What do the numbers mean?
Apparently Marilyn Monroe’s vital statistics were 38 – 24 – 36. In inches. That’s an easy way to envision an hourglass shape and ski statistics are given in the same way. For example the Atomic Crimson Ti is listed as 129 – 86 – 115. In millimeters, and always Tip – Waist – Tail. For easy comparison, a roll of toilet paper is 100mm wide, a coke can is 120mm tall.
How are the numbers useful to consumers?
Pay most attention to the middle number, the waist. Ski width tells a lot about what the ski is designed for. Generally, wider skis for softer snow. Narrow skis are easier and quicker to get up on edge. Slalom skis are narrow, heliskis are wide.
• Under 70mm – Most dedicated front-side carvers and skis for groomed conditions only.
• 70mm to 90mm – All-mountain skis are in this range. They combine floatation in soft snow with some performance potential on groomed snow.
• Over 90mm – Off-piste and powder skis range up to waterski territory. For example, the reverse sidecut Capital Custom G-Funkenstein is 162mm underfoot and they admit it isn’t the widest ski on the market. Most are specialized skis that don’t appreciate groomed snow.
What is sidecut?
Sidecut is a way to describe how shapely the ski is, or how much of a curve the ski edge makes from tip to tail. It’s usually given as a radius in meters. Imagine placing the ski on a flat surface, scribing along its edge and extending the line until a circle is completed. The radius of that circle is the skis’ sidecut. Only a few decades ago consumer skis had approximately 40-meter radii, now it’s closer to 15 meters. Skis with a lot of shape turn more easily but sidecut is designed to match what the ski is intended for. A slalom ski will have lots of sidecut for small turns, a downhill ski will have less for long turns and a backcountry powder ski will usually have not much sidecut either.
Just because a ski has 14-meter sidecut doesn’t mean it makes turns on the snow that are 14 meters in radius. Turn radius on the slope still depends on the skier but it’s a way of knowing how much shape the ski has compared to others.
In general terms sidecuts can be roughly grouped like this:
• less than 14 meters – carving skis and short-turn models.
• 14 – 18 meters – all-mountain boards and skis aimed at versatility.
• more than 18 meters – backcountry straight-liners, GS and downhill race skis.
What’s a Parabolic ski?
When Elan first introduced the short, radically shaped skis over 20 years ago, the sidecut was not an arc, it was a parabola. Parabolic was a catchy name that came to be applied to all shaped skis. A parabola is a particular shape that can be described by slicing off part of a cone. Engineers experiment with all kinds of curves now but only a few years ago Elan claimed it still used parabolas.
Why are dimensions sometimes given for a certain length?
For example: 14 meters in 165cm length. Because the ski gets wider going from the waist to either end, the longer it gets the wider it gets. There is a practical limit to how wide the tip and tail can be and still work well so as a result if the width measurements stay the same, as the ski gets longer the sidecut will also change as the ski effectively gets less and less shapely.
What else can the numbers tell me?
Most skis are wider at the tip than the tail and sometimes it’s worth looking at the relative widths. Some companies refer to the “taper” of the ski to describe how much the tip and tail differ. Skis for powder snow are often quite a bit wider in the tip than the tail to improve floatation of the forebody. Other skis such as the new Salomon Aero series have quite a bit of taper to help turn initiation on groomed conditions. Skis that are just as comfortable skiing backwards as forwards such as Nordica The Zero (130 – 104 – 130) or Atomic Urban Punx have no taper at all. They are called symmetrical sidecuts.
Any exceptions?
Of course...
- Multi-radius sidecut. Most skis still have sidecut shape that is an arc along the side of the ski, or part of a circle. Now there are an increasing number of multi-radius skis such as the Fischer Progressor models or K2 Progressive Sidecuts where there are more than one curve along the side of the ski. Varying the shape of the sidecut is one way to make the increasingly popular wide skis perform better.
- Reverse Sidecut. In these skis such as the K2 Pontoon and Armada ARG, the widest part of the ski is not at the ends, it is the middle. Imagine a high-tech barrel stave. Reverse sidecut skis are designed for backcountry powder and can be especially effective in gnarly snow conditions. For deep snow only, not very good on groomed.
- 5-dimensional skis with sidecut within a reverse sidecut. Check out the Armada JJ. It is listed as 126 – 136 – 115 – 133 – 121. That means it is a reverse sidecut ski with a short section of traditional sidecut under the foot. This may become more popular among the big mountain skis to make them more manageable on conditions other than deep powder.
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