Snowboarding is the world’s fastest growing winter sport and is set to become
even more popular than skiing. It is still a young sport and there are many
people eager to learn more about the enjoyment the sport has to offer. Without
going to a mountain and taking a few lessons it is hard to fully appreciate what
the sport really is, and the sensation that riding a snowboard gives. Hopefully,
my report will tell everything a person would need to know about equipment, so
that they can go try the sport out for themselves. The first snowboard ever
marketed was produced by Shervin Popper, in 1964. It was a crude model put
together in his garage, after he saw his daughter trying to go down a hill on a
sled standing up. It consisted of two children’s skis strapped together, with
some doweling on the top for foot attraction. His daughter took it to the local
sledding hill, and soon enough all the kids wanted one. Another pioneer was
Dimitrije Milovich, a surfer from the east coast. He made his invention because
of the lack of warm water in the winter. This board also had no bindings, but it
included iron edges. In the early seventies Milovich began limited production of
these custom boards. In 1977 the main snowboard company for today started
production. Jake Burton made and sold his prototypes with handmade bindings.
These included some elements similar to modern design. Tom Sims also started
production of some boards. In 1979 Tom Sims and Chuck Barfoot created the first
board made of fiberglass. At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the
eighties, the snowboard began to appear in some sports magazines and on American
and Canadian TV. A beer commercial showed Paul Graves riding a snowboard. This
introduced the snowboard to the public, although it was still considered a
strange sport. Now that snowboards were allowed on some mountains, the board
needed to be redesigned so that it would work on packed snow. Shaped wood can
slide along on a hill of deep powder, and it could turn pretty good, but it
still was slow and hard to turn on packed snow. In 1980 and 1981 the three main
snowboard companies, Burton, Sims, and John Winterstick began to produce
fiberglass boards with polietilene (P-tex) bases, as well as metal edges. The
same year the Struck Brothers produced a board with two small skis on the
bottom. Called the Swingbo, it was easier to carve and turn on packed snow. When
snowboard companies found out about the importance of flex, sidecut, and camber,
nine basic materials began being used. They could be manipulated or have
substitutions, depending on what the board was supposed to do. These parts were
wood or foam, fiberglass, poly MDI, epoxy matrix, polietilene (a.k.a. P-tex or
PE), flacee or ABS, Fenolo-reinforced poly MDI or P-tex, steel inserts, and
steel with rubber dampening. Wood or foam makes up the core of the board.
Usually the core is made of different types of wood, stiff and light to make the
board flexible and durable. Wood needs to be laminated vertically so that the
glue doesn’t play too important a role in the board’s performance, and so
the board will keep it’s characteristics over time. This process is more
expensive than the process to make a board with a foam core. A foam core is
cheaper than wood. It can also be produced an a larger scale easier. The only
problem is that it isn’t as durable as a wood core, and it often needs to be
reinforced with materials such as Kevlar. There are many variations of the size,
shape, and placement of the core within the board. For example, a board with
most of the core in the center of the board would spin easier, because there
would be no counterweight to slow the spin. Fiberglass is used in all boards
over and under the core to increase stiffness and to keep the board from
deforming. The process of putting all the layers together is called lamination.
