Lib Tech

The highly original and innovative Lib Tech and their Skate Banana snowboards are the names on every snowboarders lips. Their experiMENTAL division has come up with the likes of Magna Traction and now Banana Technology, to produce what they call a new Age of Fruity Enlightenment, where one snowboard now rides all conditions from ice to pow, in both directions from a centred freestyle stance. Lib Tech is the core, non sell-out company, with real riders designing and hand-making the snowboards, in the world’s most eco snowboard factory.

Easier, fun, all boards for one and one board for all!
Magne-Traction – Magne-Traction started when Lib Tech’s two founders’, Peter Saari and Mike Olson, whilst loving the flotation a snowboard provided, became increasingly frustrated with its performance on hard-pack. Firstly, they pioneered deep sidecuts(yes, those that we now take for granted), and then they invented Magne-Traction, to provide unprecedented edge hold. Magne-Traction is LibTech’s solution for the dead spot between the two bindings on a snowboard, the long-forgotten region of a snowboard between a rider’s feet where their balance is centred. Essentially, Magne-Traction is seven bumps on each edge of the board resembling a serrated knife edge, and therefore providing more edge contact points than just the tip and tail. Replacing ‘two contact point ski theory’, where conventional skis and snowboards have 2 contact points, Magne-Traction snowboards have a wobbly-edged 7! Seven is more than two. With Magne-Traction, when your two outside contact points lose grip, you’ve still got five more to take over, meaning you won’t fall as much. Magne-Traction provides better edge hold and control in icy conditions, more power when initiating turns as turn initiation come from under your feet, not a foot and a half to either side of your feet and decreases the chance of blowing out on turns”. Sounds weird but so did deep sidecuts.

So, Magne-Traction means, better edge hold, climbing icy pipes and turning ice into powder! The beginnings of a brighter snowboarding future are found in the likes of Lib Tech Skate Bananas, the Travis Rice Pro Model and Jamie Lynn’s BTX Phoenix Series.

So far, so innovative, and then along came:
Banana Technology – Hailed as a major breakthrough in the evolution of truly functional snowboard geometry, Lib Tech’s Banana Technology has had overwhelming success, through contest victories, multiple awards and retail sell-out. It would seem that it is not just hype, once tried always converted. Jamie Lynn, positively evangelical, says, ‘First I was sceptical. Now I’m a believer’.

Because you’re not going skiing and a snowboard is not a ski, Banana Technology replaces camber with the rocker ‘banana’ between your feet. This reverse camber means that instead of the tip and tail touching the ground when the board lays flat, the board looks mor