Snowboarding History Essays - Snowboarding, Individual Sports

Snowboarding History Snowboarding is the world's fastest growing winter sport and is set to become even more popular than skiing. It is still a young sport and there are many people eager to learn more about the enjoyment the sport has to offer. Without going to a mountain and taking a few lessons it is hard to fully appreciate what the sport really is, and the sensation that riding a snowboard gives. Hopefully, my report will tell everything a person would need to know about equipment, so that they can go try the sport out for themselves. The first snowboard ever marketed was produced by Shervin Popper, in 1964. It was a crude model put together in his garage, after he saw his daughter trying to go down a hill on a sled standing up. It consisted of two children's skis strapped together, with some doweling on the top for foot attraction. His daughter took it to the local sledding hill, and soon enough all the kids wanted one. Another pioneer was Dimitrije Milovich, a surfer from the east coast. He made his invention because of the lack of warm water in the winter. This board also had no bindings, but it included iron edges. In the early seventies Milovich began limited production of these custom boards. In 1977 the main snowboard company for today started production. Jake Burton made and sold his prototypes with handmade bindings. These included some elements similar to modern design. Tom Sims also started production of some boards. In 1979 Tom Sims and Chuck Barfoot created the first board made of fiberglass. At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, the snowboard began to appear in some sports magazines and on American and Canadian TV. A beer commercial showed Paul Graves riding a snowboard. This introduced the snowboard to the public, although it was still considered a strange sport. Now that snowboards were allowed on some mountains, the board needed to be redesigned so that it would work on packed snow. Shaped wood can slide along on a hill of deep powder, and it could turn pretty good, but it still was slow and hard to turn on packed snow. In 1980 and 1981 the three main snowboard companies, Burton, Sims, and John Winterstick began to produce fiberglass boards with polietilene (P-tex) bases, as well as metal edges. The same year the Struck Brothers produced a board with two small skis on the bottom. Called the Swingbo, it was easier to carve and turn on packed snow. When snowboard companies found out about the importance of flex, sidecut, and camber, nine basic materials began being used. They could be manipulated or have substitutions, depending on what the board was supposed to do. These parts were wood or foam, fiberglass, poly MDI, epoxy matrix, polietilene (a.k.a. P-tex or PE), flacee or ABS, Fenolo-reinforced poly MDI or P-tex, steel inserts, and steel with rubber dampening. Wood or foam makes up the core of the board. Usually the core is made of different types of wood, stiff and light to make the board flexible and durable. Wood needs to be laminated vertically so that the glue doesn't play too important a role in the board's performance, and so the board will keep it's characteristics over time. This process is more expensive than the process to make a board with a foam core. A foam core is cheaper than wood. It can also be produced an a larger scale easier. The only problem is that it isn't as durable as a wood core, and it often needs to be reinforced with materials such as Kevlar. There are many variations of the size, shape, and placement of the core within the board. For example, a board with most of the core in the center of the board would spin easier, because there would be no counterweight to slow the spin. Fiberglass is used in all boards over and under the core to increase stiffness and to keep the board from deforming. The process of putting all the layers together is called lamination. Fiberglass is a woven structure which is usually "Biaxle," meaning there are two directions in the weave, but even better is "Triaxle," which has three. Poly MDI is a polymeric matrix that gives the board good flexibility over time. The epoxy matrix is the glue used to stick parts of the board together in the laminating process. It has a good shock resistance, is lightweight, and has a long life of