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Salomon Custom Shell
The most important thing about a ski boot is comfort - if your feet are not comfortable, you'll have a rotten time on the slopes. Salomon's new Custom Shell is all about user comfort, but it also promises performance, as Eric Davies told us.
SGB: What is it about Custom Shell that makes it special?
Eric Davies: Basically in the past if you wanted a very precise ski boot they were nearly always very high performance - for racers mainly - and they tended to always be low volume, as in there wasn't much room for your foot in the boot. It was very much a trade off where you had all precision but the comfort was lacking. With Custom Shell you have a low volume boot but the shell then moulds to the shape of your foot, even if it's quite a wide foot.
The technical aspect is that most low volume boots across all the brands start off with a last which has a forefoot width of 98mm, which is pretty constrictive as most people have a width of 100mm or wider; it prohibits a lot of people from skiing with these better ski boots. But with Custom Shell it has 3mm of expansion on either side of the foot so we can go right out to a 104mm forefoot width - but we still retain the performance of the ski boot.
SGB: Why hasn't anyone else done this?
ED: It's been mission impossible because when you go to see materials from major plastic manufacturers, they were not really coming up with the goods, so Salomon has manufactured and patented this plastic themselves. It goes as soft as toffee when it's warm, as in when the foot is in the boot, so it moulds to the foot and then it goes back to it's regular shape of firm polyurethane plastic when taken off. There is a patent pending on this.
SGB: So what do I ask for in the shop? How would a sales person deal with me if I were buying a Custom Shell product?
ED: Usually with ski boots you would say what level of skier you are to the sales person. So if you said you wanted a well-fitting performance boot they would then measure your feet and would classify you as low volume, regular volume, high instep etc, which is the qualitative and then the quantative which is how long your foot is in centimetres. All the boot manufacturers use Mondo sizing. Mondo point is the length of your foot in centimetres. If you're a 28 mondo point with quite a wide foot, they would add a 0.5 to that and be looking in the stock room for a 28.5 ski boot. So having selected Custom Shell they would do a shell check and they put your foot inside the boot shell, only with the liner out. Then they slide the foot forward till the toes touch the front of the boot and take the distance between the back of the heel and the inside face of the boot. In an ideal world you should be able to slide two fingers between the heel and the boot, so when the liner is back in the boot you'll have a 'finger' of foam at either end.
Now we're ready to Custom Shell the boot. The inner shell goes into a special oven for 10 minutes and gets hot, obviously not so the plastic melts but they become very soft and pliable, and the specific Custom Shell zones on the inner become even more soft and pliable. The sales person then takes the Custom Shell using gloves and reinserts it into the boot; then the customer places the foot into the boot and it moulds to the foot. The principal zones of expansion are around the fifth metatarsal and the outside of the foot along with the zone by the first metatarsal, along the inside of the foot - the two widest points. There is a zone in the Custom Shell either side of the foot for the expansion of the foot when wearing, so you have the close fit and the comfort factor within the boot from the Custom Shell.
Another part of the boot that can be customised is the inner liner which Salomon pioneered and everyone else is now using. The liner goes onto the Salomon heat machine for 15 minutes and then this is worn by the customer for 15 minutes to mould to the foot. Salomon and Conformabel have developed this foot bed and the oven together which we can now also put the Custom Shell in.
By 2009 the Custom Shell will have been introduced further down the range, so you''ll be able to get Custom Shell in the mid-range models as well as the top model boots.
