Concept2 Forum

I'm considering purchasing a set of slides, what has been your experience?

Thanks,
Mark

We have slides in our club, I use them there as often as I can.
Too expensive to have a set at home, though...

oh I would have slides if I had the space, but unfortunately footprint is too large I love the idea of the slides

I row with the slides once or twice in a week and find them to be helpful.

It's a great way to go. And if you don't like them, you can always take them as baggage to Barcelona and trade them with Ancho.

If you are an OTW rower, being able to test your technique by switching between being on Slides and grounded is very beneficial, as well.

I'm new to erging and have had a model D + slides for about 2 months now. I think the slides are great for all the reasons discussed in this and the UK forum. The only minor quibbles are the larger footprint, and compared to the ease of moving the model D itself, it is a bit of a pain to relocate the entire rig (if you need to do this in the first place).

Thought I'd resurrect this old thread now that I've finally learned to love the slides I bought almost a year ago. I didn't care for them at all at first, maybe because I was expecting slides to be the greatest thing since beer, and they weren't. (What is, really?)

After very little erging this season (I rowed less from May 1 to Dec 31 than I have from Jan 1 to now), I decided to get back on the rail for the JVC. And now I LOVE my slides! I've regained the sensation of forward motion that I missed during my first awkward slide attempts, and I'm sure slides are part of the reason I was able to start rowing so quickly on the heels of a nasty lower-back wrench at the very end of December.

So: two big, belated thumbs up for slides.

Nice to have you back on the erg (and on the slides), Duc!

So no chance fo me to purchase your set of used slides then?

Thanks, ancho! Sorry, though, no slides 4 U.

One thing I wish the slides had is the ability to lock in place... that way you could leave the erg on the slides but switch between grounded (locked in place) and slides without having to move things around at all.

You could even alternate intervals on and off slides while sitting on the same machine if the locking mechanism was easily manipulated.

We got the slides for the holidays. Love them, but agree with some of the other posts (if we want to go slideless - which we'll do for a week or so before our indoor race - it will be a pain to lift the erg up and move them out). Locking would be cool.

Two questions for other slide-egers:

1) Do you find that it takes you a few strokes to get yourself in the middle of the slide, or do you have a technique for avoiding this? I find that when I start, the erg and I tend to wander around the tracks, sometimes banging into one end or the other, until I get to a steady state where I slide evenly over the middle of the two ends.

2) How much do you think it takes off your pace? On my slower work (2:05-ish), I feel like it is just as hard to pull this either on or off the slides, but on my faster work (1:40-ish), I feel like I can go 2-3s/500m faster on the slides for the same effort. Any thoughts/data? This will matter in terms of racing (without slides), since my slide paces may not translate to race-day speeds.

1) Perhaps a stroke or two to find the point of equilibrium, but if you are bouncing off the ends at any point you should check the levelness of of the slides. I did an experiment with removing one of the bungees from each slide, and it made no difference in the centering effect, so C2 has over-engineered the requirement for centering by at least 100%, and just in case you may think that's only for leisurely stuff, it was worked for a 1:20.2 Avg paced 250m for the January CTC, done without visual feedback of where I was on the slides (my eyes were closed).

We remove the slides from time to time and would like to store them on end, but that would normally stretch one bungee a lot, so I wanted to save that bungee if possible and it looks good at this point. If one wasn't enough, I was going to arrange both of them from the same end of the slide to provide the original tension. It had an unintended consequence of eliminating a potential tripping point as we walk behind the slides too. (The room is just large enough to have the slides under the erg so they must be stepped over or between when crossing.

2) You get a boost in pace due to the increase in stroke rate, make sure to keep your stroke rate the same, or Distance Per Stroke (DPS) the same and you won't see the 2-3 second variance. The only power input we have is on the drive and it's unlikely that you are driving harder when on the slides, though they are forgiving of things like a rushed recovery (allowing trading rate for pace easier than when on the ground), since you won't have to stop the momentum of your body at the catch.

3) If you use any Erg but the E, you can easily change to the Ground by pushing the slides 1 foot together, lift the flywheel end and set the front foot just off the slide, then lift the back foot and set it on the ground between the rails. Reverse the process to put it back on. (The E won't work because the rear foot won't fit between the rails.. Argh!)

PaulS wrote: 3) If you use any Erg but the E, you can easily change to the Ground by pushing the slides 1 foot together, lift the flywheel end and set the front foot just off the slide, then lift the back foot and set it on the ground between the rails. Reverse the process to put it back on. (The E won't work because the rear foot won't fit between the rails.. Argh!)

That's a lot more work and more tedious than if there were pre-drilled holes through which a locking steel rod could be placed to hold the slides in position. Granted, your method is what you can do now, but I think a locking mechanism would be far easier and quicker.

ehagberg wrote:

PaulS wrote: 3) If you use any Erg but the E, you can easily change to the Ground by pushing the slides 1 foot together, lift the flywheel end and set the front foot just off the slide, then lift the back foot and set it on the ground between the rails. Reverse the process to put it back on. (The E won't work because the rear foot won't fit between the rails.. Argh!)

That's a lot more work and more tedious than if there were pre-drilled holes through which a locking steel rod could be placed to hold the slides in position. Granted, your method is what you can do now, but I think a locking mechanism would be far easier and quicker.

Well, I've tried a few different things, from clamps to some wood black frames that could be placed rather quickly to keep the carriages from moving. I didn't like the clamps at all, the blocks worked pretty well, but the feet needed to be secured to the carriages better because they are not an exact tight fit (zip ties worked fine for that).

I get what you mean about a mechanical locking mechanism, but to do it right would require a significant amount of new engineering, since you would essentially be creating a mechanism to resist the movement of the carriage that was designed to be freely moving, and hold up against thousands of attempts to break it. The opportunity is wide open though, perhaps you should take a shot at the problem.

PaulS wrote: Well, I've tried a few different things, from clamps to some wood black frames that could be placed rather quickly to keep the carriages from moving. I didn't like the clamps at all, the blocks worked pretty well, but the feet needed to be secured to the carriages better because they are not an exact tight fit (zip ties worked fine for that).

I get what you mean about a mechanical locking mechanism, but to do it right would require a significant amount of new engineering, since you would essentially be creating a mechanism to resist the movement of the carriage that was designed to be freely moving, and hold up against thousands of attempts to break it. The opportunity is wide open though, perhaps you should take a shot at the problem.

I'm not really one to engineer in the physical world... or at least I wouldn't know enough to be sure it was a good solution that wouldn't break or cause problems if used repeatedly...

I guess I got the idea from the fact that the coreperform seat, which is designed to move freely to improve balance while erging, has the ability to lock in place and eliminate the motion it was designed for, so that the feature can be turned on and off at will.

Imagine if you had to replace the coreperform with the standard seat each time you wanted the normal stable seat aspect back?

Of course, keeping the seat from rolling side to side is a much smaller change that keeping the whole erg from moving through the distance of a stroke.