Snowboarding Gimmicks: Slimewalls

Tech: Slimewalls

Company: Ride

What the company says it does:

Slimewalls Technology from Ride Snowboards on Vimeo.

Ride’s exclusive Slimewalls® are forgiving and ductile, absorbing impacts rather than defending against them. Just like your skate wheels, the urethane in Slimewalls® smoothes the interaction with the snow, wood or metal surfaces you may Ride on. On top of all that, these babies are virtually indestructible, the most durable sidewalls in snowboarding.

What it actually does: It absorbs chatter. All boards come with a dampening system, (explained in my snowboard construction article) but Ride uses a sidewall that can assist with the dampening. The sidewalls are not indestructible and tying them in a knot doesn’t prove that they are. Even if they were it wouldn’t matter because the durability of the edge is the important thing not the sidewall (and dropping a ping pong ball on tempurpedic mattress doesn't mean it functions better as a sidewall).

With softer sidewalls you also get less control and stability in your carves. The high-tech core in your board isn’t going to matter much if you cannot transfer any of its energy to the edges. Unless, of course, you hate the idea of using your edge and just want to pre-spin every jump. In that case make sure you check out bataleon’s triple base.

Softer sidewalls are much more obvious when using stiff boards rather than soft boards and that is why Ride uses stiffer sidewalls for its ATV style boards. So when you put this all together, it would make sense that slimewalls are great for rail boards, right?

Wrong. Much like the short lived popularity of copper edges instead of steal, both copper and slime walls are incredibly difficult to repair. Usually if you crack or compress an edge, (often the case on a rail board) a repair guru needs to go in and use screws to put the edge back in place. Unfortunately screws don’t hold in urethane. Making them virtually unrepairable. 


I'm not saying slimewalls are bad and you should avoid them (like I do) but they aren't some secret ingredient that is changing the industry. As with most gimmicks, if this really worked why isn’t every company doing it?

Sintered vs Extruded

Snowboard Bases

Bases are made of plastic known as p-tex. This is what helps your board to go down hill and keeps snow sliding off rather than sticking on. There are two types of bases, Extruded (cheaper) and Sintered (more expensive). Beyond this companies have been known to add other things to the p-tex in order to increase speed.

P-tex itself is made of ultra high molecular weight polyetheline often referred to as UHMW. This has the highest impact strength of any thermoplastic currently made. It has extremely low moisture absorption and low coefficient of friction. In other words it is perfectly suited for sliding on snow.

Extruded Bases

Extruded bases are popular because they are so much cheaper to make. They do not absorb a lot of wax and are more difficult to repair. This is because they are created by an ‘extrusion’ process much like pushing a chunk of play-doh through a square hole. The result is a block of p-tex that can then be cut to the necessary width of a board.

Sintered Bases

Sintered bases are made up of tiny ground up pellets of p-tex and then crushing them back together under high temperatures. This process creates a much stronger molecular mass and will absorb wax and bond better to new p-tex for repairs. The p-tex in both extruded and sintered forms can be combined with fluorocarbons (a speed additive usually found in ski racing wax) or graphite. With graphite bases the mineral is mixed with the pellets of p-tex before the crushing process. Graphite will increase the overall strength of the base and decreases the friction. Graphite Bases are not often found in snowboards both because of their high price and they only come in black, which limits the base graphic branding potential.

Base Graphics

The art that goes onto a base can come from three different methods (bad snowboard joke). Either you use a clear base and put a graphic underneath, you use a sublimation process where using heat, you transfer a picture from paper to the base (only with sintered) or using a die cutting process you take different colored pieces out and then reassemble them to form a graphic. This third process can have serious consequences when water gets into the cracks and a piece of your base peels away. The reason companies still use the die cutting method is because the colors come out much deeper and you can get a true black. (fashion over function)

Burton uses a base material made of Teflon (PTFE, Polytetrafluroethylene) for their highest end boards but this is probably just a marketing gimmick. This material is considered comparable to p-tex though p-tex has a higher resistance to wear than Teflon. Oddly enough Teflon is the only surface geckos cannot stick to (If only we had ski slopes made of geckos). To me that would make p-tex a better choice over Teflon, but who knows, with the right marketing strategy anything is possible.

Snowboard Construction

Inside a Snowboard

I would like to present the inner workings of what makes a snowboard a snowboard. In this way I hope to give regular customers an understanding of what features are most important when trying to compare boards.

There are plenty of companies that would like to make you believe they have some secret ingredient that makes their board better than all other boards. This is most likely not true. If the patterns of snowboarding history teaches us anything, any secret ingredient that actually works is instantly copied and replicated by other snowboard companies without any regard to patents or licensing. Most recently we have the ‘over the toe cap’ that was first started by Technine and Burton and is now on nearly every snowboarding binding company. After a legal battle between Technine and Burton it was discovered that flux had the original patent and didn’t care who used it. Similarly wavy edge techonology popularized by Lib Tech’s magnetraction can now be found on a majority of snowboard brands including Rome and Arbor (griptech) and burton (frostbite edges). Also lets not forget the popularization of rocker and eventually some sort of hybrid rocker (originally patented by Never Summer and fought against by Lib Tech) that is now in every snowboarding company.

Building a Snowboard

There is no secret formula to snowboard design, just three basic parts, base, core and glue. Pretty much everything else is extra. Every company has some unique combination of materials that they would argue makes their product the absolute best but in reality they all have their advantages and disadvantages. My goal with this blog is to let people understand these advantages without the help of companies’ marketing lingo. Instead of reading about all the different types of sidewalls (10:45, ptex, eurothane, ABS, Sandwich vs Cap) you will be able to understand they all do enough of the same thing that this shouldn’t be a priority when choosing a board.

