Pheeps - Building Progress
Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2020 10:19 am
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this forum through the years. It's educational, entertaining and inspiring. I continue to read and learn from what you documented, which helps greatly throughout my own building progress.
Basically, this is just a hobby for me, no real expectations or aspirations other than to build some skis and make some turns on them. I started skiing young, raced when younger and have done plenty of back country, which has me designing/building skis for groomers as well as skis for powder. Like most here, just posting to share my application of knowledge gained from this site back to the community. Maybe someone else will find it useful; hopefully I'll get some more tips from others.
My first attempt was in late 2018, a powder ski (about 120mm under foot?) which never got past the prep of materials. I made a template. I got the cores profiled, shaped, rabbeted. I cut the base material and a few weeks later attached edges. Then I learned the hard way about base warp. Base material had warped significantly prior to attached the edges and, being my first time, I used way too much super glue to attache the edges. Oh well, I still have those cores and bases just in case for later on.
No further work on skis that year.
Second attempt. Started way too late in 2019, but really wanted to try them out during a mid-January trip to Montana. So, it was a bit rushed. Not many photos, but it was a good learning experience on the full process and the finished pair skies way better than expected. Since none of my skis are powder skis (Volkl Mantra being the closest) I wanted to give that a try again, plus I was thinking powder skis might be more forgiving of mistakes and imperfections, not sure how true this is. I searched online for a ski to emulate and decided to use J Skis - the Friend. I used sno-CAD and came up with a 182 with side cut of 143-118-133. I was able to print at work and glued the template to some MDF.
Then I just lined up a piece of flexible pine to the outline of the template side cut and drilled it into place to use as a router guide. Nothing fancy, but it worked.
The guide worked well with my home made table router and a flush trim bit with top bearing. I got a nice clean edge right on the printed side cut line. For whatever reason, I was thinking I needed to have both sides trimmed perfectly, I ended up modifying this later.
Warning: my workshop is a small, 0ne car garage and we are continuously renovating our house which takes priority and never leaves enough time to clean up. It's not the cleanest nor organized.
...more to follow
Basically, this is just a hobby for me, no real expectations or aspirations other than to build some skis and make some turns on them. I started skiing young, raced when younger and have done plenty of back country, which has me designing/building skis for groomers as well as skis for powder. Like most here, just posting to share my application of knowledge gained from this site back to the community. Maybe someone else will find it useful; hopefully I'll get some more tips from others.
My first attempt was in late 2018, a powder ski (about 120mm under foot?) which never got past the prep of materials. I made a template. I got the cores profiled, shaped, rabbeted. I cut the base material and a few weeks later attached edges. Then I learned the hard way about base warp. Base material had warped significantly prior to attached the edges and, being my first time, I used way too much super glue to attache the edges. Oh well, I still have those cores and bases just in case for later on.
No further work on skis that year.
Second attempt. Started way too late in 2019, but really wanted to try them out during a mid-January trip to Montana. So, it was a bit rushed. Not many photos, but it was a good learning experience on the full process and the finished pair skies way better than expected. Since none of my skis are powder skis (Volkl Mantra being the closest) I wanted to give that a try again, plus I was thinking powder skis might be more forgiving of mistakes and imperfections, not sure how true this is. I searched online for a ski to emulate and decided to use J Skis - the Friend. I used sno-CAD and came up with a 182 with side cut of 143-118-133. I was able to print at work and glued the template to some MDF.
Then I just lined up a piece of flexible pine to the outline of the template side cut and drilled it into place to use as a router guide. Nothing fancy, but it worked.
The guide worked well with my home made table router and a flush trim bit with top bearing. I got a nice clean edge right on the printed side cut line. For whatever reason, I was thinking I needed to have both sides trimmed perfectly, I ended up modifying this later.
Warning: my workshop is a small, 0ne car garage and we are continuously renovating our house which takes priority and never leaves enough time to clean up. It's not the cleanest nor organized.
...more to follow