Development of Ski Touring Boot

Abstract

This project is based on an idea formed by Anders Lagerström and Fredrik Lund of a Ski Touring Boot (STB) with a higher cuff than what found on a regular STB on the market of today. The higher cuff gives the skier better control while the ski is on edge and reduces chin bang. The high cuff is not optimal for hiking and gives the best skiing performance if it can be adjusted to each individual. Therefore, Lagerström and Lund (LL) wanted a STB with a high adjustable cuff. Even though LL had done some prototyping, this project starts the Product Development (PD) from scratch, as if no work had been done. This is to make sure that no possible solutions are overlooked and the end product is the best possible. The first part of this project is covered in Development of Ski Boot for Alpine Touring (Underdal, 2016) and concerns a concept development face generating seven concepts which were refined into three. To further investigate visual prototypes were made of the three concepts. One of the concepts had an obvious design fault and were removed. Two concepts, the Telescopic two columns (TTC) and Lower part telescopic (LPT), were left as relevant and were up to further investigation in this master s thesis. The master s thesis starts of by making a working prototype of each concept and test them against each other. The LPT scores better on almost every parameter in the test and is selected as the best concept. A working prototype including all features is made based on design principles. The prototype is tested against Salomon MTN Lab, the leading STB on the market today, and the test indicated that the Reboot Prototype (RP) has a high potential to compete with and outperform the MTN Lab on ski performance, while the hike performance was close to the performance of MTN Lab.