Unless, you have been hiding out, or are new to snowboarding, you have undoubtedly seen, heard, or witnessed something about the rocker revolution.  Whether it’s Banana, C2, Rocker & Camber, Gull Wing, V Rocker, and more, rocker has been shouted from the heavens and it appears to be here to stay.   So, I wanted to write up a few posts, or a series of articles if you will, discussing rocker, and it’s variants.  Now, I don’t just want to describe the shape, and be done with it, but I really want to spend some time helping people understand why rocker technology by itself isn’t the answer, unless there is a complete alignment between the rocker technology and the sidecut used on a given board.

I think I’ll address a various company with each post, starting out first with Banana and Magna Traction from Lib Tech/Mervin Technologies.  Let’s take a look at Banana first and foremost.   In a design incorporating Banana Rocker, the board is rocker between the binding inserts, and is flat from the start of the binding inserts, out towards the tip and tail.   The tip and tail are firmer, allowing more float in pow, with the raised tip and tail.  This results in the board being forced flat, allowing full tip to tail edge contact during riding.

This design by itself, wouldn’t be too fun to ride, if the sidecut wasn’t adjusted to accomodate for the rocker. You’ve have edge contact issues, making for a washy, squirrelly, and horribly tracking ride (in my opinion) outside of the park.  Lib Tech uses their Magna Traction sidecut technology to compliment their banana rocker.  Magna Traction essentially looks like a squiggly line running down the side of the board, allowing seven contact points or bumps to give the rider more control.  The two bumps nearest the bindings, are larger than the other bumps, outside of the binding area, allowing for more control from the rider.   Does it work?  Sure it does.  It sometimes works too well, as far as grip is concerned.  I’ve found Magna Traction tends to slow the board down unless I’ve detuned it, during past testing. I’ve still found that with banana rocker, the effective edge under foot, is shortened, usually causing the washy feeling I’ve felt in the past.  In the park, this design works brilliantly, as the board is fun, buttery, and soft, but outside of the park, banana by itself just isn’t up to the challenge, at least not for me.

The answer to the above issues?

C2 is Lib Techs answer, when a rider wants to take a banana board up for some freeriding. Sure banana floats in pow, and it should, but it doesn’t hold a turn as well as it should when you’re up shredding the mountain. C2 essentially takes the design used by banana rocker, and adds in cambered points where the flat points would be on a standard banana rocker.  What does this do? This adds stability, and a bit more pop to the board, allowing the rider to really engage the edges in sharp carves without washing out the board as is common from my experiences with a simple banana rocker design.

If Lib Tech simply released banana/C2 without any kind of sidecut design to help compensate with issues that rocker introduces, they’d probably have quite a few riders who weren’t happy with them.  I’m not the biggest fan of the banana technology, but it does have it’s place.  I think the Magna Traction is a bit too grippy, unless I detune it a bit, but I’ve chatted with others who absolutely love it.  It’s all a preference on what you yourself may like.  When possible, get out and demo gear, to see what you like.   I’m going to cover Never Summers Rocker & Camber with Vario in the next article.