Snowboards - REVIEW: Burton Shaun White Collection 156 charliebuoy - May 21, 2007 - 01:48 PM Post subject: REVIEW: Burton Shaun White Collection 156
Cost: £340 (reduced from £390 because I'm cool)
Specs:
Sintered Base
Dualzone EGD™
Triax Response Fiberglass
Negative Core Profile Super Fly II Core
Carbon I-Beam
Infinite Ride®
Pro-Tip™
Burton have got a bit of a poor reputation of late. There have been accusations of them churning out inferior products and putting money before product quality. There's also the image that 'real' snowboarders don't ride Burton. I was inclined to believe these rumours after having a bad experience with a Burton board that literally fell apart. In fact I hadn't had one since. I bought this board pretty much spur of the moment. I'd managed to wreck both my all mountain board and my park board and was left, the day before a two week long trip to Morzine, with nothing to ride. I reluctantly got the credit card out and wandered down to my local shop - Mayhem in York. Now I know the people who work there pretty well having spent at least 30 mins every weekend drooling over equipment so they know how I ride (the whole mountain is a big park) and what sort of board I want. They immediately pulled out the Shaun White and said that I'd love it. I was dubious at first but they offered me discount and the graphics were pretty (though perhaps not to everyones taste) so I went for it. Hardly the right way to buy a snowboard but it worked out this time...
Taking a look at this board it's basically a Custom with a slightly different flex, varied stiffness, a narrower waist and a deeper side cut.
I bolted on my pretty green and white Cartels and pulled on my 32 TM2's (I'd say this is probably an aggressive freestyle set up) and set out on the varied snow conditions of Morzine. The first thing I noticed about this board was that the flex and pop were perfect for my style of riding. It has enough softness to pull off any kind of butters but has awesome snap off the nose and tail. I was ollying over fences that I wouldn't have had much confidence in getting over on a different board. Control off kickers is great and a nice low swing weight due to tapered tips makes rotations that bit easier.
In the pipe this board rode very well (as you'd expect from the Shaun White signature model), due to the narrow waist it's super fast from edge to edge and has good hold between transitions. The narrow waist caught me out a few times initially, it makes it that bit easier to catch an edge if you're not concentrating and people with big feet won't be going anywhere on this board.
Performing well in the pipe results in a board that can cope with ice and moguls. It doesn't let you down when you're cruising along at speed or putting in fast turns down a mogul field. Burton seem to have got the responsiveness and softness balanced very well making a board that snaps well out of turns.
A freestyle orientated board like this wouldn't be expected to perform that well in powder but it seems to work surprisingly well for a board with such a small footprint. Not as good as a wider and longer board but having set my stance back by a couple of inches it floated pretty well. I even had the confidence on it to do my first front flip off a small cliff drop.
Unfortunately I didn't really try this board on rails because I wasn't up for de tuning and losing my edge control in some dubious snow conditions. Since that ginger bloke rides a lot of rails, it may be safe to assume that it's probably alright.
Having only ridden the board for a couple of weeks I have no idea how long it'll keep such magnificent pop. It does have Burton's Infinite Ride® technology which gives me a reasonable degree of confidence that it'll last for a decent length of time. There have been no construction issues so far and the construction seems to have okay durability. I'm not sure how it'll cope with a big knock though - we'll see!
I have to say that the Burton White Collection is one of the best snowboards I have ever ridden, it manages to be fast, high performance yet fun and suits my style of riding perfectly. This board helped to get me off a learning plateau that I've been stuck on for ages and I can give it no greater praise. It's safe to say that I like Burton snowboards again.
