The Ride Kink snowboard has established itself as a staple in the freestyle snowboarding scene. Known for its focus on predictability and durability, this board is designed to excel in urban and park environments. Whether you're hitting handrails or jibbing through the park, the Kink offers a reliable and responsive ride.
Design and Features
The Kink is a street machine designed with a focus on predictability and durability for urban and park riding and is at home on handrails and jibs. It’s one of Ride’s best-selling true twin snowboards and fits right in with that low-level twin class that’s really hot right now.
- Twin Tip and Twin Flex Design: The board rides exactly the same in both directions, which is standard for a jibbing board.
- Extra Camber Profile: Camber underfoot provides pop and smooth turn initiation, while a minimal amount of rocker at the tip ensures predictable, catch-free performance.
- Quadratic Sidecut: This feature enhances predictability and edge hold.
- Sintered Base: The harder and more durable sintered base is built to last.
- Biaxial Fiberglass: Lightweight and forgiving, this material provides torsionally softer flexing.
- Extruded Base: Easy to maintain, the extruded base is simple to repair after impacts and doesn't require frequent waxing.
- Slimewalls: Urethane sidewalls are highly resistant to cracking, lock onto rails effectively, and offer shock absorption and suspension.
- Cleave Edge: Doubled material at the edge enhances durability against metal abuse and allows for de-tuning and re-tuning as needed.
- Color-Changing Ink: The top sheet features ink that changes from light to dark when exposed to snow.
Performance and Ride Experience
The Kink is a freestyle board, more specifically a jib board. Despite being advertised as buttery, it has always felt lively, with a good amount of pop, which you get evenly from both nose and tail. It’s buttery and easy to press, but that softer flex doesn’t bring a flat, washed-out feel with it; it’s springy. The Ride Kink is a pretty basic freestyle board and doesn't have a ton of bells and whistles, but it gets the job done.
This board is responsive and edges well for shorter and quicker carves. It’s gonna be pretty predictable, definitely stable, with a rolling away flat base. The Kink is plenty to get you through most of the park.
On Rails and Jibs
The Kink feels nice to press with, and, when boardsliding on rails, the flex is forgiving and leaves room to shift your weight around. A lot of jib kids are gonna dull their edges down, but I’ve done nothing with mine and I haven’t had too many hang ups.
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Justin's Review-Ride Kink Snowboard 2020-Snowboards.com 10 50
All-Mountain Performance
Although the edge hold hasn’t been great in some situations, I think the board does pretty well at speed: not too jittery, not wanting to wash out all of the time. It’s probably more accurate to say that I haven’t felt held back around the mountain. But if you’re looking for a jib board you already know you’re going to be making compromises in this area.
Comparison with Other Boards
Different jib boards have different flex patterns. Some jib boards, like the Evil Twin for example seem to be softer in the middle and stiffer at the tips, so they have a slightly different ride. Softer in the middle should be better for connecting with rails; softer tips easier to press, butter and pop. It’s up to you.
The Agent is marketed and designed to being a little more all-round freestyle than a pure jib board. I certainly found the Agent to be better all mountain, it definitely had better edge hold in the halfpipe and it had a smooth, buttery ride to boot. Maybe. But then again it is considerably more expensive and probably doesn’t ride rails as well.
I thought that the Squad Flex 4 had similar feel/design with respect to soft flexing tips, yet it lacked the pop of the Kink. It felt a little flat in comparison.
Durability and Maintenance
One of their best-selling snowboards, this one definitely has a lot of tech built into it for the price tag. As you’d expect from a softer, park-focused board this one is going to chatter at speed.
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For side-features, there’s slimewalls: a urethane sidewall, definitely very resistant to cracking. It has a cleave edge, with doubled material to the edge. It will definitely hold up to more metal abuse, and it will be able to be de-tuned and brought back later on down the road, if you want to go from rail to pipe, which you can do with the snowboard.
Who is it For?
As softer boards are typically recommended for beginners, this would be a reasonably affordable option for most beginner snowboarders, and will grow with them for a bit if they want to start riding more in the park or freestyle type riding.
Summary of Pros and Cons
Here’s a quick overview of the Ride Kink’s strengths and weaknesses:
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