On Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 10:11:53 AM UTC-7, lal_truckee wrote:
On 9/25/16 9:10 AM, Toller wrote:

I guess my question is really if bindings are typically accurate from the factory, or if they can be significantly off.

Don't know if the industry still operates the same, but used to be each
manufacturer specified how much the set DIN could deviate from the
measured release DIN before declaring the binding unusable and a shop
wouldn't officially set them. (Off the books, shoppies do a lot of
things.) Some brands "featured" significant deviation, often right from
the factory. Bottom line - you couldn't trust the on-binding "DIN"
setting to provide a specified DIN release, even brand new. On the other
hand, near enough is often good enough.
I assume in practice it is still the same.

The DIN settings are defined by a quasi-government organization (Deutches Institut fur Normen = German Institute for Standards) so the settings numbers are traceable to actual metric numbers. The 11 and 12 on your bindings are not just like Spinal Tap's "better than 10". One could build a device that mimics the ones in ski shops, but it would probably cost more than getting them tested by a professional, insured, ski shop.

A high school friend of mine used to say that he could test the release of his toe pieces by putting the ski on and then kicking the front of the ski sideways into the snow.

Until he sprained his knee doing that.