Export Gold Extreme Day 2

Fatter skis and twin tips are now a widely accepted part of the landscape thanks in no small part to the snowboarding fraternity’s influence. This season will see the mainstreaming of a new technology for the ski industry, the Rockered Ski. Rockered skis poked their heads up over the wall as a pure powder ski a few years ago with the likes of Volant’s “Spatula” the brain child of Shane McConkey, and flirted briefly with the sunlight and snow before disappearing back into whatever design abyss they came from. Not so this year, rockered skis are here with a vengeance, with most brands producing at least one or two models in their line-up. As you’d expect with an emerging trend its being described a hundred different ways, rocker, negative camber , and reverse camber amongst them. So What’s it All About? – better performance in powder Conventional skis are cambered (bent) so that when they’re lying on a flat surface without any weight on them they only contact the ground at the ends and lift away from the ground at the middle, this combined with their side cut (wider at the ends and narrower in the middle) means that you get better edge contact with the snow when you apply weight and lean to an edge to turn. Rockered skis have reversed the camber so that the tips lift away from the surface of the snow earlier and may in some cases have smaller tips as they don’t need to be as tall as conventional skis with the extra lift being provided by the rocker. The goal of the rocker is to give greater lift to the tips of your skis in powder without having to lean back on your ski helping to avoid “submarining” or nose diving bringing your run to an untimely end. Like any species of ski there are as many different varieties of rocker as there are manufactures. Some have little or no side cut and are pure powder killers (shaped more like a water ski) and others have a more conventional side cut to allow for good edge contact when angled to the edge, allowing them to deliver better performance on firmer and groomed terrain. This gives the effect of a shorter ski when running flat but giving good edge contact and effectively a longer ski when angled to an edge to turn. The degree of rocker also varies some products are rockered at both ends and some are flat (neutral camber) at the rear and rockered only at the front, whilst others are flat (neutrally cambered) along their entire length.

Uploaded by Martynd, 3 years ago