By far the best place to get gear is used off ebay.  The ebay button in the menu bar of this site links to our ebay gear search, and it works really well.  There’s a lot of good race board stuff listed on ebay, and some of it goes for REALLY cheap.  Our search was developed over years of looking for deals on gear, and it tends to work good.  It searches within the snowboarding category for a whole bunch of shite, it basically brings up all the race gear on ebay at any given time with a single search

Next, you can find used stuff in the classified section of bomberonline.com.  Stuff there usually costs slightly more than you’ll pay on ebay.  But you never know, and it varies by the item and the person selling it.  Catek.com also has gear available on their message board, however the board isn’t as well setup for trading gear.

Another good place to find cheap gear is klugriding.com (operated by Olympic medal winning snowboard racer Chris Klug.)  The site has older Burton carving gear which was never sold, and sat around in warehouses.  Some of the deals are pretty good.

For new gear see the links page, we're not listing specific companies here, as it is usually quite a bit cheaper to buy used.  However obviously a new custom stick would be pretty sweet if you can throw down for one

Before you start looking for gear you need to decide what you need.  At the very least you need some race bindings (also referred to as plate bindings) for riding a snowboard in hardshells.  You can find both bail types and step-ins.  The most common are bindings with bails, which have a toe lever for locking your boot into the binding, and work with any race boot.  Unlike the softboot world, step-ins are the ultimate in performance.  Being able to step in is also cool.  There are several types of race snowboard step-ins, and like softboot step-ins, the bindings and boots must be compatible.  High end bindings (Cateks and Bombers) are made from solid aluminum and are really nice.  However they tend to go for more than lower end plastic bindings.  Plastic bindings work fine, especially for your first season carving, and don’t break the bank.

If you don’t buy anything else you can throw plate bindings on your freeride board, rent some ski boots, and get a much better feel for carving than riding a softboot setup gives you.  However ski boots don’t work well for snowboards, so you’ll be very uncomfortable and won’t have all the performance you could have.

So… You need some race snowboard boots.  Race boots are typically sized in mondopoint, which is a fancy word for the length of your foot in centimeters.  To find your size, get a ruler and measure your foot.  Most people are around 27 cm (about a size 10 men’ shoe.) We highly recommend race boots with at least four buckles, as opposed to freecarve boots that only come up to your ankle, and only have three buckles (they suck, don’t waste your time)

To get all the advantages of the race boots and bindings, you need a race board.  You have to be careful here because some weird stuff floats around out there.  Carving was bigger during the development of the snowboarding, and the used equipment you find can date from any time, starting with the 80’s and up to this season's gear.  Way back in the day (the 80’s), boards didn’t come with inserts, you drilled holes in the topsheet and mounted your bindings with ski screws.  The freestyle boards without inserts seem to have pretty much disappeared, however you still see race boards on ebay that predate inserts.  Don’t buy a board that doesn’t have inserts, period.  Another thing to avoid are asym boards.  As snowboards developed, they thought for a while that it would be a good idea to make asymmetric boards, which either look like a parallelogram, or have a different heel sidecut radius than toe sidecut radius, or both.

Long story short, they later realized this wasn’t such a good idea after all.  Don’t buy an asym board.  Also don’t buy a board with a waist width larger than 22cm.  Once the waist is this wide you might as well just be riding a freeride board. What you do want is a board made after about ’94 at the earliest, that’s long, skinny, symmetrical, and has inserts.  A good length for a first time carver is about 164 to 167.