TESTING new ski designs can be a bit of a bind. First the prototypes have to be designed and built. Then skiers have to be paid to test them on the slopes. The result of this costly procedure is, at best, subjective feedback that may depend heavily on the snow conditions that happened to prevail at the time. It's a problem that two Italian engineers believe they have solved with a new system for testing the stability of skis without taking them out on the piste.
How well a ski performs depends largely on how stable it is: in other words, how evenly the forces generated by the skier are transferred through the ski to the snow. Skis are often built from layers of different composite materials, which makes it difficult to predict how they will behave, particularly during cornering.
Another factor is the curved "side-cuts" that manufacturers are making ...
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