Answer to subject line: No, vicissitudes of time.

On 11/22/2010 05:35 PM, Richard Henry wrote:
When I got the skis down from the garage attic to set them up for my
new/old boots, I took a look at one old pair with Look rotary heel and
"Sensor" toes. The toepieces were swinging around without constraint,
which I didn't remember them ever doing before. Then I noticed a big
metal spring lying on the floor, and THEN, I noticed that the toepiece
plastic shell had split in half (from the compression of the spring?),
and the missing parts were nowhere to be found.

Plastic has a shelf life. Witness "exploding Nordica ski boots".
I once had a pair of Technicas do this to me. I worked the shop
at the Bear Mountain section of Killington for a year. We were
the broken equipment capital of the world. Broken bindings were
on display on a window sill in our shop. The most common were
Geze, ususally fairly new because they were crap to begin with.
Then, because Salomon had been around for so long and sold so
many, really old Salomons were next followed by Markers with an
occasional Look (because Look didn't start using plastic parts
until well along in its life.


Another thing I would rather not have known - when I took the bindings
off the skis, I saw that one of the screw holes had been originally
drilled about half a screw-width off, and a metal helicoil insert
installed to fix it.

Ah, helicoils, the savior of many a shop rat's ass. I'm sure
they are still in the tool kit of all shops today.