Anton Glider
Something new on the snow
The Anton Glider is designed to carve turns easily on
firm and hard surfaces.
Unlike a ski, it’s not meant to float over snow, but to slice through it.
It’s not meant to skid, slip or slide.
It’s a Glider.
The ice skate carves beautiful arcs on even the hardest surface, for two reasons:
It’s narrow, and therefore very easy to tip on edge.
The cutting edge achieves a jam angle, not a smear angle.
By contrast, a ski is wide and more difficult to tip on edge. At the modest angles achievable by intermediate skiers, the edge forms a smear angle.
The Anton Glider gives the intermediate skier the ability to edge – andcarve -- like a skater.
But it makes beautiful round speed-control turns for the beginner, assuring an anxiety-free first day on snow.
Limitations of narrow skis
There have been very narrow skis in the past, from innovative designers at Olin and Elan. They were not successful.
The very narrow ski has insufficient structure – call it modulus – to distribute the skier’s weight along its length. The result was that narrow skis always hinged in the center. The tip and tail were just along for the ride.
The Anton Glider solves this problem with a unique G-Spring suspension system. The suspension distributes the skier’s weight, and turning forces, evenly along the ski’s length.
The tunable G-Spring suspension can be adjusted to the skier’s actual weight, strength and speed. And because turning forces are distributed broadly along the length of the edge, the Anton Glider has an astoundingly broad sweet spot.
On an Anton Glider, an unskilled skier literally cannot make a mistake in stance.The G-Spring suspension soaks up terrain surprises, including junk snow. The Glider doesn’t decelerate over rolls and in wet powder –it just slices smoothly forward in a smooth arc.
Because the narrow Glider slices through softer snow to the firmer surface below, new skiers handle powder – up to about six inches deep – with aplomb. Confident that the Glider will turn when edged, new skiers don’t panic in powder: The glider won’t skid, but it doesn’t have to.
While the narrow Glider tips easily on edge, the preloaded G-Spring suspension, with its sophisticated mechanical linkage, requires surprisingly little muscular effort to hold the runner in a reverse camber.
Thanks to the immense sweet spot, intermediate skiers find it easy to
hook up in a smooth carve – along the entire length of the edge.
The Anton Glider is a new product category, perhaps a new sport. It will
serve as a teaching tool, helping new skiers to master the carved turn
quickly.
“Terminal intermediates” with no ambition to ski the steep
and deep Glide happily – and gracefully -- on low-angle terrain.
Specifications
The prototype Anton Glider consists of a ski-like runner about 150cm long, and 75mm wide at the shovel and tail. The waist is 35mm wide.
The G-Spring suspension rises 38mm above the top of the runner, for a
total stack height of about 60mm. It’s fixed to the runner at the
center, and via spring-loaded struts to mounting swivels about 50cm toward
the tip and tail. This provides a sweet spot fully one meter long.