CONSTRUCTION

Preverb:

WHY POGO PRICES ARE SO REASONABLE:

There many ways to build perfect boards, the only barriers are due to material prices and fabrication efforts. We are not conceited to have found the egg of Columbus, but we are sure to have some of the most experienced structures and advanced know-how in snowboard fabrication. Raw material prices and production costs don't play the first fiddle in our plans. To us, the most important factors are quality and durability of our boards as well as the smile on our customers faces.

SO MUCH FOR THE PRICE REASON
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About "molecular cohesion":

Building boards as a technician, your goal is to bring certain molecules in a specific cohesion to optimize them for the later use of that product. Being conscious that nothing in this word is built for eternity, idealistic mechanical engineers try to build this cohesion in a way to delay disintegration as long as possible by unrestricted material and production expenses. Unfortunately, the engineers are not authority in the factories. It is the industrial economists and managers who decide which material and which productional efforts will be used for the construction. The cheapest is the best whether material or manpower. Many manufacturers have compromised production lines to Third World countries like China or North Africa. Profit is first priority. After all, the product has to fall apart shortly after the guarantee, otherwise they won't be able to sell their new products.

At POGO there ain't no economics in the management. Our staff consists solely of production-diploma engineers and technicians. We are opposed to the omnipresent trend to make as much profit as possible with the cheapest means possible. We are opposed to that Darwinist Marketing Doctrine that only fast growing and expanding brands can survive, or that small brands can only keep up being swallowed by large brands. Our production quantities and sales figures are about consistency. Most importantly, even after having sacrificed twenty years of our life to riding and producing boards, we still go to work every day with the certainty of simply trying to build the best boards on earth.

The easy-chair farting, pea-counting marketing strategists in the head offices of the big factories apparently cannot sell the same board construction two years in a row (especially if last seasons product is about to fall apart). So some kind of marketing cosmetic is needed. Trigonometric aerospacially-woven multiaxial cores with the latest space technology-pathfinder-just-beamed-from-Mars-to-Earth. Even the most hair raising bullshit is allowed as long as it also raises the sales figures.

POGO-Boards are built with nearly the same structure for almost twenty years:Classic laminated woodcore sandwich construction. The segments are glued watertight vertically and made from european woods. We never use foam, RIM or tropical woods. The sidewall material is ABS, which is less resistant to cold than the frequently used cheaper Phenol sidewalls. The sandwich construction is way more expensive, but so much better than any monocoque /cap-construction (where the top layer goes down along the side onto the steel edge).
Some brands sell their caps with the argument that they are harder in torsion, and the laminated side is stiffer than ABS sidewalls. They should better stand shocks, but the truth is the contrary. An elastic sidewall absorbs shock much better than a stiff laminate which splinters or at least delaminates.

Here's an old saying from technicians: "If it breaks, make it softer!"

Now, the argument of stronger torsional stiffness: To increase torsional stiffness, it makes more sense to choose another fabric, such as triaxial textures, than to wrap the core since the thickness stands in a neglective ratio to the width of a board; so the laminated sides have almost no influence on the torsion.
But the real question is: How much torsion/stiffness do we want? If you go to the extremes (45°layers or isotropic aluminum sheets), the board will be a hell of a carver, hard to cant up and impossible to drift. You will not be able to correct your line and the board will want to go all the way through the turn and back up the hill before you will be able to switch edge.

In our construction we use high-quality 7/1 tissues (warp/weft), which means 7 parts of it's weight go the long way, to one part transversal. This fiber combination joins a reasonable torsion-flex with a perfect bending-flex. To keep the tail more flexible in torsion, we cut slots into the stiff aluminum tailprotector, and cut out parts of the tail. Thus torsion and bending are a lot more harmonic. The pieces we cut out of the alpineboard tails come along with the board as a keyring with the serial number.

Since the use of In-Tech/Step-in bindings, boards get stressed far more in areas other than the bindings. To spread the stress over a wider area, we put titan-aluminum pads into the woodcore, which also takes the kink under the bindings out of the bending-line and improves flex and riding harmony.

The POGO twin-insert system is unique in the market. Two inserts are welded onto a stainless steel plate. This makes certain the inserts cannot pull through, even if they are completely delaminated. There is no drill-tip hole in the bottom, so there are 2-3 turns more thread. The surface of the plate keeps the base from "swamping in" as it always does with single inserts (they get pulled into the core). The insert walls are so thick, you can even cut an M8 thread into them in case you ripped out the M6 one day.

