Well the silence didn't mean I wasn't playing lots. I have been getting a daily sessions in and trying to make it no less then 45 minutes daily. Anyhow, good stuff. I can feel some semblance of stamina coming back and can string all the two adds I can pull (illusion and clipper is still elusive).
I have been practicing the inside stall like crazy and have been stretching my ankles quite a bit but could probably do it more--just hard to remember to try and break your ankles every 30 minutes
Never mentioned it but I am 31 and have had diabetes type I for 27 of the 31 and I have been trying a new program out that has been killing my blood sugars. Once I get that figured out I think my ability to play footbag (at least have more desire to exercise in general) will go up.
I am doing 100 toe stalls for warm up and then 10 inside stalls each foot alternating back and forth. Then do as many mirages in a row both sides until I am tired. Then legovers, pickups, illusions, and then the nemesis clipper stall until I am done--usually only getting a clean one or two out of 50.
Dang, I thought I had made allthe mods necessary with the inside/outside--oh well, the toe's are coming out. As an FYI, a stitch picker makes the begining of the job much easier and less dicey--thanks to my crafty wife for finding me hers.
Also, I have a brother in law who designs shoes for Nike. No kidding. I was giving him the low down on the sport and the unique situation with shoes and all the mods. Here is our Conversation posted for all to enjoy--it has been edited a bit to remove certain irrelevant and illegal (just kidding, well sort of
) parts of the conversation. Unfortunately it is a threaded email with interlaced responses by me so it might be a bit hard to read but hopefully interesting. If adidas doesn't want to pay attention to footbaggers perhaps Nike does.
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No probs on the repsonse time--life is WAY too busy. I have embedded some coments below in red.... Good conversation.
On 9/24/05, <@excite.com> wrote:
Sorry for the delayed response,
Love the shoe mods and the whole concept of minimal shoes. Building knock-offs is easy except for the volume issue. To open up new molds for the outsole components is a few thousand dollars per size. Might be to build a very similar shoe with all the same charictaristics but with a swoosh on the side. Then I could order some parts and have some uppers sewn together that you could test out.
Yeah, that is exactly what they are...mimmal shoes. And yet, they are have a thick sole for cusion, and a comfortable liner. The essence or reason for taking the canvas material out of the the inside, outside and toe is to have a better feel for the bag with as large and flat a surface as possible. Yeah, I wouldn't want to contribute to any intellectual property issues on the mold thin. Also, I don't want you to have to hastle building a shoe, just wanted to show you this as it is a really unique example in the shoe market of "customization". In fact I don't know if I have ever seen anything like it. These people are devoted to this shoe as it really is the only one that has the characteristics they need which is extremely light, thin mesh lining and therefore very easy to feel teh bag on the inside, outside, and toe. Adidas probably doesn't even hardly know about teh following, but I would imagine a large number of their sales are from footbaggers. Here is a petition asking them to not stop producing
http://www.petitiononline.com/adidasrl/petition.html . I wish I knew how big the footbag market was, I think it is exploding in europe. Have you seen any of the intense crazy move videos--could make a sick commercial if done in slow motion with some killer nikes that were all worn out. The shoes are very "deconstructable" as I have found out from taking my canvas out on two pair that I own. So from a reverse engineering standpoint ti would be easy to get fabric measurements and general sizing of the shoes.
The only thing nike has that comes close is a "linerless" version of our most popular skate shoe called the dunk. Here's the link:
http://freshnessmag.com/content/feature ... /index.php
They're hard to come by, but I could probably round up a few pair if you wanted to compare and try it out. Remind me what size you are and I'll get the ball rolling.
How much are they--I am a size 8. They look interesting, not sure how they woudl withstand teh cutting required on the bottom lace piece to open the toe. The swoosh part might be a bit thick and prevent a lot of feel or touch.
On the footbag side, It would be fun to run some experiments. We already make a footbag as a way to use more "regrind" from old shoes. ( regrind comes from Nikes post consumer waste project where we grind up old shoes and make basketball courts, tracks, frisbees footbags, etc.)
This is exactly what I would like to do, run some experiments but leverage your vastly larger knowledge on materials both for the cover (more durable) and the fill (was thinkingt a mix of plastics and metals might be best).
It would be fun to come up with 9 or 10 different filling formulas and try them out. I'm sure I could set it up with a few phone calls. Once we dial in a formula for the filling, we could then run durability tests with some newer materials.
To help me out, tell me what performance characteristics do you look for in a bag. soft, heavy, light, rebound.
Ha, this one will be tricky. A good footbag has a certain "dampened" quality that makes it nice and easy to stall and yet still lively enough to re set for another move. A lot of people like these "dirtbags" they are full of fine or course dirt. They stall very easy. There is another bag, which is probably the most popular and one of the most expensive that has both plastic and metal filling. I think as far as fabrics most like what is called "facicle" which has a great touch to it, but really doesn't last all that long and wears out more quickly if dirty. So you end up having to wash the bags a lot to try and keep them around longer. Here is a link to the abshire:
https://www.freedomfootbags.com/shredsh ... ucts_id=29
