Burton Flies High with Plascore Honeycomb Core

Burton, Burlington, Vermont

With the name synonymous with performance, style and leading-edge fun, Burton has fueled the growth of snowboarding worldwide through its ground-breaking product lines, grassroots promotional efforts and team of top snowboarders. Burton dominates the snowboard industry worldwide with global headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, and international offices in Innsbruck, Austria and Tokyo, Japan.

Far and away the technology leader, Burton offers snowboarders the same 'standby to fly' engineered core afforded the top aircraft: Plascore aluminum honeycomb.

"We've been using Plascore honeycomb core for about 6 years," said Todd King, Burton Business Unit Manager. "It was a bit of a challenge at first because we use such a wafer thin aluminum core. But now that we have it down, we're way ahead of our competition. It gives us a superior, lightweight platform for our high-end boards."

Many of the company's snowboards have a specially designed Engineered Grain Direction (EGD™) wood core that determines riding characteristics. Alumafly®, the Burton trademarked name for the hybrid EGD™ and aluminum honeycomb core composite, is available only on the Vapor and T6 snowboards, as well as new designs under development. The company promotes Alumafly as being so light it's like riding on air, so tech it high-grade honeycomb technology and EGD™. The resulting featherweight and seemingly impossible strength creates surreal snow sensitivity and hyper-precise board control.

Todd points to the subtle, but very appealing 'pop' performance characteristic of the aluminum honeycomb core. "We married the exceptional lightweight performance of aluminum honeycomb with the supple on-snow feel of wood. The outcome is a resilient ride of EDG plus a very responsive pop of aluminum core. To use an analogy; it's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup — it's a better product because of the two."

Plascore manufactures several aerospace grade aluminum honeycomb cores with a modulus that provides very high stiffness-to-weight ratios for the most demanding applications. Typical applications include aircraft floors, wing and fuselage components, rotor blades, energy absorption, air/light directing, EMI/RFI shielding, and of course, world-class snowboards.

For more information visit Burton at www.burton.com.