the current style that uses skidding as the primary form of speed management.
It takes only one section of uncut powder to realize that this unsullied canvas is where the Mindbender 108Ti would prefer to display its artistry. Who wouldn’t rather ski unblemished freshies? By afternoon what was once pristine is now a mogul field. Remarkably, its soft, rockered forebody allows the 108Ti to conform to gnarly bumps – I’m looking at you, snowboarders – as if they were only a minor inconvenience.
