SIA09: Paul Maravetz On Rome’s Hybrid Camber

We’ve been fans of Rome Snowboards‘ co-founder and snowboard engineering wizard Paul Maravetz for years, but when we saw the camber menu on the side of the Rome booth it was a little hard to process. Then Paul walked us through “hybrid camber” and discussed how it works on the Rome Anthem SS. Here’s what he said:

“As you know as someone who turns a snowboard. The camber gives you a nice crisp initiation it helps initiate the board and guide the board into where you want it to go. It also helps you exit with a really crisp, poppy, snappy feeling.

“Reverse camber has its benefits. You loose a little of that crisp initiation; you lose a little bit of that exit where you’re snapping out of your turns. What we do with our reverse camber is we’re adding stringer technology to help increase the pop and stiffness torsionally in very targeted regions in the board so you get some of that crispness and back.

Follow the jump for the rest of the story. . .

“But one of the reasons we came up with the hybrid camber is to try and find a nice balance between the two where we have a board that when you lay it down on the table or on a flat surface you have your widest point and you have your contact point just like a tradition board. But what you have from the center of the board up to about five and 10 centimeters beyond your last binding mounting point the camber line has an inflection point so it hits this point and it actually goes into a reverse camber at that point, but it’s still got a downward trajectory so what you’re getting is you’re getting some pressure up near the contact point still. You still have a little bit of that pressure to help initiate. But when you de-camber it the contact point will roll back to that inflection point and your get a little more of powder board feeling and the loosness and the buttery feeling that you do get from reverse camber.

“So we’ve been playing with that we started about a year and a half ago when we were working on different camber stories. And that was one of them. But we kind of put it aside because we didn’t have enough SKUs to really manage it. Then we got a chance to continue to evolve it a little bit. And we really found that there is a lot more possibility there. Where it is, how much it is, how aggressive it is and how it works even with sidecut which we haven’t explored as aggressively as I want. It’s going to change how the sidecut works.

“So it’s kind of the tip of the iceberg. We put it on the Anthem SS and feel that it’s a really nice balance of a crisp initiating board and completion, boyancy in powder, losemess and enough stiffness to really power through stuff.

“That’s where we’re coming from with the hybrid camber.