Thank you! The boots weight about 3.5 lbs each (on a spring scale). They are A LOT lighter than Pilar’s regular downhill boots.

and to thelawgoddess:
again thanks and you are right about the shells. The intuiition liner we used was a size 22, so that helped some. The footboards are ones that you can get at most any bootfitting shop, and then you can cut them down to the size of your insoles and they just sit between your insole and the liner. They are pretty much just a hard cardboard material, i think coated with something to resist moisture. You could stack them i suppose, and just duct tape them together, so there is no slippage.

As to your question about shin bang…. hmmm, a couple of ideas:
1. you could try and pad around the horizontal ribs so that the tongue sits on your foreleg as one smooth and interrupted surface. Then you could pad it with a piece of foam from the hardware store.
2. the other thing i could think of was maybe checking to see how well the boot is fitting. If you sit right in the heel pocket and your ankle flexes forward right on the boot (i.e. there is no dead space between your ankle or shin and the front of the boot). then you should always be in contact with the tongue and there would then be no impact. A way to accomplish this would probably be to:
- insert the adhesive on your tongue so that it takes up that space.
- use the footboards to raise you up into the smaller part of the boot, possibly bringing your ankle into contact with where the boot bends and leaving your shin to rest on the tongue.

hopefully this helps… oh, and the footbed is a superfeet footbed… i think.
good luck!

Unfortunately nobody makes a true 22 shell for AT boots. I have asked just about everyone from retailers to manufacturers, here and in Europe. Anything labeled a 22 is actually a 23 with a shorter liner. Some 23 shells fit a little snugger than others, though! Sure would be nice if someone started making one for us smaller folks …

Question: I have some race flex Raichle tongues for my AT boots, but this year I started getting some sort of shin-bang from the horizontal grooves in the tongues. Any suggestions for how to fix this? It was so bad I had to remove them to let the bruises heal …

Also, do you have any photos of the footbeds and boards you used to firm up the inside? I was thinking some kind of flat board would actually help quite a bit, and I was wondering how thick of one you used and what it was made of?