What's your favorite mass produced softboot carving board

[Rob Stevens]

My board is like my wife’s car. 
AWD, turbo, lifted, 4 door with a trailer hitch. 
And you can buy it, so it’s “produced”. Not en masse, but the $ isn’t different than any other “high end” Burton so get onto the Stranda site and grab yourself a Shorty 164 W. 
 

Edited April 21, 2023 by Rob Stevens

[crackaddict]

@wayte

Welcome to the forum.

Without generalizing too much, the Asian style seems to be more quick push-pull turns on green and blue terrain, they tend to ride steeper binding angles and have smaller feet than Americans.  Some of those guys are fantastic riders, who am I to tell them their boards are too narrow?

In BX competition 250-260mm seems to be the average waist width too, and those racers also know what they like.

For myself, my riding style (big fast turns), my preferred terrain (steep), the wide runs and sparse crowding in Revelstoke, and my preferred binding angles (+30/+15), I need 300mm at the waist for a long sidecut board.  And risers too.

On a big board with a big sidecut I need to angulate a ton to keep my turns tight and my speed under control.  When my boots start to touch the snow it slows the board down and pushes my weight forward, plus the pressure of my toes on the snow surface wants to lever my board out of its trench.

Shorter, slower boards with smaller sidecuts can be narrower but I wouldn't even attempt to carve anything less than 27.5 on a Revelstoke black diamond.  Remember too that it's the width underfoot that really matters, not at the waist, so sidecut radius and stance width also play a role in determining the ideal board width.  

I had a 310mm wide Donek (12m scr) and I found if I angulated far enough on steeps I would boot that out too, and yet it initiated turns like a tank.  So my opinion is that there's always going to be a tradeoff: no board is boot out free, the wider you go the less boot out you suffer, but the narrower boards are much smoother through the edge transition and they're lighter which is important if you're doing tricks.

Hope that helps.  

[wayte]

Thank you @crackaddict for the elaborate response. A deeper sidecut will make the waist width smaller and that's something I did not think about, or did not know how much it actually affects the width.

I am asian myself and even amongst asians, my feet are incredibly small at size 7. So i guess I am lucky not having to downsize on boots . I think I will look for some board within 255-260mm to begin with because a larger sidecut may be harder to control at my current skill level.

[Neil Gendzwill]

I don’t think the sidecut radius makes a huge difference to bootout, at least not from a pure waist width basis. For a 50 cm stance, the difference in width at the inserts between a 10 m radius and a 20 m radius is about 3 mm, assuming a circular sidecut centred between the inserts. 

For the math minded if R is the sidecut and S is the stance width, the additional width at the inserts is given by 2*(R - sqrt(R^2 - S^2/4)). 
 

So if you have a 10m radius and a 50 cm stance it’s about 6 mm wider at the inserts, with 20 m radius about 3. 

[Xargo]

This got me thinking that maybe this is what's happening with deeper sidecuts. Feels like a bootout but it's not. Here's an illustration of high edge angle carve where mid part of the board doesn't have any grip in icy conditions. This is with 5.8m scr:

It's just that in hardpack/icy conditions the edge pressure might not be high enough to dig the nose and tail deep enough which will cause the mid part of the edge to not engage which feels a lot like bootout when the edge looses grip.

With a big sidecut board the width difference between tips of the board compared to waist is smaller and thus the nose and tail don't have to dig as deep in order to engage the mid part of the sidecut as well. This is the biggest reason why I wanted my new softboot carver to have 16m scr.

[Neil Gendzwill]

As the board gets more inclined, flex matters more than sidecut. As you note, at 90 degrees your grip is largely based on how far you can drive the edges in. If you have a 10 m radius and 140 cm of effective edge you need to drive the nose/tail in 2.5 cm before the centre gets involved. That’s a tall ask in icy conditions but doable in fresh cord. 

[crackaddict]

8 hours ago, Neil Gendzwill said:

2*(R - sqrt(R^2 - S^2/4)). 

Thanks for doing the math @Neil Gendzwill 

I'm having trouble with the formula though, is it supposed to be the whole thing under the square root divided by 4 or just the square of the stance width?  I tried it with R and S both in metres and I can't make it work.

My gut says there's probably a bigger difference between 8m and 16m than between 10m and 20m.  Plus, soft boot stances are closer to 60cm than 50, and that a board design like Contra has most of the sidecut between the feet.  But even without these additional factors, 6mm is not nothing; that's already a big difference in boot out potential.

For example, I'm thinking of my NeverSummer 27.5 wide w/8m scr vs a JJA 29.5 wide with a 16m sidecut.  Width underfoot is way different for sure but the NeverSummer is soft and has so much sidecut that it doesn't require nearly as much speed or angulation so boot out potential is similar.

So when I said: 

On 4/20/2023 at 5:59 PM, crackaddict said:

it's the width underfoot that really matters, not at the waist

I should have said that its a combination of all the board specs, including flex, that determines the ideal waist width for a given rider on a given run in specific snow conditions... accounting of course for the phase of the moon at the instant they initiate...

[Neil Gendzwill]

Order of operations, do the exponents first then any multiply/divide then add or subtract. Parentheses override. Make sure you use the same units. So with R of 10 m and S of .5 m

2*(R - sqrt(R^2 - S^2/4))

2*(10 - sqrt(10^2 - 0.5^2/4))

2*(10 - sqrt(100 - 0.25/4))

2*(10 - sqrt(100 - .0625))

2*(10 - 9.997)

.006 m = 6 mm