The nice people at Shred Betties emailed me for an interview to which I happily obliged.
http://www.shredbetties.com/riders/story/doctor_snowboard/
They wanted to know about my work and the project with True Snowboards which is great as it means more people are taking a keen interest in the science of snowboard design.
One of the questions that I thought was particularly relevant to recent ‘technology’ in snowboards was reverse camber. I was explaining about my thoughts on this to a snowboarding friend who didn’t have the slightest idea what camber actually does and realised other people might be in the same boat so I would stick up a little diagram of snowboard camber pressure distributions.
Please excuse my poor sketching but this is the basic principle of it that the camber of the snowboard alters the pressure distribution shape underneath the snowboard. If you would like to read more on this I recommend Lind and Sanders book the physics of skiing. On that note - it was actually skis which camber was invented for! Now the thing with skis is they are thicker so have a greater second moment of area and therefore stiffer (also they use stiffer materials in their construction in some models). The details of that I will save for another time but basically all you need to understand is the effect camber has on a ski will alter the pressure distribution a lot more than it would on a snowboard which is softer in flex. I can flatten my snowboards - even a ‘uber’ stiff Girls Burton which was the last snowboard I actually brought before starting true, with one finger. This therefore implies to me as a scientist and engineer that the effect this camber has on the pressure distribution map will be minimal, whatever the camber direction, with most snowboards on the market.
Where I believe the real key to reverse camber lies is in offpiste snowboards which are stiffer. Powder acts as a liquid essentially so having a reverse camber is beneficial - just look into any research on surfboards, wakeboards and some on boat hulls
A stiff board for powder coupled with the reverse camber will induce a more ’surf’ like feel, or at least that is my hypothesis.
I hope to prove this hypothesis soon using a special paper which when applied to a surface will alter its properties with the pressure distribution. The paper is then scanned to generate an image which can be analysed.
Far more important to the feel of a snowboard is the quality of its materials used in manufacture and the cohesion between the structural layers - again this is my hypothesis which I hope to prove through some dynamic and structural analysis of ‘dead’ snowboards compared to new ones.
So you may ask…why does True Snowboards have any camber in their snowboards if I have just mentioned it having minimal effects on the snowboards performance from a theoretical standpoint? Well because a positive camber is still conventional and at True we are about proving in peer reviewed literature any alterations to convention that we make. Until I can prove my theories correct - or otherwise, we will not be making changes to our range from a camber perspective. A 74% medal win rate at the 2008 BRITS proves our boards are not doing too badly for the time being
The opinions I have made here are my own based on my scientific and engineering knowledge - they are yet to be proven and subjected to peer review, but hopefully will allow more people to understand a bit about how camber works and what it was designed for as I see so many misinformed people passing on information to others. The sketches are for illustration purposes only and are not a true pressure distribution map - there are some really good ones in the Lind and Sanders book. Once I have any peer reviewed literature links to it will be published on this site















