Taking it a step further, it all starts with the material. Both the core material, styrofoam that comes out of the mould and also the PVC sandwich sheets, which are not solid, have tolerances in thickness of +/- 0.5mm. Some cores are shaped by CNC, but the materials constantly deform and the final router traces always leave too much room for tolerance and imperfections. It’s also fairly normal that every step of vacuum bagging and/or mould pressing leaves further areas of imperfection with additional unwanted or missing materials. There is simply no other way around these small imperfections other than to rework the shape by hand after every step. In order to handcraft the soft materials to within 0.5mm requires highly skilled and experienced shapers.

If you study the actual shape a concave or any curve has, you’ll see infinite measurement points, which again make it difficult in production to follow a perfect set of measurements.

We know that some brands have the single concave concept in their range but as mentioned above it’s almost impossible to control the fine measurements to within 0.5mm in mass production and this results in dramatic performance variations. The sponsored riders from these brands will almost always have the opportunity to select 1-2 good boards out of 5 at the start of the racing season. However, for our customers we can’t accept to offer a shape with only 20-30% of performance quality and therefore Patrik never finalized this concept for production.

Patrik: “It is simply not fair for our customers who cannot test several boards at once and choose the best one. After years of testing, even I struggle to find the best balance between the fine line of just 0.5 mm tail and side kick in just one session.”

Over the years Patrik has continued to search for a solution in order to obtain the same performance effect of the single concave in the tail, but with a simple concept that can be put into production. Throughout the past 3 years Patrik has worked on an Invert-V concept – a V-Shape which goes inside the board. Similar to the normal V-Shape, the Invert-V concept can vary between constant-V, closing-V or increasing-V. It is important to find the correct V-Concept to ensure the perfect board trim. If the V is closing instead of opening the board will be sticky, if it is opening instead of closing the board will lift too much. In comparison to concave, with infinite measurement points, the Invert-V has flat sections across, along and/or diagonal to the board and can be easily measured with a straight edge.

Patrik: “This concept sounds simple, but it took years of brainstorming, shaping and testing until I could finally find a way to introduce this concept in to mass production. The first board with this concept was the Slalom 128. I was a bit unsure if it would work out, but following many meetings and detailed instruction, I proved that this concept could be put in to production so that we can offer 90-95% accuracy in shapes.”