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Burton Recalls SI Step-in Binding
by Robyn Hakes
11/2/98
After waiting three years for a step-in binding from Burton and finally getting it, Burton dealers were surprised to receive a "retro-fitting" letter from North American Sales Manager Clark Gundlach on Friday October 30, 1998.
The letter asked dealers to second-day ship all SI bindings back to the Burlington, Vermont headquarters for retrofitting. According to the letter, the process should take about five days and Burton will second-day ship the fixed bindings back to retailers, incurring all costs.
"The SI Binding was designed to work with an automatic engagement under most conditions but the design also allows the rider to manually engage in certain conditions," the letter said. "To use the manual entry, a rider reaches down and physically pulls the engagement tabs into position. In riding the SI Bindings, we have just learned that our automatic engagement system is not working as designed. As such, the rider is required to manually engage the four levers more often than is acceptable to us."
Vice President of Marketing Dave Schriber expands on this by stating: "The people in this company have been dissing step-ins forever. If you have to reach down to operate the binding it's not a step-in. We said, 'There's no way we're happy with this, we're fixing them.' Now they're going to be better than they were before."
The ability to manually operate the binding is a feature that is ideally reserved for deep powder days when snow pack limits step-in ability. "There are two orange indicators that tell you when you're in," says Schriber. "There is no possibility of a false positive. Sometimes you have to wiggle your foot to get it to engage, and sometimes, no matter how much you wiggle, there's no way it's going to engage so you'd have to reach down.
"To us, that's not a step-in. But we've got the fix and it'll be lightning quick."
Schriber adds this is something they could have fixed out in the field, but it's much easier to have the bindings sent back now (before too many are sold) to get it taken care of. "It is totally not a safety issue, it's a convenience issue," he says.
There was no good time to catch the problem, but sources at Burton say only about 35 percent of the step-ins have been shipped at this time. "It's still early enough in the season when not a lot of people are out riding yet," Schriber adds.
More information about this retrofit is on the Burton Web Site (www.burton.com). Consumers who've already purchased the binding will be notified through the liability-waiver paper trail. Anyone with questions should call Burton rider services at: .
The letter sent to dealers added one additional piece of information: Nataza Zurek recently won the Vancouver Indoor Quarterpipe contest on the Freestyle SI.
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