The response of snowboards to vibration is in some ways similar to the traits of a motorcycle suspension. The main intent is the same: Grip! The board/wheel only has grip as long as it is in pressure contact to the slope/road. If the suspension is worn out, the wheel will not be brought back on the road immediately. During it's "airtime" the motorcycle will drift out of the curve, just like the snowboard would on snow if it's rebound was too slow (that's why cheap or older boards often have no icegrip). The problem gets worse if the board/wheel gets in resonance and starts bouncing. So the goal is to construct a snowboard that "kills" vibration immediately without swinging at all.
This is out of reach, just like a perpetual mobile: the winner is who gets as close as possible.
POGO "motorcycles" have a very hard suspension with strong dampening.
This performance can only be achieved by using expensive materials like Kevlar for the hard suspension (and long-living flex), and viscoelastic layers (thin rubber sheets). Due to the exorbitant prices of these materials, there are only "alibi-Kevlar-textures" with one or two threads of Kevlar in a 98% glass tissue on the market for ski and snowboard industry. Therefore, we have tissues made especially for us. These layers are 100% Kevlar. They go from tip to tail over the whole width of the board. Our boards have not only one rubber layer on the steel edge, but in every joint of lamination. This lends another advantage. The joints are elastic and cannot be delaminated by shock. The nose and tail-lifts of our boards are 100% rubber to dampen down vibration as much as possible. Alpine Noses are equipped with an integrated PU-protector for gate running snowboarders. It's an elastic lightweight material which also has softer torsion and better dampening quality than aluminum nose protectors.

The lifetime of a board can be estimated by measuring the loss of camber and response. A certain loss of camber at the beginning of use is inevitable in any construction. But after this first loss, the board should be keeping it's camber and response for years to come. In statistics of big ski producers, the average use of a board is around two weeks, so the warranty needs to cover that period. They produce their products to just not break down before warranty time is over. Up to +/-5% of warranty change is tolerated. Anyway, most of the cases are rejected due to improper use (rock contact,...). Next problem, since the cheaper boards are only used during this short period, they have to be "broken in" and optimized for the first day of the use. Therefore, the first inevitable loss of response and camber leads to worse riding qualities of the boards in the long run. Well, sooner the customer will be willing to buy a new product again.

POGO Snowboards are fabricated so they attain their best riding properties after 1-2 weeks of active riding. Before this, they are a bit too stiff for a normal or lightweight rider. After the short break in period, the POGO "horse" reaches it's optimum carving ability and stays in this shape for years. We have seen 15 year old boards with almost no edges or running base left, but still with perfect camber and flex response. Part of this success is the ingredients, but part is the trimmings. The simple fact is that we can take more time to build a board than the laying-battery-boardfactories allowing us to optimize the polymerisation (hardening process) of our resins in the molding process. The best temperature for this pressing is not the same that is needed to do the job as quick as possible. The hardening process is chain-building of molecules in 3D. The chains in this matrix should be as long as possible, which is the case at a temperature around 75°C and lasts 25 minutes. Most producers just choose the molding temperature as high as possible to accelerate the process. If the running base would not melt at 130°C, they would go even higher. After 10 minutes, they shock-cool the mold and board with the cooling circuit, so it can be taken in hands for further tooling and the next board can go in the oven.
At the POGO workshop the boards harden at +/-75°C for half an hour. Then they cool down steadily another half hour while the press still holds the pressure.
This way we get the longest chains into the matrix to stiffen out the tissues. You can see that we could build five boards in the same time if we did it like the large producers. But the product would not be the same! The boards would lose camber over the years and the fascinating ice grip would dissolve with the slow down of rebound. Moreover, the laminate would be much more vulnerable to shock, so the board would easily get destroyed with rock contact.
Believe it or not, some shops have told us that it would not make sense for them to sell POGO because clients would buy the boards and never buy another one since they last for years. If the board finally gets destroyed on rocks, POGO will repair it for free, if we can do it. What a nightmare for a shop! Fortunately, the truth is they come back for other models or new designs, so most of our shops are happy with the product!

As you may have already realized, our aim is not to cut down production time and effort. It all starts with the shapes of the boards. Most producers limit themselves to radial sidecuts to avoid difficulties and be able to work with CAD/CAM. We do the shapes by hand. That's how one can build a lot of scrap before you get a good shape, but it´s also the way you can test more specific riding qualities of the sidecut shape. We really have piled up a scrapyard of useless prototypes in 20 years, but we have acheived shapes that can do more than just carving that 15m radius. Sure, you can't go wrong if you choose a board with radial sidecut, and for certain demands it might even be the best solution. But turn-entry and accelleration, fast edge switches and icegrip can reach another dimension on non-radial sidecuts.
Sometimes it takes some riding to find the little finesses of these shapes, like shifting your weight slightly back, or pushing with your rear leg to get more accelleration at the end of a turn.
This concept of shape definition requires very flexible production (proto-molds and templates) and a lot of testing in the mountains to decide the shape of a model in a series. Then, over several years of small changes in the series, a model comes to it's perfection. Like a living being, it is born and grows over the years to an intelligent, perfectly adapted "molecular cohesion". A board which is created in this way incorporates all the experience, love of life and idealism that it's creators put into it's cradle.



EPILOG

The production and use of snowboards is a hazard for our environment. Fine talking won't change it. We try, whereever we can, to limit these hazards. We hope, that the users of our products get closer to nature, respect it in every way, and keep the damage as small as possible.

When you come from the mountains, take nothing but your memories with you and leave nothing but your tracks in the snow.

Meanwhile we will do our best to invent the snowboard, that leaves no tracks.