I first showed you the G3 Onyx binding in 2010 (here). I wrote a review of the Onyx in May of 2011 (here). However, there was always one thing I wanted to try.
The Onyx has the nifty feature of being mounted on a plate – and you can buy more mounting plates cheap and have them on several skis.
The only question is how hard it is to move the bindings from one pair of skis with plates to another?
Turns out its pretty easy! The only tools you need are some Philips head screw drivers and a measuring tape.
Step one – unscrew the two small screws that hold the ski brake on (the binding on the left has them on still, the one on the right has them removed).
Step 2 – slide off the ski brake and housing.
Step 3 – unscrew the back piece of the binding by turning the adjustment screw.
Step 4 – Once the adjustment screw runs out of threads, the back piece will slide off the rail.
Here’s what the bottom of the back piece looks like. You can see the back piece mounting plate on the ski.
Step 5 – Unscrew the two holding screws on the front piece.
Step 6 – slide the front piece off the rail. Here’s what the bottom of the front piece looks like.
Make sure you take note of all of your binding settings before you do a swap. I did it one ski at a time and checked the set-up on the other pair against the one the bindings was on originally. I also measured the spacing from front piece to back piece.
Here’s the back piece slid on – the ski brake and housing are almost in place.
Here’s an image with one binding re-mounted and the other next to the ski it will go on. All of the tools needed (2 Philips head screw drivers) are also in the picture. Essentially, to remount you go backwards through the steps above. I found that everything was hand tight, and returned it to that state.
Here’s everything remounted. Total time commitment – about 10 minutes.
Closing shot – the Black Diamond Drifts I tried out, which necessitated the binding swap. A fun pair of skis which proved to me how awesome rockered tips are! Too bad they are only 176’s…