and so i did...just to find my initial hate of plastic confirmed
after 2 days of glueing cores and sidewalls the whole shit got eaten uf by the router profiling.so all in all an experiment to forget quickly and not worth sharing. BUT! there`s still something worth sharing.
a few weeks ago i visited the stoeckli ski factory over here. i think i don`t have to explan what stoeckli is - it`s the only large swiss ski factory. their factory tour was pretty intense and i was surprised by how much they showed. i was able to see every step from profiling the woodcores to the layup of one of their skis. the only thing kept secret was the profile of the core and the weight of the glass they`re using.
the interesting part was how they did their cores. they get core halfes from a supplier. those halves are straight and already have sidewalls on on one side. so they basicalli look like this:
sidewalls (about 5-8mm thick for their race skis)
veneer (about 7 or 8 layers of veneer, each stripe about 3mm thick, so the whole wooden par is about 25mm wide)
foam (don`t know anything about this foam, but i guess it`s some PU foam from isosport...)
so i hope you got how thos core halves are built. then they take those halfes and put them, sidewalls facing each others, into a milling machine that cuts away some of the foam. so basically it cuts a radius into the foam so that the core halves are wider in tip and tail and narrower in the middle. then they take the core halves and flip them so that the foam parts are facing each others. now the middle of the cores/the area under the binding has to be pressed together and gets fixed with some bostitchs. by this the middle gets pulled together and the sidewalls with the veneers follow the radius of the skis.
afterwards the whole core gets profiled. (i think it was like this. may also be that the core halves get profiled before bostitching together, but doesn`t matter anyway).
as i never saw a construction like this on this forum i thought i might share what i saw. it seemed a pretty fast ans efficient way of doing cores with the advantage of having wood stripes right over the edges, following the radius of the edges. this may result in a better transition of power along the edges.
so for my messed up sidewall skis i wanted to do something similar. here are some pics:
here`s the whole core. i adopted the stoeckli way of doing cores a little to my needs. i split up the core into 3 areas: 2 sidewalls of about 30mm width and a middle part. i think you would have a hard time bending wood wider than 30mm into the radius, that`s why i did it like this. so i only profiled the middle part and then glued on the wood with the sidewalls so that those outer stripes follow the radius too. here`s a closeup:
the red lines mark the areas where the middle part stopped and the sidewalls began. i think you had to do a similar "3-part-core-approach" if you wanted to do full woodcores. you only can do the "2-halves-approach" as stoeckli does it if you`re using some foam in the middle. everything else will be too stiff to get bent into shape.
i hope you got how it worked, else i`ll have to draw some drawings to further explain it