Understanding company catalogs can be a nightmare, as none seem to do a very good job of breaking down the tech. Check the snowboard gimmick section to find out if the Tech your company is bragging about is actual tech or simply some marketing guru’s interpretation.

Snow Flex Melbourne

Moving to Australia, nothing has been more difficult than suffering through back to back summers and skipping winter. My cravings for snow have been on the scale of a heroin detox and I spend almost every day scouring the Internet for snowboarding videos and cheap flights to the nearest ski resort. In this pursuit I stumbled on to a glimmer of hope, All Seasons Skiing and Snowboarding. Melbourne has recently approved a new artificial ski and snowboard resort in Keilor, Victoria.

All Seasons Skiing and Snowboarding Keilor

This artificial resort will be using a material called snowflex which is supposed to come as close as possible to the sensation of snow. I for one could not be more excited especially after the City Snow Park closed days before I arrived in Melbourne. According to All Seasons we should expect to see a halfpipe, 4 different jumps and a few other surprises! 

Artificial Snow Resort

On the All Seasons Skiing and Snowboarding website they claim that they have broken ground and hope to have the resort up and running by April to May. Unfortunately the website has not been updated since June 2011 and makes me wonder what is really going on here. On closer inspection of their facebook page more updates have been made but they also have nothing posted after Oct 27^th 2011. Looking through the comments on Sep 8^th All Seasons posted:

There is NO landfill problems as we have the planning permits already, what we are waiting for is the building permits and this has nothing to do with forming the hill. We are in the process of getting the BUILDING PERMITS.

A month later on Oct 27th (the last update as far as I can tell) CEO Ian Hutchison posts in response to a comment about building inspectors:

Do you have any contacts that can help
With Brimbank council
Regards
Ian Hutchison
CEO
ASS&S

Since then we have had radio silence and I pray everything is still on schedule. 

I have posted some pictures of the landscape architecture that are currently only on facebook. 

What Happened to Sierra Snowboards

How Sierra Snowboards Changed the Industry

Over the past two years, there has been a huge change in the way the snowboard industry works. This is largely in part due to the closing of Sierra Snowboards and limiting the amount of snowboard product that is available. For those of you who don’t know, Sierra Snowboards (now sold and renamed trusnow.com) was a massive online snowboard shop that was able to discount product way earlier and cheaper than any other local retail shop or website.

Sierra, Dogfunk, The House, Eternal and all major online retail snowboard shops have all become successful because of one reason. There was a huge overproduction in products by most of the major snowboard companies. To understand this you need to understand how the snowboard industry works.

Shops order product from a company about 8 months in advance. Burton for example takes these orders and calculates how much product they need to make for the upcoming season. They calculate this by the number of actual orders placed by shops + rider requirements + extras in case there is a good economic season and they need to sell more to the shops. Usually this excess product is discounted 20% to 40% below cost (which is already 40%-60% below MSRP) so they will not be left with excess product at the end of the season. Having spoken to employees at sierra after they closed I was told that Sierra’s business plan was to buy limited amount of full priced product at the beginning of the season just to have the basic requirements of Burton Customs, and Lib Skate Bananas and then right before Christmas they buy huge amounts of close-out product on discount. As soon as they get this product they put it on sale for 30% off MSRP. Sierra will still be making full margin on this product while brick and mortar shops would be breaking even at the price. Because Sierra was putting things on sale so early everyone started buying from them based purely on price not on experience or any other value. All the major manufacturing companies have put deadlines on when product was allowed to go on sale so there was more of an even playing field from local shops to websites. Because the local brick and mortar shops followed the rules and Sierra took advantage of the system these shops ended up being stuck with the majority of their product at the end of the season and having to sell it below cost just to get rid of it. These core shops started closing and the manufactures repossessed the product and then sold it back to companies like Sierra at a discounted rate once again fuelling the cycle.

In 2009 the industry had gotten so bad that consumers honestly believed that companies were ripping them off by charging anything more than 30% off. No industry can survive like that.

I remember reading in forums after Burton stopped selling to Sierra how pissed customers were that Burton was ‘price gauging’ when in fact they were finally correcting their mistakes.

I don’t want to make this article sound like burton is the hero because in all honesty they were the worst of the companies when it came to over producing.

Companies were encouraging websites to buy huge amounts of product with rules that said if you wanted to sell Burton online you had to buy at least 1-2 million dollars in product. Then as local shop sales of Burton gear declined the shops were harassed and not given any discounts. Most of this Burton problem happened during the years Laurent Potdevin (originally made his money with Luis Vuitton not snowboarding) was CEO. After he was let go and Jake came back on, Burton turned things around, but it would be stupid to believe Jake and the rest of the Burton organization didn’t approve of this system.

On March 10^th 2010, Burton told Sierra that it would no longer be selling to them. Without Burton, (making up around 50% of their inventory) Sierra was forced to file for bankruptcy and later sell the company. This was one of the best things that could have happened to the industry. As soon as Burton pulled out many other companies followed (including K2, Ride, 32). On top of pulling out of sierra, Burton along with a majority of other companies cut their supply way down for the next year eliminating the problem of excess supply that had started this mess. The following year small shops once again had successful years and customers found that if they waited for high demand product to go on sale the product disappeared. This enthusiasm pushed into the next season where customers who had missed the opportunity to buy Travis Rice’s and Sherlock’s were coming into shops and buying them full price to make sure they didn’t miss out a second year.

Now that sierra is consumers are no longer able to find such good deals but on the bright side your local snowboard shops can finally survive.

This experience has been well documented by Angry Snowboarder and I invite you to check out his blog’s for further reading.