Everthing you need to know about buying a snowboard: the coreThe very heart of the board, if it’s no good, and clogged with chip fat and a lifetime of cigarettes, it’ll be pretty useless
The core provides impact dampening, pop, and an elastic centre, forcing the board back into shape. They have the biggest single influence on how a board rides.
The majority of cores are still built from vertically laminated strips of wood (typically Aspen or Poplar). Once a basic shape is formed, the black art of shaping begins. Cores are machined into different thicknesses from the tip to tail to give different flex patterns and rigidity.
Year on year, more technology is seeping in snowboarding. The core is one of the places where there seems to a greater diversity between brands. Look out for different types of wood combined into the cores, from Balsa to Bamboo, each of them adds slightly different properties, from cutting weight to adding stiffness.
Shunning Mother Nature, some brands have gone out on their own to add aerospace technology into their cores. Aluminium composite materials built into honeycomb shapes as employed by Burton and Palmer in particular, have allowed for giant leaps in weight reduction. As ever, Head’s Intelligence Chip technology and Intellifibres may well have been stolen from androids in the future. Essentially, using something to do with helicopter rotor blades, the core will stiffen as you ride harder and flex the board.
Also, watch out for carbon inserts that will, rather obviously add a fair dose of stiffness to proceedings.
Want to check out some snowboards? Head to our gear pages at www.documentsnowboard.co.uk/gear
Posted by name - Thu, 14/01/2010 - 4:19pm
The very heart of the board, if it’s no good, and clogged with chip fat and a lifetime of cigarettes, it’ll be pretty useless
The core provides impact dampening, pop, and an elastic centre, forcing the board back into shape. They have the biggest single influence on how a board rides.
The majority of cores are still built from vertically laminated strips of wood (typically Aspen or Poplar). Once a basic shape is formed, the black art of shaping begins. Cores are machined into different thicknesses from the tip to tail to give different flex patterns and rigidity.
Year on year, more technology is seeping in snowboarding. The core is one of the places where there seems to a greater diversity between brands. Look out for different types of wood combined into the cores, from Balsa to Bamboo, each of them adds slightly different properties, from cutting weight to adding stiffness.
Shunning Mother Nature, some brands have gone out on their own to add aerospace technology into their cores. Aluminium composite materials built into honeycomb shapes as employed by Burton and Palmer in particular, have allowed for giant leaps in weight reduction. As ever, Head’s Intelligence Chip technology and Intellifibres may well have been stolen from androids in the future. Essentially, using something to do with helicopter rotor blades, the core will stiffen as you ride harder and flex the board.
Also, watch out for carbon inserts that will, rather obviously add a fair dose of stiffness to proceedings.