BMBW Fast Action Tech

Q&A with Jesse Burtner, Marketing Director at Mervin.

The binding game in snowboarding has levelled up immensely over the last few years, with new alternatives to the traditional two-strap setup taking the market by storm – strapping in is getting faster.

Bent Metal Binding Works has taken a slightly different approach: rather than reinventing the traditional two-strap binding, they’ve been looking at how to make it better.

Enter Fast Action, BMBW’s take on bringing more convenience to the classic two-strap setup without sacrificing the feel and performance that have kept riders coming back to it for decades. Built around the Fast Action Toe Strap and quick, tool-free forward-lean adjustment of the Cube, it’s less about changing how a binding works and more about making the whole thing quicker, easier and more adaptable.

We caught up with Jesse Burtner, Marketing Director at Mervin, to find out where Fast Action came from, how it works and why BMBW believes there’s still plenty of life left in the classic two-strap setup.

Bent Metal has always had quite a distinctive approach to binding design. Before we get into Fast Action, can you take us back a little about where BMBW’s approach to building bindings comes from, and what has stayed consistent over the years?
Bent Metal has been around for quite a while, since the early sublimated high back days of the 90s. It went through a couple of different iterations back then, and one constant thread was the pushing of irreverent fun through marketing and playing with the image of what a binding company should be. Then Bent Metal went away for a while. When we relaunched the brand, we chose to call it Bent Metal Binding Works because we wanted to focus on performance and reliability. You don’t have anything without bindings that rip and instil ultimate confidence. So this past decade of BMBW has been all about focusing on the basics from the ground up. Reliability, comfort and performance in straps, buckles, high backs, heel cups, discs; we are constantly testing and tweaking and pushing for the ultimate in performance and reliability. The fun and irreverence of the old Bent Metal lives on as well, percolating deeper inside the brand; you can see it pop up on artist collabs and IG captions, but our main focus is steadfast: make sure BINDING WORKS and works damn good

Fast Action is all about making a conventional two-strap binding quicker and easier to use. Where did the original idea come from, and what problem were you trying to solve?
The original idea was from wanting conventional binding performance to not get swallowed up by fad binding systems that sell convenience over everything else. There’s a reason our bindings are the way they are; there are decades of industry-wide global testing behind your “old” two-strap system. It’s proven itself on all the biggest stages time and time again, and when it’s engineered and produced well, it’s an unbeatable system. With a conventional two-strap system, you can crank your bindings down hard and comfortably and get the ultimate in precision snowboarding while staying comfy all day; no need to sacrifice one for the other. That said, can we improve upon it? Yes, we can. There are good ideas that we haven’t yet given the Bent Metal Binding Works treatment. Looking again at these innovations and attacking them with a “binding works” ethos is what Fast Action is all about. 

There are obviously a lot of different approaches to faster binding entry right now. Why was it important for you to keep the traditional two-strap experience rather than completely reinvent how riders get into a binding?
It’s mostly important to us because of performance standards driven by our professional and in-house team of riders. Co-founder Pete Saari will not suffer bad-performing gear. He is an elder statesman of snowboarding, but he keeps his shred game airtight, and it’s been largely his research and development that has led us to the Fast Action Toe Strap, aka the Snake Tongue, which is a closed-loop toe strap system that gives the rider “one less mouth to feed”. Our product manager Paul FerrelI is a former pro rider who has competitive victories under his belt and can rail a heel edge turn like few others. But it’s not only Pete and Paul; it’s our entire team at every level. They would be best described as sceptics when it comes to equipment modification. They are keeping their riding on the razor’s edge of possibility so their bindings cannot be getting in the way of their potential; in fact, bindings should be enhancing that potential. That’s the bar that we have raised the brand to, and that’s the bar we all want our equipment to perform at. The other systems we’ve tried have been fun to experiment with, and there is for sure a happy customer out there for them. We continue to work with multiple convenience binding system techs that are great for the person looking for them, but “life hacking” the two-strap system with Fast Action is opening up a new exciting middle ground for us where we don’t have to feel compromised on comfort or performance. 

How exactly does the Fast Action toe strap work, and what changes compared with a conventional toe strap?
The Fast Action Toe Strap is a closed-loop system that gives you “one less mouth to feed” when you bend down. It’s intuitive and simple and shaves important time and effort off every run. The toe ladder features two bumps that hold the buckle in place unless you forcefully pull them through (which you can). This makes it so every time you unstrap the buckle and the ladder stays connected, but the entire strap falls out of the way. Then when you go to strap back in, it’s one simple fast motion of tightening it back up.

