Snowboard Review Features

The 2010/11 winter season was a big year for innovation, we’ve seen all sorts of camber profiles, from banana to Flying V. Nearly every brand has dabbled with sidecut geometry to put more grip at the feet of the rider and we even saw Forum lift the profile of their Honeypot and Holy Moly boards at the feet.  In comparison next year’s boards look a little bland or familiar to be more precise. A lot of brands plan to rest on their laurels for the 2011/12 season, and who can blame them; it feels like the last 3 years has seen a constant flow of innovation, and innovation costs money.  Fear not, there is one brand that comes to the market next season with one of the most exciting snowboard design innovations since Mervin decided that snowboard sidecuts would benefit from a bump or seven and Bataleon announced that building boards with a flat base was for luddites. I introduce to you Silbaerg Snowboards and their ALD technology.

Continue reading Silbaerg Snowboards - The Next Evolution of Snowboard Design?

It’s been a busy weekend of board testing at Snowboard-Review.com, but the first board of the weekend was certainly the most unique. Being an all-mountain snowboarder the range of board lengths I’ve ridden varies quite considerably. I’ve ridden boards as small as the 148 Stepchild Jib Stick and as long as the 165 Palmer Crown LE. The first board I picked up from the Good Boards Test stand towered over the Crown by a mighty 20cm. At 185cm the Good Boards Flash is without a doubt the longest board I have ever ridden, by a considerable margin.  There are very few brands producing boards of this magnitude, Rad-Air build the mighty Tanker which has a very loyal following and reaches a mighty 2m and other brands like Prior and Rossignol have reached the mid 180cms in the past with their pow specific swallow tails. The difference with all of these boards to the Flash is that their sidecuts are absolutely enormous with radii of 11m-12m meaning that you are restricted to turning like an oil tanker, at 9m the sidecut on the Flash is relatively normal.

Continue reading Tested - 2011 Good Boards Flash 185

All-mountain snowboards are dying a bit of a death of recent. If you ride mostly in the park it’s now standard procedure to own a super short, blunted tipped, rocker profiled jib noodle. If you get your kicks from laying down epic rooster tails in chest deep powder and carving trenches in pristine corduroy then it’s a stiff tapered powder gun or an uber rockered floating banana that sits in your garage until the good stuff falls from the heavens. If you enjoy both, the likelihood is you have quiver of boards to fulfil your snowboarding needs.  What has happened to riding everything on one snowboard? Tobi and I spent a day at ISPO in Munich hunting down the best All-Mountain boards of the upcoming 2011/2012 winter season.

Continue reading 2012 All-Mountain Snowboard Preview

Before I knew it a year had passed and I was back at ISPO eyeing up 2012’s snowboard releases. I’m not going to lie to you guys, Snowboard Trade Fairs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sure there’s lots of opportunities to drink Grenade’s free stash of lager or perch yourself in the Ride complex and ogle at the slightly ropey looking pole dancers, but unfortunately when I go to ISPO I have a job to do and that’s going around gathering as much info on next year’s gear as possible. The fact that yearly I insist on visiting Munich’s legendary Hofbrauhaus the night before the show starts and drinking my bodyweight in Bavaria’s finest ale really doesn’t help with the enjoyment factor. However this year was slightly different, I’d managed to rope in our German forum guru Tobi (aka Zoryfl) to give me hand for the two days I would be visiting.

Continue reading 2012 Freeride Snowboard Preview

Snowboard Trick Tip Movies on the whole are the most frustratingly rubbish instructional videos on the planet. Browse Youtube or Vimeo and you’ll find hundreds of them, it seems every man and his dog has given them a go. Until recently I’d been blown away by the complete lack of anything resembling instruction in such videos, sorry but “pop hard, throw your shoulders, spot your landing and then ride away stocked” isn’t going to cut it when I want to work out the mechanics of a backside rodeo.

Then about a year ago stuck at my desk in the centre of London dreaming of fresh lines and going through a number of tricks in my head, I got a Facebook message from my brother Tom who at the time was spending the winter in Verbier. The posted link was about a new instructional video he’d found on Youtube that had helped him stick his BS 540s and move onto 720s. The video was the ‘Advanced Spinning Lesson’ by Snowboard Addiction. Nev and the team went through each aspect of spinning from run-up to spin initiation in such detail that it instantly blew every other instructional video I’d ever laid my eyes on out of the water. I emailed the guys at Snowboard Addiction to find out a bit more about their plans for the future and their other video tutorials.

