Skis are like tires for your car. Different skis are designed for different conditions. You can go the ‘all season tires’ approach and have a jack of all trades ski, but anyone who’s driven ‘all season’ tires in the winter knows that ‘all season’ is a euphemism for ‘lousy at most things’.

A way better solution for tires is to have conditions specific tires. Nice fuel efficient and quiet tires for the summer (or semi-slick performance tires if that’s your thing) and a heavily siped, blocky tread winter tire for getting out to the mountains on snowy roads.

The best part is, the conditions specific tire approach doesn’t even really cost any more than all seasons – your tires last twice as long when you only use them half the year. You get better performance, for the same cost.

Skis are the same way – yet most people only own a single pair.

In my experience, a normal set of backcountry skis is generally good for one to two hundred days of use before the cores start getting super floppy. Light skis don’t last as long as heavy skis due to the way more delicate wood used in their cores.

So, if you replace your skis every hundred days, that’s good for around two seasons of ‘Phil’ level use. If you have two sets though, then you take twice as long to hit that replacement point.

Personally, I have three or four sets of skis on the go at a time. I have my rock skis (a miled-out set of old skis I can destroy without feeling badly), I have my lightweight setup that’s a little narrower and can be used for either low-powder situations or traverses where weight matters and I have my full blown mid-season-puke-fest setup which are huge, a little heavier but float amazingly.

Because no one set is being used all of the time, EVERYTHING is getting used for a longer period of time. I get the right ski for the job, but my cost-per-ski-day is the same as if I had a single set of skis.

The problem though, is that this has historically meant that I had three sets of basically the same bindings. Currently, I have two sets of Dynafit Radicals and a set of Dynafit Verticals which is basically the same thing. That seems like a waste to me. Unlike the skis – where each set serves a different purpose, the bindings are just duplicates and don’t wear out the same way skis do.

When I bought a new set of skis this year, I decided to fix this problem once and for all.

I reached out to Binding Freedom and got a bunch of their binding inserts. If the concept of binding inserts is new to you, here’s the deal.

The idea is that you mount these metal inserts into your ski following the mounting pattern of your bindings. You then attach your bindings to the inserts. There are two advantages here – one is durability. I have problems with my toe-pieces coming loose over time. The inserts increase the interface area with the ski, so they should make things stronger. The other advantage is that when I want to swap between two different skis setups, I just unscrew the bindings from one and move them to the other. The metal-on-metal interface of screws and inserts lets you do this with no damage to your skis. Five minutes with a screw driver and you’ve moved your setup.

Genius.

Now, the only problem is installation – not all shops will install inserts and those that do tend to want a silly amount of money for it. So instead of paying a shop to do it, I went around to my buddy Kyle’s shop and used his tools and expertise to do it ourselves.

So that’s why I installed inserts, now I’ll tell you how we installed them.

Usual disclaimer of this is only how I installed these inserts. This is NOT me telling you how YOU should install them. When in doubt, consult Binding Freedom or have you favourite local shop help you out. Screwing this up could result in injury, so if you aren't confident in what you are doing, pay a few bucks to have a professional do this for you. Practising on a scrap 2x4 a few times is probably a really good idea.

Equipment: