Explain camber please...

[tufty]

If you're the only one promulgating your position on the issue, how could you possibly be right?

Number of people agreeing with you doesn't necessarily equate to the correctness of your argument.

...KKK analogy snipped...

If you go back a few years, you'd find a lot of people arguing that snowboarding would never take off, that it was inherently more dangerous than skiing. Look in the current snowboarding press and see if you can find much support for the idea that carving and hardboots are where it's at, rather than "falling leaf"ing down to the snowpark.

Yeah, that's loads better than KKK references. See how skilfully I avoid being Godwinned, whilst still inferring "you're no better than a park monkey" :)

Seriously, though - when it comes down to it, unless you're riding asolutely flat, you are going to be rockering your board, no matter how cambered it is when it's laid on your living room table. I can buy that camber might help in the initiation of a carve, provide some extra stability during the edge-edge transition, and that how much camber a used board retains is a half-way-decent measure of how utterly fscked and noodly it is. Beyond that, I would agree that it's largely meaningless. Once you're carving, there's no reason a highly cambered board should behave much differently to one that's flat, or even rockered.

Here's Jim Callen "somewhat" decambering a Prior (courtesy of the photos section)

And Arnaud "slightly" bending his Swoard

[Puddy Tat]

I wondered about these rockered boards.

As tufty showed with his two attached pics we completely decamber our boards when we ride.

Someone made a rocker in watersports comment as well. I spent one day wakeboarding last summer, and found carving around on the on water pretty easy. With the rocker inherent in the wakeboard all that was required to do to turn was to apply pressure onto the edge by leaning into it. While snowboarding I never ride a duck stance as it causes me a ridiculous amount of knee pain, however on the wakeboard I rode all day in duck with zero knee pain. I'm guessing this is due to the way I rotate my weight forward while carving a snowboard, that isn't required to carve a wakeboard.

The recent resurgence of rockering started on park boards where duck stances dominate. I wonder if a rockered board is just easier to turn in a duck stance? Similar to the wakeboard can you now just pressure the edge to make it turn?

Dave

[Erik J]

I this stuff (the discussion of the how's and why's, not the )

Reverse camber / Rocker? Interesting stuff. Anyone spend any time on board with rocker?

[b0ardski]

libtech bananas do not carve. On packed snow there is no possible way to get the nose to bite into the snow to initiate a carve. 99% of any control they offer comes from inbetween the bindings. They feel like the effective edge is the width of your stance, thus makeing the magnatrac a necessity for any control on steep packed snow, forget about ice. In deep snow over 8in, the rocker is good for spinning and porpoiseing & quick short turns jibbing off of trees or snowfences.

Have you ever driven a cheap old car with dead shocks, springs, and sloppy steering down a windy mountain road?? it drives like a banana

Did I mention that bananas do not carve. I could ride barrel staves to the bottom but it won't be graceful linked arcs.

I have a rockered convex board that I can ride with tennis shoes in fresh deep snow but its not the kind of fun I get from an all mountain carver.

[BlueB]

"Nice trick, good Monkey, here's your Banana."

[maxlean]

What camber does for a carving board...as you initiate the turn, it helps set the nose into the snow. It also acts like pre-load in a shock absorber - the board is already stressed when flat, which eliminates chatter.

Ah, motorcycle terminology, I get it.

So if we accept the proposition that the more camber a board has, the more weight that will be on the tip and the tail. In theory, this would cause the tips and tails to "bite" allowing the board to more easily de-camber - like seen in the pics posted on this thread.

Now, here's the mind bender: we all know (assume?) that the side cut of a board determines the radius of arc a board will carve, right? Well, if you lay an EC carve where the board is completely perpendicular to the snow, the side cut has no effect on the radius - the radius at this point is determined by how much the board has "de cambered," right? Explain that all you big braind b*tches!

cheers,

Robert

[b0ardski]

sidecut radius combined with longitudinal radius (of the flexed board)= trench radius

Torsional stiffness and snow consistancy also affect resulting turn radius

preload, thats it. good analogy Tex

[tufty]

libtech bananas do not carve. On packed snow there is no possible way to get the nose to bite into the snow to initiate a carve.

I fully agree with pretty much everything else you've written here, but (admittedly with no experience of the board in question), as long as it has sidecut and isn't a complete noodle, it *must* be carveable at some point, regardless of its rocker. Because, at some point, you must be able to get it up on edge, where the magic combination of the line traced in the snow by the front of the board is followed by the rest rather than skidding. If it really can't be carved, then it's probably a function of it being too floppy (perhaps for the rider) rather than anything else.

Getting it over far enough that the nose and tail are touching the snow so that you can carve might be an "interesting", perhaps even "sh*t scary" exercise, given that you're rockered and thus, as you point out, only have control between the feet, but it should be do-able as long as the board doesn't bend itself completely out of its carveable rocker once it does "bite".

BTW, you can't carve a barrel stave because you can't get it "over" far enough - the shape of a stave means that it has to be at >90 degrees before it will start to describe an arc in the snow. If you mounted your bindings on the side of the stave, you could carve one with impunity, but I don't think that's what you're getting at.

