Carving Skis

General

Two forces came together in the mid 90s to revolutionise skiing - snowboarding and new technology.

In the early '90s many skiers started to take up the new, cool sport of boarding. Snowboards - due to their shape and dimensions - provided a carving sensation that was difficult to match on traditional skinny skis. Consequently the ski manufacturers started to run into difficulties and were forced to rethink ski design radically.

Ski manufacture is a never-ending search for the correct flexibility. In the beginning, all skis were made of wood. There was a limit to the shapes of skis you could make - too narrow and they snapped, too wide at tip and tail and they would twist and lose their grip on the snow. Manufacturers slowly became more adept with composites and complex internal structures.

By the mid '90s, with the help of these new materials and improved technology, a number of revolutionary skis emerged. These new 'shaped' skis combined the torsional stiffness necessary for precision and good edge grip, with the longitudinal flexibility that makes turning easier. And so 'carving skis' were born...

[Photo: Atomic]

[Photo: Christoffer Sjostrom, The Three Valleys]

Common carving terms

Shape and sidecut Carving skis are narrow at the waist and wide at the tip and tail, which is what gives them their shape. The sidecut is the difference between the tip, tail and waist.
The deeper the sidecut, the quicker and easier the ski will turn. The shallower the sidecut, the harder it is to initiate a turn and the ski will prefer longer turns. will also be more stable, especially at higher speeds.
All skis have sidecut so that they can turn - no sidecut and the ski, when put on its edge, will want to go in a perfectly straight line. On carving skis, the sidecut is more pronounced.

Sidecut Radius Imagine the hourglass shape of a ski. If you then extend that profile to form a circle, the sidecut radius would be the of this imaginary circle.

Turn Radius This is dependent on the effort that each skier makes. By using steering, pressure and edge control, the radius of each turn is determined.

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