A ski bends only until its sidecut contacts the snow, and you can't bend it further without skidding on hard surfaces. The presenter demonstrates this limit on a 184 cm ski with an 18 m radius, showing that edge angle and sidecut geometry determine how tight a turn you can carve.
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Let's clarify bending a ski and the physical limitations of bending a ski, whether you can bend like a ski more or not, or what are the limiting factors. Okay, so this ski at a 184cm has a radius of, they're saying, 18 meters in the center of the sidecut. So, this side cut on each side of the ski is what is going to limit how much I can bend the ski. So, I'm going to show you. So, wooden floor, you could perhaps equate this to skiing on the surface that the World Cup people ski on, very firm surface. Okay, so I'm going out there on my ski, on these set of skis. And I tip the ski over and I just stand on it. Hopefully you can see this bit of light under here. Without any load from my body, there's light, so the sidecut is not pressed into the snow. I press down with not too much. I don't even have to put my whole entire body weight. I just lean a bit on here. The sidecut is pressed into the snow and the ski bends. Now for this ski, can you see there's not a lot of bending? So on a very hard surface, this ski is not going to bend very much, okay? It's going to bend that much at this particular, particular angle. The only way I can bend it more, okay, because I cannot bend through— I can't push through the wood— the only way I can bend the ski more is by tipping it over further. So if I tip it over, this would be a very high edge angle, like hip on the snow edge angle. Now to fit the sidecut on the snow, the ski bends further. Okay, so another angle, a lot of edge angle. There's the bend. And again, it's surprising how very little the ski is bending to go into a tighter arc. Here is this much edge angle. Bend, bend, bend, bend. Greater edge angle. There's the point it can bend to. Because it just stops whenever the sidecut fits the surface of the snow. And once it does that, unless you've got softer snow like deep, deep powder, it's not going to bend further. So people that say tip it over and bend it more, physically impossible unless you have the ski tipped over more and more and more. So I get right over this edge angle, this is probably about as much before the ski is going to skid away, that I can bend it. And it stops as soon as the sidecut hits the snow. So stating that, the only way I can tighten the radius of this ski more with it like make a shorter turn is by adding steering or allowing the tail to displace to turn. So I hope that clarifies, uh, bending a ski. So again, the less edge angle, especially with a longer radius ski, like there's stuff or bend in the ski here. If I want to bend it more, I must have it tipped on a greater edge angle, or I must buy a ski with a bigger sidecut, like a shorter radius, because then it's going to take a longer time. I'm going to have to bend it more in order for it to fit the snow surface. I hope this topic helps some people bust the myth. Thanks to Yuri Franco, the developer of the First, Alain Shapescu, he helped me kind of understand this better, but hopefully it busts the myth of like bending skis more than the actual physical capabilities of that ski and snow surface.
