Product news, Snowboards, Splitboarding
Get the lowdown on the new Shorty!
Sep
We’ve made a huge leap in snowboard technology with the 2022 Shorty, setting new standards for performance. It’s truly a game changer for this category of boards.
Developing a new shape is always a balance between performance in different kinds of snow conditions. The brief for the Shorty, when I designed it 5 years ago, was ease of handling in variable backcountry conditions while retaining the capability to carve the board on groomers. The first generation of the Shorty nailed it all, but after 4 seasons in production we came up with some fresh tech. It’s long rockered nose is your best friend as soon as you’re leaving the groomed runs and when prototyping we did many test runs straightlining, reaching around 100 km/h (aprox 60 miles per hour), to see that the big rocker nose was safe at maxed out speeds. But but now I found a way to improve the board…
“The effect was beyond belief, nose still bends as expected but the ride on icy man made snow is rock solid at any speed.”
But first some background: The easiest way to construct a powder board is just stiffening up the whole rockered part, but that would seriously hurt on piste performance as the board won’t track when put on edge. You’ll get a one trick pony, especially when you encounter chunder, crust and wet snow during a day of riding. So how did we go about, keeping flex the same but improving the ride?
“Reducing nose weight and adding two materials with different dencities cancelled the vibrations.”
The solution was reducing nose weight and adding two materials with different dencities, which translates in to cancelling out each other. We shifted to PU-sidewalls which has great dampening characteristics and cut out parts of the hardwood ash core in the nose and substituted it with feather weight paulownia. We combined this with 2 stringers of thin aluminum, running from front inserts to the end of the nose. Aluminum has a totally different behaviour and it’s mixed with ash/poplar/paulownia in the rocker part of the Shorty. The effect was beyond belief. Nose still bends as expected but the ride on icy man made snow is rock solid at any speed. Any smaller vibrations are cancelled out and the edge hold is like on a race board. Bingo! For the splitboard we kept it as is with just a minor tweaking of the core and a reposition of the touring inserts for better balance.
