Bad Ideas In Snowboard Design

Every once in a while great ideas grace my presence, like the Whip, then we have Ed Hardy, or that snowboard thing with the brake on it. Needless to say there’s more engineers out there making stupid ass products that should never see the light of day. Well here’s another one to add to the ever growing pile the SMARTBoard.

Here’s there little promotional video. I love how the shapes of the boards look like dildos.

Now unless by some chance we have suddenly developed technology similar to the Evil T1000 from Terminator this does not exist. More than anything it is still a conceptual theory and probably will remain there till we’re all dead. But lets say for the sake of humor that it does exist.

If you look at their video it looks like they’ve created a Triple Base Technology that now changes when you tweak your little watch. It’s probably the same watch that lets you call K.I.T.T to come pick you up after a rough apres party. I wonder if also tells time, what time dimension you are in, where Buckaroo Banzia is located, when John Conner will save humanity, and if Doc Brown’s flux capacitater is still fluxing.

Evidently for slow or deep snow you want “Wide Shape, Flat Profile, and Flexible Stiffness”. Interesting when I’m in slow snow I want a deep side cut and a stiffer flex pattern so I can use it to pump through it. Wide isn’t a bad thing in deep snow more surface area but I’d prefer it to be wide and reverse camber or rocker and I’d like the flex to be on the stiffer side so it’s not getting bounced around.

Now they say if you’re going down hill or hard charging you want,”Medium Width Shape, Slightly Curved Profile, and to be Semi-Flexible”. I think if I was hard charging a groomer I’d want it to be on a narrower board with a really aggressive sidecut, the slightly curved profile can help with edge to edge initiation. This is the one that most closely represents TBT and if you’ve ever ridden TBT you know how it initiates turns. So this theory could possibly work.

This is where I think they get the whole idea of what people need wrong. For freestyle riding they’re saying, ” Narrow Shape, Sharp Angular Profile ( WTF does that mean, deep sidecut?), and hard stiffness”. Anyone else think they missed the boat on this one? I’d love to see a jib kid try to press on this, it might be good if you’re hitting 100 foot super booters of doom. But you’d think that pop would be the preliminary thing they’d have gone for here.

This statement on their Youtube page made me laugh:

A new morphing technology which can change the shape of snowboard to adapt different snow conditions/usages

So you’re saying it can fully change for usage? Does that mean if you’re a chick who’s lonely in the backcountry it could turn into a sex toy and pleasure her? The picture seems to demonstrate that they’re already dildo shaped decks.  If that’s the case maybe we’ll see some real snow porn.

Why is it that people that don’t understand snowboarding always try to reinvent it?  I have yet to figure this out.  Are these the type of people that are like, “Gee I snowboarded once and I’m an engineer lets invent this horribly functionless board and then sell it for 2,000 dollars!” I want to meet these people so I can understand what drives them to believe they can create this crap.Anyone think this is a bogus idea that will never happen?

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