Continue reading Snowboard Addiction - Probably the best trick tutorials in the world

The Burton Sherlock is a very different snowboard; that much is certain as soon as you lay your eyes on it. That’s what is so good about the big powerhouse in our industry, Burton want to keep snowboard technology progressing. Who bought us extended binding highbacks? Which company was instrumental in the development and boom in popularity of tapered powder boards like the famous Fish? Yep that’ll be Burton. So what’s so exciting about the Sherlock and its new shape? Well to start with it’s pretty much a true twin and you don’t often call a twin a powder board. Then there’s the Flying V profile, again not particularly revolutionary; Burton, Nitro, Rome, Never Summer and Mervin have been combining a rockered profile with cambered tips for the last couple of seasons. Where the Sherlock differs from all of these boards is that it uses a really deep sidecut with a standard waist width, on the 157 I was riding the sidecut radius was around 6m. So that the tips don’t get super wide at the start of the effective edge Burton have cut the sidecut short meaning that the sidecut blends into a flat section before it blends into the nose and tail radius, Burton call these flat sections “Side Effects”.  This little design tweak gives the Sherlock three unique properties. For a twin shape the nose and tail have a relatively large volume under at the nose and tail providing a bit of extra float for riding deep days. Secondly, these flat sections reduce the boards drag in deep powder making switching edges much less catchy and less effort too, at least that’s the theory. Thirdly the super tight sidecut and relatively soft flex mean that in softer snow the Sherlock can turn on a dime, the Sherlock will switch direction faster than a London Cab. So what does it ride like?

Continue reading Tested - 2011 Burton Sherlock 157

Two weeks ago conditions in my local resorts were incredible. We had two foot of fresh snow and enough of a base to make pretty much all of the lift accessible freeriding lines rideable, and best of all it was just myself and a lucky few free to enjoy it. In the last couple of weeks the conditions have changed dramatically. The weather went through a very warm period of around 6 degrees and then refroze to form a base of sheet ice. To add to this the groomers and park are now experiencing the busiest week of the year the lift queues make London Undergrounds Holborn Station at Rush hour feel like a walk through a country park. For the first time in a very long while I have been wearing a lid. If I’m going to get injured this season it’s not going to be because I was stupid enough to leave my Helmet at home. It would only take a small fall or some out of control lunatic to run into me to knock my brains out.

The only problem is, I’m pretty vain and when I’m snowboarding I like my gear to look sharp and if that means wearing my beanie under my helmet then that’s how I’m going to wear it. The problem is I’ve been blessed with a fairly strange shaped cranium and finding a helmet that fits comfortably and that doesn’t wobble about like a jelly on a plate is almost impossible. With this in mind I’ve conducted a little bit of research into helmets on the market where the fit is adjustable, more accurately customizable. It appears that helmet technology has moved-on leaps and bounds over the last couple of years.

Continue reading Buyers Guide - Custom Fit Helmets

I can’t believe it’s the end of 2010, I’ve been riding since 1997 and on Tuesday I had my first experience of riding a Burton Custom X. With so much history and nostalgia behind the Custom X it was inevitable that I was going to ride one at some point, and the fact that it has consistently appeared in the top 10 most popular board on our site out of the 500+ listed is testament to its universal appeal. When I got a list from Philipp at Blue Tomato detailing that they had a 156 Custom X test board in the Schladming shop I was there in an instant.  Hey and what do you know, the only bindings they had in stock that would fit my boots were a pair of Carbon Fibre C60s, my luck was definitely in. However, there was something slightly un-nerving about carrying around a setup worth 1100 Euros the equivalent of two month’s rent and bills.

Continue reading Tested - 2011 Burton Custom X 156

Firstly, I must apologise for the delayed posting of this review. Since finishing the video for the Supermodel review Austria has had one of the best early season dumps for some time so I’ve been away from my computer making the most of the epic conditions. Four thigh deep powder days before Christmas isn’t bad going! If I sound smug, it’s completely intentional.

Continue reading Tested - 2011 Burton Supermodel 164

Back in 2005, a couple of months before my first snowboard season in the French Alps, I was bought a Rossignol Todd Richards 157 as an early Birthday present. The graphics were ok and the spec was pretty comprehensive but it was a Rossignol so I had reservations. Within a couple of weeks of riding my Burton Dominant had taken a back seat and I was riding my new Rossi day-in day-out for absolutely everything on the hill. Two whole 100+ day seasons later I had to retire the TR because I’d decided to jib some rock faces with it. Since then the brand I’ve returned to is Rossignol. I’ve since owned a JDub 158, Twilight 164 and an Angus 157. With every board I’ve owned I’ve been impressed with the durability of the boards, the quality of the materials going into the boards, the build quality and most of all the way the boards deliver great performance. Sorry this is beginning to sound like a sales pitch, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that Rossignol is a brand that has always been a little bit of an outsider in the snowboard game, those that have tried the boards on the most part have only good things to say about them, and there are those that despise the fact that Rossignol has been producing skis for decades, they feel that Rossignol has no part to play in the industry. Isn’t the saying ‘It’s where you are going, not where you have come from”?

I met Arno one of the big men behind Rossignol Snowboards at ISPO in February, he took tons of time to show me through the boards, chat about the brand and the company he works for, definitely one of the nicest people I’ve met in the industry to date. It occurred to me that it would be nice to humanise Rossi and let people decide for themselves whether Rossi is a brand they want to buy from or not, so I put together an interview for Arno.

Perhaps after reading the interview you’ll have a better or just a different opinion of Rossi, perhaps you won’t, but at least you’ll know a little bit more about Rossignol Snowboards and you can make your own mind up. At the very least you’ll get a little exclusive on two boards being put together for the coming seasons!

Continue reading Brand Focus - Rossignol Snowboards