Lib Tech Snow Mullet 1986

I saw my first snowboard in 1983, on Regis's film "Apocalypse Snow". At the time the only snowboards I could find didn't seem to have edges, and I wasn't too impressed with that as I could afford only piste riding back then. The solution was obvious: I copied the guys in the film on Monoskis, and learnt how to ride moguls on one ski. I didn't start riding sideways until '89, so I can't remember what board designs were like in 1986. Certainly they didn't have inserts; they did have loud graphics though. So I'm not sure what the 1986 is all about, but the "Mullet" bit may be a reference to the Burton Fish, or it may not be.

Anyway, this is a review of the Lib Tech Snow Mullet 1986 for riding powder. By "powder" I mean specifically cat and heli back-country powder, not resort fluff.

Powder board alternatives

I've ridden Fish and Malolos in heli/ cat powder for a few years, but I was disappointed to find that for the 2008/9 season Burton have adopted their 2-hole proprietary binding system for these boards. I couldn't figure out how to mate my beautiful F2 race titanium bindings with Burton's new finbox system (EST/ICS/whatever the marketing people are calling it). I could get some old windsurf straps and hook my toes under those, or use Burton's soft boots, which is about the same thing. Yeah right. The alternative is simply to dump Burton's boards and use something more standard.

So that's why this season I'm looking for alternatives to Burton's rather good powder boards (Fish and Malolo). There's the Prior Khyber which I rode a few years back, but I was much less impressed with that than with the Fish, so I don't really want to go there. Hence I picked up Lib Tech's "Snow Mullet 1986".

A Mullet equipped for speed in powder

The Mullet

Lib Tech's marketing guys are less arrogant than Burton's, and the board has a neat array of sensible 4x4 inserts in it, like on a real snowboard. Just in case anyone from Burton's listening, this insert design is really good as it allows you to mount your bindings quickly and easily, precisely where you want them, and they work with any standard binding. How cool is that? Even better, they make a mechanically good connexion between binding and board, allowing advanced riders to apply a great deal of force to the board should they see fit.

Lib Tech's marketing guys probably smoke something interesting though, as the board has a few features which are a bit on the funky side:

• The edge is crinkle-cut. I can see how this may work in icy conditions, but it's hardly relevant to back-country conditions such as I ride on my powder boards. This isn't a problem, but it's hardly a sales point for me. If I need to ride ice, I'll ride it on my slalom board and no amount of "magne traction" is going to help you keep up.
• The board's tapered. In fact if you take a 165 Mullet and place it back-to-back with a 166 Malolo you'll note very little difference... the board is in this respect pretty much a Malolo copy. Comparing a 156 Mullet with a 156 Fish, again the plan shapes are very similar - the Fish has a slightly wider nose and therefore slightly more taper as the tails are very similar.
• The camber's the wrong way around: the board has rocker, like the old Spatula skis or the more modern models from Rossi etc.
  

Riding it

Picture by Barry, camera by Canon, clothing by Burton,
bindings by F2, boots from DeLuxe
and snowboard from Lib Tech

go big or go home?

I rode a 165 Mullet that for a couple of days in mixed powder mostly in the trees, including some windblown crust as well as some face-shot material. My initial feeling was that the board was fine, but it felt a bit like my old Supermodel (first generation) 168 - a traditional powder board. The board turned well enough, and I ripped up a number of Monashee powder lines including some tight tree lines which left the skiers wallowing a bit.

I noticed that the tail tried to kick me out, and that the board appeared very quick. My boarding mates thought I seemed to be putting more effort into the turns than usual, so we tried to figure out why. I compared the Mullet with a friend's 166 Malolo, I discovered as above that they're very similar in size. I already knew from a couple of years riding them (before the EST thing arrived) that my Malolo size is 158-162... so it looked like I'd been riding a size or two over where I should be.

I switched the next smallest size I could get hold of, and rode the rest of the week on that. The 156 Mullet is very close in shape to the 156 Fish as described above, and mostly it rides like that. As a small board it's agile in the trees and doesn't suffer from the problems you'd have on a small piste board in these conditions. I hacked it across large bowls with the lightest face-shot powder, and across wind-blown crust. The "Magne Traction" seems irrelevant but harmless; cutting crust is not like riding ice and any old board can do it

I rode the 156 board in full-on Monashee storm snow without wanting to go bigger. If I encounter low angle stuff with 75cms on it maybe I could use the bigger board, but really that doesn't seem necessary. The little board works. It may work a little better than the Fish on the lower angled stuff, being a fraction faster for the length.

rocker

It's hard to say how the rocker works; I can't say that I can see much difference in the ride between this and a conventionally cambered powder board (Fish for example are soft and pretty flat anyway). My feeling is that camber and flex are hugely important for a piste board because those are the things you're railing on. In powder things are a little different, with the board planing on the snow. So I expect that some design factors which are key for the piste are next to irrelevant here. Whatever, the rocker doesn't seem to cause the board any problems, and I think it makes it easier to shuffle the board along than a traditionally cambered board in deep powder. In soft deep snow the board is very responsive to front-foot adjustments (I'm using hard boots, so I'm able to control that very well). It's pleasantly easy to rock the board from side to side, and the rocker may play a part in that looseness.

set-back 

This is pretty much a Malolo - it rides like a Fish with more tail. The limitation of both Malolo and Mullet is that you can't sink the tail as effectively as you can with at Fish, so your breaking technique needs to accommodate that. I wondered about this in the light of the board specs below. As an experiment I shifted the bindings back 1cm. That's way less than the Fish, but I wondered if it would make tail-breaking easier. I did a couple of heli drops set this way, but all it did was make my legs ache. So I put the stance back to the centre of the reference stance and my legs were fine again for the remaining 12 drops that day. I conclude therefore that you need to "slash break" with this board on most terrain; maybe you can sink the tail on really steep ground. My second conclusion from that experiment is that the reference stance (adjusted for width) is where you need to be set on this board for powder, and that a 1cm shift doesn't much affect the board's ride, but it does affect the load on your legs.

mixed conditions

I rode a fair amount of wind crust, not the sort of snow for the feint of heart. The Mullet performed well on there. On softer crust you can cut in with the back of the board just like with the Burton powder boards. Although it's flexy, the board has enough stiffness to be "bounced" into the crust on harder sections. On solid crust the magne-traction ought to make some difference, but I noticed none at all.

Specifications

Note that Burton board specs are from the 2007/8 season - the last season of Burton boards I was able to ride before the 2-hole binding system appeared.

[1] The weight range for the 156 Mullet seems to be 90-100, no units specified. Lib Tech's site uses a mix of units without definition. The boards are "made in the USA near Canada", which may explain the maker's confusion on this. These can't be pounds, as there really aren't any healthy adult Americans who weigh only 40 Kilos. But they can't be Kilos either, as I weigh 62 of those and can ride thse boards perfectly well. Oh well.

Summary

All in all I'm entirely happy with the Mullet, and when my own old Fish finally bites the dust I know that here's a board I can ride instead.