Ski Builders Forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keo3uLMP ... r_embedded

have a look at sentury snowboards' core construction. what do you think they're using as the centre material?

It could be.. or a laminated balsa wood....?? IDK, looks kind of flexible/rubbery when he's laying epoxy on it.

they say its and engineered wood product so could be a balsa or cork composite. Looks real floppy and light weight.
I would think that could really soak up the epoxy and make a heavy board. Guess not.

neat application of a concept that I have been tossing around in my head for a while.

I met these guys at ISPO 2009 last February, got to check that board out, it does definitely feel nearly as light as a burton vapor, what are they using? its almost rubbery like memory foam? hhaaha, maybe it's some kind of blow molded foam/woody like thing, its definitely way more bendy than i'd want. Neat idea though, a whole pound shaved off from just that? Nah, its gotta be taken from the core, the inserts, the thicknesses of other materials, and the glue.

Hi. I reckon it's endgrain balsa. It's available as a sheet but the $$$ are deadly. Some guys on the grafsnowboards forum were into it at one stage. Chris.

this looks very very interesting. as far as i can see this...thing has something like veneer on top and on the bottom. this could prevent it from getting soaked with too much epoxy.

i built skateboards using balsa once and used this very same technique to stop the balsa from soaking up all the epoxy that gets presse out of the fiberglas.

you also need to have a "filler" to take up the gaps of any material you remove, if you're doing top/bottom clamp style compression molding like we do, unless you have a 3D top mold/cassette. But if you dont, you'll get wrinkles/bubbles and lumpy bases, that might be part of what their theory is too.

maybe eps foam or some other type of foam/rubberish stuff with what looks like scraps of some veneer'ish stuff laminated to top/bottom?
I'm not trying to cheapen it, its amazing if its working!!

I'd guess at a plastic foam reinforced with a natural fibre (wood, jute, hemp etc...). The foams would probably be some sort of polyurethane system as that is the most well researched matrix for short fibre reinforced foams.

Corks was one of my first thoughts but it looks too floppy. Also, I noticed that it wasn't too easy to force the material into the cutout area. If it was cork this should be pretty easy to do as natural cork has a poisson's ratio of about zero (i.e if you squash it in one direction it doesn't expand in the other, thats why you can fit them back into wine bottles!) which should make this easy to do.