Ski Builders Forum

as there are so many professional looking home-built ski out in this forum recently it was time for me to step up to the next level as well.
actually this was planned some time ago as I run out of base material - I was kind of fed up with the endless quest of getting sources for small quantities. additionally i was unhappy with my current ski-building-situation: working partly in the garage of my parents, having to clean up and to tidy up everything in the evening so that we could park our car again. all in all the building process was not really efficient.

so I decided to start things a bit more professional. and this is the actual result of long and hard work:



this model is called sleipnir. in the background you can see my...uhm...workshop. actually it can`t be heated, has a leaking roof and 2 days ago someone smashed 2 windows. so I`ll probabely relocate my workshop somewhen soon
177cm long, 128-88-128, 11.5m radius, 1760g per ski, pretty fun to play around. it has a poplar/beech core with rubber sidewalls - I was looking into several different plastics for sidewalls and on nearly all of them i had bonding problems. rubber bonds increadibly well, but is a pain to work with and I run in a ton of problems... the topsheet is a printed one, corona treated for a better bonding. so it bonds really well, but already after one day i found pretty ugly scratches and chips.
so, frustrated of all these plastics I decided to go back to wood...



as I still had some topsheets left I decided to use them.
valkyrie - a fat powder ski for the ladies. 172cm long, 152-132-147, 2240g per ski, rockered. it has a bamboo core - the whole ski got quite "heavy" due to the massive bamboo core, so i`ll probabely mix it with lighter wood the next time. I`m really looking forward to ski this one and to see how the bamboo sidewalls hold up the abuse. up to now they just look great

i thought they were for the ladies? LOL
sick work, lets see the inside of the shop!!!

Oh, my bad, that IS inside the shop? Dude you should film a horror movie in there hehehe.

What are those piles of stuff? Sawdust?

Good luck with the place, we're hoping to move into something soon as well.

sadly there`s nothing but pure chaos on the inside of the shop
the shop is located in an old concrete factory which was shut down about 10 years ago. so it has been left for the past 10 years and looks really cool and rotten - as you said, great for horror movies, foto shootings and such stuff, but not that great to work in

these "piles of stuff" actually are my top secret indoor all year round testing facility where you can simulate all different types of snowconditions and slopes for about 4-5m of vertical. no, seriously: the owner of this property also owns forrest and so he`s storing wooden chips in there - which really can be skied

the skis look cool. The rubber sidewalls sound interesting but sort of heavy.

Has anyone thought about using base ptex as a sidewall material (park skis maybe?).

Hey Ply

iam dying of strees to see if your bambbo sidewalls hang on the pressure and still let water out... for shure you had treatthem after trim the sidewall??

keep the nice work )) they look sick

shopvac wrote:
Has anyone thought about using base ptex as a sidewall material (park skis maybe?).

Some companies have done the "cap down to sidewall" method and used a uniform thickness sidewall which is the same thickness as the tip fill material, which is probably 1.8-2.0mm thick ptex or abs. So using "base ptex" is not far off. K2 does this with snowboards now, November boards did this a while ago, some others have done it.

the rubber sidewalls...i guess sidewalls are too small to be concerned about their weight and weight is not the issue, it`s machining them and getting them into shape. this issue can be solved though, but there are many more to come. even if it`s hard rubber it is still flexible - which resulted in a concave base after pressing, just to name one example. the base was still concave after grinding the ski as the sidewalls got compressed while grinding the base. insane edge grip, but that`s not really what you want, right?

about the bamboo sidewalls: i haven`t hit many rocks up to now or really abused them. up to now they seem to hold up just as good as ash or beech. i somewhere read bamboo gets brittle in the cold so i was a little worried, but i couldn`t notice any brittleness on my skis. of coures i treated them - the usual way: coating with epoxy after beveling them.

just to show and prove that my ladies can handle such skis: we finally received some powder this season. it felt great and was worth every second invested in building new skis.

WOW! That's almost as much snow as we got in NJ and NY!
Sick turns