oops ! I'm building some skis !
4 pairs on the go right now, 2 are to be 175cm normal GS style skis based on an atomic shape, and 2 are 166cm twintip mucking about skis. Now bear in mind I haven't skied for about 15 years (apart from a brief mess about last year) this is gonna be a lot of fun to build and try and ski on.
I'm building with a friend who has never built before, and who has done a great job of building the spruce and ash wood cores - painstakingly laminated with 4 and 6mm laminates...
graf snowboards er NO - skis !
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graf snowboards er NO - skis !
Last edited by dg on Sun Nov 08, 2009 6:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
...I reckon I'm becoming "bi" ! I think we'll be mounting some Vist plates on them so we can flip bindings between skis. The profile - well - looking at 11.5mm core thickness on the GS and 10mm on the twins, with the usual 750gsm triax either side of the core, and a carbon UD tape down the center...
hi mr. dan!
that would have been sweet! sadly i can`t come on saturday morning, i`ve already arranged a final building session with my student. but if you want to you could make a stopover at my place on your way back home, admire her new (then hopefully) cutout skis, have a chat and tell me a little more about the carpenter
that would have been sweet! sadly i can`t come on saturday morning, i`ve already arranged a final building session with my student. but if you want to you could make a stopover at my place on your way back home, admire her new (then hopefully) cutout skis, have a chat and tell me a little more about the carpenter
plywood freeride industries - go ply, ride wood!
Well, things didn't start off too well. First skis in the press and nearing the last quarter of the cycle - we hear a big BANG !
Ooops - that's nasty. The upper mould - being built out of crap - disintegrated. However, by some miracle everything stayed nicely under pressure and didn't move - so fingers crossed....
...and yes - a very nice pair of skis came out. Here Uwe is giving them the grind of their lives.
and grind.....
So we made 2 pairs of 'GS' skis. The "seventeen" ski has 17 laminates in the wood core and is the softer build - laminates of UD glass and +-45' biax, carbon tape from the tip to the platform, UD glass and texalium on top. The topsheets are reverse digitally printed directly onto the material and corona treated for bonding. The texalium behind shows thru and lights up the graphic beautifully.
And....now the weird skis (you can tell a snowboarder built them)
166 twintips - not 100% symmetrical - we have a slight taper towards the rear and a higher rise on the tip compared to the tail for floatation. Same graphic technique...
and another pair the same shape this time with a minimal graphic which really shows of the texalium under the topsheet. In fact the 166 skis have a different layup to the GS - here we used normal snowboard triax, one layer either side of the core.
So generally everything went really well, the press was fixed in 30 minutes or so, yesterday we pressed 3 pairs of skis in one session. The camber is a bit high off the press (bottom heating) but I'm sure that will relax into a good natural position after a few days skiing. One or two little defects - we left the cores a bit too thick at the ends on the twintips and the tip-fill didn't quite reach the same thickness - this led to some crinkles on the tail, but I don't think it's a problem, just cosmetic.
After building snowboards all these years, it's cool to try something different - it's just twice as much work - this was like building 8 snowboards ! Ski test is planned for 14th and 15th of November in Laax - I'll let you know how we got on.
Ooops - that's nasty. The upper mould - being built out of crap - disintegrated. However, by some miracle everything stayed nicely under pressure and didn't move - so fingers crossed....
...and yes - a very nice pair of skis came out. Here Uwe is giving them the grind of their lives.
and grind.....
So we made 2 pairs of 'GS' skis. The "seventeen" ski has 17 laminates in the wood core and is the softer build - laminates of UD glass and +-45' biax, carbon tape from the tip to the platform, UD glass and texalium on top. The topsheets are reverse digitally printed directly onto the material and corona treated for bonding. The texalium behind shows thru and lights up the graphic beautifully.
And....now the weird skis (you can tell a snowboarder built them)
166 twintips - not 100% symmetrical - we have a slight taper towards the rear and a higher rise on the tip compared to the tail for floatation. Same graphic technique...
and another pair the same shape this time with a minimal graphic which really shows of the texalium under the topsheet. In fact the 166 skis have a different layup to the GS - here we used normal snowboard triax, one layer either side of the core.
So generally everything went really well, the press was fixed in 30 minutes or so, yesterday we pressed 3 pairs of skis in one session. The camber is a bit high off the press (bottom heating) but I'm sure that will relax into a good natural position after a few days skiing. One or two little defects - we left the cores a bit too thick at the ends on the twintips and the tip-fill didn't quite reach the same thickness - this led to some crinkles on the tail, but I don't think it's a problem, just cosmetic.
After building snowboards all these years, it's cool to try something different - it's just twice as much work - this was like building 8 snowboards ! Ski test is planned for 14th and 15th of November in Laax - I'll let you know how we got on.
Crap material. It was chipboardy stuff which was fine at first but I guess under repeated cycles - and especially with the heat coming from below it got extremely brittle. Perhaps if it had been solid it would have lasted longer, but it was interleaved to make it adjustable.what exactly caused the top mold to crack?
Now I have two big fat solid wood beams in there instead, actually works better - the hose sits better in the press...!
Indirectly, yes. I don't have a printer large enough, but a guy called Thomas at Sitra in Köniz here in Switzerland does (http://www.sericora.ch). They can print digitally either directly on to the top of the material (including white material) or in reverse on the back.Seems like you ran some material through a printer
I elected for in reverse on the back for obvious reasons. They were going to flood coat behind the graphic for us, with a white ink but had trouble sourcing the ink. Since we had limited time to build the skis, I opted to grab some Texalium from Swiss Composite and throw that in - and I'm so glad that little twist happened, as it made the skis look way more interesting.
So the ink is inside the ski on the back of the topsheet. The printing company Sitra corona treat the printed topsheet so bonding should not be an issue, and the plastic protects the ink to some extent from UV fade.
I was offered an incredibly good price per print including material - about 15-20 USD I guess. There is a one-off fee for transferring the digital artwork as it needs converting to the right format and there are rules on ink levels across the CMYK gamut. I asked him for a specification for the file, as I didn't want to pay the one-off fee - makes no sense when practically every ski or board I make has a different topsheet - and the batch I ordered had 6 different designs. He was kind enough to supply the magic formula (eg the best recipe for black, the overall ink coverage limits etc) and I delivered TIFF files to spec from Adobe Illustrator and got the fee cut to a minimum.