Anybody knows a company or shoemaker who could make me fully rigid cross-country boots with a totally unusual profile?

Unlike downhill ski boots, XC boots are flexible: they’re designed to let you push off with your toes. The problem is, I don’t have any.

So without doing anything, the front of my boots isn’t supported at all: I have trouble controlling my skis, the boots fold and bite on my tender bits at each step and eventually collapse completely in short order, ruining a new pair of boots in a matter of miles.

Currently, my solution is the shortest boots I could find that fit me with stiffening steel bars bolted under the soles:

They work okay for classic XC skiing and they’re usable for a bit of skating, but they’re not ideal:

  • I have to use Rottefella bindings that grab the boots with two thin “hooks” instead of a full-width attachment so they can straddle the bars under my shoes. They work fine when they’re new but they quickly develop play. I hate the design of Rottefella bindings but I have to use them with my modified boots.

  • When skating, even with the stiffening bars, the boots are simply too floppy and I have difficulty controlling the skis and skiing efficiently.

  • The boots are too long, and since I have less force and almost no pushoff, they’re very tiring.

For me, the ideal XC boot would be a fully-rigid downhill-style boot with a NNN binding, very short and very wide at the front (think size 11 boots in width, size 7 in length and squared off at the front).

I could conceivably modify DH boots to adapt NNN attachments, but they wouldn’t fit me right if they were regular profile boots anyway.

So I’m looking for a ski boot maker who could take acrylic resin prints of my feet (I have those) and build custom-fitting boots around them, either fully rigid custom XC boots or custom DH boot that I could modify myself for XC. Like carbon fiber boots or something. Money is not too much of an object: the kids have been out of the house for quite some time 🙂

Anybody knows someone who might be able to help me?