We were lucky enough to get an interview with TJ Schneider for issue 10 and he had so much to say we even had some left-overs. TJ is the man behind the ‘Snowboard Realms‘ series that gave us an insight into the life of a travelling professional snowboarder over a season. After the cut, check out what should be considered a web-sclusive where TJ talks about some of the new tech that Capita is working on (and he tests in the video above). Seems these days, every board company is trying to emulate the rocker/reverse-camber design made popular by the folks over at Mervin. Or are they?

Could you tell us a bit about the new board? I know it’s supposed to be a bit of a secret.
It’s coming out as a late release, and if you’ve seen our catalogue then you’ll see that we have done a horror theme for this season. A lot of people are doing reverse camber boards, like a straight up reverse, I mean I’ve ridden one of those and it feels like you’re about to die all the time [Laughs], like as soon as you go high speed it’s just all of a sudden going to shoot right and your just going to die [Laughs]. A couple of other companies have something similar to it, but instead of doing a reverse camber park/jib board like what a lot of people are doing we tried to do something a little more stable, where you actually have some effective edge always on the snow. So we did a flat camber from the outside of your inserts, on each side it raises like a flat kick with a little bit of camber until your noise starts and then it’s another flat kick. It’s like an old school flat nose, instead of the progressive curve, so it’s like a double flat kick. It’s amazing, as a jib board and a park board it’s going to be awesome because you still have an effective edge that’s holding you in place all the time, but you still have the reverse camber feel where you can go through bumps and still press reel nice.

Have you hit jumps on it?
I haven’t hit any jumps on it, because I got fucking schooled on this stupid bag jump. But I rode it in the pipe and this was sort of my tester of how it was going to ride in ice and hold an edge. And I was doing like 10 foot frontside airs in this pipe! We were shooting with Joel, and I was like, “Are you kidding me?!”, this board was a 152 and I’m doing 10 foot frontside airs in the pipe! I was hitting some rails and 5-0ing with what felt like my nose 2 foot in the air [Laughs]. We were also hitting little tiny jumps and moguls and bouncing through them. This board is just incredible, it’s so crazy, I’m riding the 52, but I can’t wait to try the 56 or the 48. And the graphics are going to be insane. They are going to be released in pretty limited numbers though.