Fiberglass is a woven structure which is usually "Biaxle," meaning
there are two directions in the weave, but even better is "Triaxle,"
which has three. Poly MDI is a polymeric matrix that gives the board good
flexibility over time. The epoxy matrix is the glue used to stick parts of the
board together in the laminating process. It has a good shock resistance, is
lightweight, and has a long life of rigidity. Steel inserts are the holes that
you see on the top of a board that has no bindings on it. They are the holes
that bindings screw into. They are imbedded into the fiberglass and are very
strongly rooted into the board. They come in three basic patterns. The basic 4
by 4 pattern is 8 aligned inserts on each half of the board. Almost every board
uses this pattern. Next is Burton’s 3-d insert pattern. It only requires that
three screws go into the board per binding. The up side to this is the thousands
of stance possibilities that can come out of this pattern. The down side is that
a lot of binding plates don’t fit this pattern. The third is not very popular,
it has a weird set of holes that are meant only to be filled by baseless
bindings, which only have screw holes on weird parts of the edges. It is not
extremely common. Maybe 1 out of 20 boards have it, if not less. The shiny layer
that you can see on the top of a board is called the top sheet. Usually it’s
made of flacee or ABS, two extremely hard materials that are very difficult to
cut. Underneath it there are usually graphics that can be put under the top
sheet by printing them out on a special sheet of plastic that goes between the
fiberglass and the top sheet. Side walls are the narrow sides between the top
sheet and the base on the edges. The strength of this component is very
important because if they are punctured, water can enter the core and rot it
out. Around the edges is a strip of metal, usually steel, that allow the board a
good hold on ice and protection for the board. These strips are called the
edges. Between the edge and the bottom of the side wall there is a layer of
dampening, often made of rubber, to absorb the shocks and vibrations coming from
the edge. The edges can wrap all the way around the board, or they can stop just
before the tip and tail. Edges that are not fully wrapped are just becoming
popular. Various shapes and components are used for specific styles of riding.
There are 4 main styles of riding, with specific boards for each:
Alpine/Carving/Race, Freestyle, Freeride, and Big Mountain/Longboard. Racing,
Carving, or Alpine boards are very distinguishable from other boards. They are
usually thick , skinny, and have very low tails, if they have a tail at all.
They can also be noticed by the hard, ski-style boots and the ski-style bindings
that are used on this type of board. The board usually has a low, short tip for
good performance, without vibrations at high speeds. The tail is usually very
low, flat, or sometimes there is just an angled cut-off. A Freeride-Carving
model would have a semi-stiff core, and a large side cut, so that the board can
go at high speeds as well as make large sweeping carves. A race board would have
a little side cut, and it would be very thin, so that it can switch quicker from
edge to edge. A Freeriding board would have good performance in all conditions,
whether powder, jumps, ice, steeps, halfpipe, and any other conditions that a
mountain could have. This board mixes the characteristics of a freestyle board
and an alpine board. They are large, but with a moderate sidecut . They are not
too stiff, and they don’t have very low or very high tips. The nose would be
long and at a moderate height so that it can float in powder, and go off jumps.
All models are symmetrical, but some have a distinct tip for powder. The purpose
of Freeriding is to use all parts of the mountain to have fun, whether it is in
the pipe or off in the trees. Freestyle boards are made for riding in the park
and pipe. The boards are usually short and wide. The short length allows for
better maneuvers in the air, while the large width allows for lower stance
angles so that riding forward and backward can be easily done. The flex is
important and with the sidecut, makes the difference between a specific board
for the park or a specific board for the halfpipe. A board for the park would be
stiff in the center, and soft at the tip and tail to absorb landings. A halfpipe
board would have an equally distributed flex, so that the board can contour to
the curve of the pipe better. A Big Mountain or Long Board is ridden by experts
who do a lot of hiking around in the backcountry of the very large mountains.
They are like long, wide, Freestyle boards, so that they can float in. They are
usually very long, about 170 to 185 centimeters. Bindings are the mechanisms
that keep the rider’s feet on the board. There are three styles of bindings:
strap-ins, step-ins, and hard bindings. Strap-ins are the most popular, because
they have been around the longest and can be used on all types of boards except
Alpine boards. Step-ins are newer, they are more convenient and are beginning to
be just as high in performance as strap-ins. Only a few companies make them, and
you need special boots to use them, which is why they are in second place. Third
popular are hard bindings, which require specific equipment to use; an alpine
board and hard boots. Snowboarding has come so far in the last few years. It
came from a toy to a high-tech piece of equipment, from a sport for trouble
makers to an Olympic event, from a small family owned business to a major
business. In recent years we’ve seen huge advances in equipment technology and
performance, clothing design and smooth riding styles. This has provided the
images necessary to make snowboarding appealing to all kinds of people and to
assure it’s growth well into the future. As more and more young people take up
snowboarding, together with the increasing adult cross-over from, we can be
assured that this is no fad or craze that will soon die out. Snowboarding is an
individual, creative, and healthy pastime exercised in the great outdoors, and
is different things to different people. Try riding and who knows, you just
might enjoy it.