What did the prototyping and testing process look like? How many versions did you go through before arriving at what we see now?
It looked about as DIY as you can imagine, with Pete Saari rigging up a bunch of different versions over the holidays to test at Snoqualmie and Hurricane Ridge two winters ago. He ended up crafting one that he loved and rode it all year in all different conditions. Then Paul and our engineers Dane and Ryan started working on actual prototypes, going through a few iterations before arriving at the one we’ve shipped to shops. 

How much rider feedback went into the development? Was there a particular bit of feedback where you thought, “OK, now we’ve got it”?
It was pretty seamless right off the bat where we had the feeling that this is cool and if we just get people to try it they will immediately get used to it and see it as a no-brainer that shaves some time and effort off your normal strap-in. And that was the case, but we still ended up tweaking the resistance to pulling it all the way off because we didn’t want someone to get in a situation where they wanted the toe strap all the way off but couldn’t achieve that without going crazy on it. So we changed the bumps and made it a bit easier to take all the way off. As funny as that sounds, I, for one (one of 10 globally), like to do unstrap tricks on my snowboard. So it was nice for me to be able to more easily separate the strap completely while I tried to film some unstrap-to-one-foot trick and then put it back into Fast Action position afterwards. 

The other big part of Fast Action is the Revolutionary Cube. How does that work, and why did you want to rethink forward-lean adjustment?
The Fast Action Cube is really a sleeping giant of innovation in the binding space. Up to this point, all the convenience being introduced actually has no positive impact on performance. Getting in and out faster is great, but with most systems you sacrifice performance. Our Fast Action toe strap doesn’t sacrifice performance, but it also isn’t performance-enhancing; it’s just faster and easier. The Cube, on the other hand, is a performance enhancer with its quick toolless forward lean adjustments. We’re not saying that you need a bunch of forward lean all the time; we’re saying you need the option to alter your forward lean super quickly, mid-run even, to perform at your best in different circumstances. We Bent Metal riders have been doing this for years; the Cube has survived all the way from the early 1990s version of Bent Metal. We know how well it works. Gonna rip groomers in the morning? Spin your Cube to the 3 setting; it takes exactly 1 second per binding, and now you’re going to trench heel edge turns. Jibbing the rope tow park? Stop at the top and spin the Cube to a setting of 1; now you’re calmly approaching features without unwanted reaction. Straight up, it’s that simple. It’s easy, intuitive and fun to play with; our riders have been dialling in their Cube settings for different terrain for years, a lot of them mixing front and back foot settings for their particular style. Also, if you bought soft bindings because that’s your vibe, you can level up carving reaction with the Cube so once you get better at turning and more aggressive on your board you aren’t feeling like your equipment isn’t up to the task. 

Fast Action appears across quite a wide range of the BMBW line. How did you integrate the same technology without taking away the individual ride characteristics of each binding?
We think that all the bindings should ride really great, so we usually pull tech to as many as we can as soon as we can; that’s why our Flex Control Drive Plate goes so deep into our line and then the Cube and our bomber buckles and straps as well. The Cube itself is also a visual identifier for the brand, so we put it on all of them as long as the system supports it (Lightspeed System does not work with a Cube). If it’s BMBW, then binding works! 

What does a really well-designed binding feel like to you?
I love this question because to me it’s a trick question. A really well-designed binding doesn’t feel like anything; you shouldn’t have to think about it. It just feels right, and you go, and you focus on ripping and having fun. I love when I ask a team rider how their bindings feel, and they have to stop and think about it because they’re holding that room in their brains for things that are actually perplexing them; they’ve forgotten about the bindings, the bindings are just doing their job like the good little boot candy they are! 

Looking back at the evolution of Bent Metal, where does Fast Action sit in the brand’s story? Does it feel like a significant new chapter for BMBW?
Absolutely significant. Fast Action is both us striving for better but also doubling down on classic. It’s been nice to come out of this “Game of Thrones” moment in the binding business with a feeling that we should stay the course, full steam ahead, exceptional conventional performance meets convenience.

And finally, is Fast Action the end result, or the beginning of something you see developing further over the next few years?
It’s in development; stay tuned!