[b0ardski]

OK, you got me. the bigger skunkape, and the mullet can carve an arc once its up on edge enough. but they're not full bananas. They are flat between the bindings which is where all of the control comes from (on these boards) at the end of one arc thru transition into the next arc. You cannot use early pressure on the tip to "bite" into the next turn, and you will not get the rebound out of the tail to "hop" into the next turn.

I consider carving to be to be smoothly linking highly angulated arcs down the run.

Rocker makes fast smooth transitoins very difficult on hard pack

In deep snow they work because you are not depending so much on the bite of the edge, as you're depending more on the base surface area of the board.

[NateW]

I can buy that camber might help in the initiation of a carve, provide some extra stability during the edge-edge transition, and that how much camber a used board retains is a half-way-decent measure of how utterly fscked and noodly it is. Beyond that, I would agree that it's largely meaningless.

Well put.

I suspect that the rockered boards are popular in the park because they make spinning/buttering tricks easier.

The wake/surf analogies don't work for me. Those (and waterskis too) "carve" because when the base of the board is submerged the rocker (plus some trig) defines the carve radius. Snowboards on hardpack carve because the sidecut (plus some trig) defines the carve radius.

I suspect that a cambered and sidecutted surfboard would suck. Never tried it, of course, but that's my guess. A reverse-cambered and reverse-sidecutted snowboard would probably be fun in powder (where you could submerge it and carve like a wakeboard) but on hardpack I'm guessing it would work about as well as a cambered and sidecutted surftboard. Which is to say, I'm guessing it would suck.

[spil]

I suspect that a cambered and sidecutted surfboard would suck. Never tried it, of course, but that's my guess.

I think that one guy with the 252 tinkler has done that. I think I saw some pictures/videos on BOL somewhere. So it can be done, but I'm assuming it sucked/was hard compared to regular wakeboarding/slalom waterskiing.

[BlueB]

... couldn't stay dry ;)

[NateW]

And he sold all his regular waterskis and wakeboards after that because it worked SO well.

:lol:

[tufty]

You cannot use early pressure on the tip to "bite" into the next turn, and you will not get the rebound out of the tail to "hop" into the next turn.

Makes it harder to carve, for sure, but not impossible. Consider the banana, which is rockered between the feet - when you're riding flat, this will be de-rockered to flat, in the same way that your cambered board will be decambered to flat. In fact, it will have an identical "footprint" to a cambered board. As you bring it up on edge, it will have a tendency to rocker, rather than bite the nose and tail, for sure, but it will still behave in pretty much the same way as a "normal" board, and should carve in a identical manner (to a noodly cambered park-oriented board, which is to say, not very well)

I consider carving to be to be smoothly linking highly angulated arcs down the run.

Personally, I consider carving to be carving. Making the entire running edge of the board run through the same arc. Doesn't matter if they are highly angulated or linked - that's "advanced" carving.

Rocker makes fast smooth transitoins very difficult on hard pack

Not having ridden a rockered board for a long time, I couldn't really say. It might, but seeing as rocker is going to make it hard / impossible to use the tail to "unload" in the transitions, which will make them different, but I'm uncertain in which way.

What I can say is this.

Rocker should make no difference in terms of the carveability of a board, the only things that determine the carvability or otherwise of a board, ski or barrel stave is sidecut. Flex has a stake, in that it extends that "carvability" beyond "fixed radius per speed per weight of rider" as does rider skill. A rockered board might be more difficult to carve, or less forgicving, but it should still be carveable.

In fact, about the only thing I can think of that rocker adds/removes as opposed to the more "normal" camber is "provide a gimmick for the park-oriented snowboard press to focus on". I'd go into a rant about how snowboards basically invented carving and then completely forgot about it, and how snowboards look **** in the park compared to skis, here, but I'll abstain.

[Phil]

I've ridden a skate banana and a banana TRS. They both are awesome. The banana tech allows you to be very smooth transition between a skid and a carve. They are not just for park monkeys, but they are not for every condition/rider either.

In all honesty after riding these boards I'm convinced that in some courses/hill a reverse cambered race board would be the choice. Look at the shape of the newer SG's and the KST camber profile......Rumor has it that Bezzetto had a Kessler for ice that was fully reverse camber. I can't confirm this, but it makes some sense for racing and on steep SL courses.

.....

[tufty]

I'd go into a rant about how snowboards basically invented carving and then completely forgot about it,

I'm not flaming you

I just want to point out that in 1972

warren witherell published a book

"how the racers ski"

I picked it up in the late 80's after having skied since the late 50's and within a week had dropped from 249th in an adult ski leauge at ascutney, vt to the top 25

it taught me to carve

just comunicating

S'cool. I have a copy of that boxed up somewhere, I think. Yeah, it's true, that you could carve skis before the "parabolic revolution", it's just that it wasn't common, or easy, to do. Hell, even in the early 90s, people were being taught Arlberg over here, with parallel turns considered "advanced", and even now you see the older ski teachers doing stem christie on highly shaped carving skis...

I guess what I was trying to say was that the one thing that popularised carving on skis, and probably advanced the sport more than any other innovation, was the parabolic ski, with its deep sidecuts - this was almost totally derived from experimentation on snowboard shapes (although it probably would have been "invented" independently anyway).

I'm gonna be working almost entirely on skis this year. New resort doesn't like lifties on boards. Bah.