To wake a dead thread. Last year I worked a little more with the 'wrap cap' process and have had pretty good results. To protect the sidewalls, I cut the bottom layer of fiberglass extra wide and during the layup process I wrapped the extra width of the bottom layer of glass around the sidewalls and...

These skis are now in their ninth season!!! They are still holding together well and are great to ski with. The only problem of late has been that last year the bindings (Salomon S914) broke apart from the abuse of kite skiing on windpack at high speeds. I haven't mounted any bindings this year, but...

MontuckyMadman wrote:5 hours?
OMG!

sorry about my use of exclamation points... they tend to use exclamation points on everything here (in Sweden), and occasionally my languages get blended together.


the vacuum is going on 8 hours now. I was expecting it to start smoking a long time ago.

ya, I did a dry run, and everything went smoothly in the actual layup (this wasn't my first pair of skis) I just didn't count on the bag leaking as much as it did... it has been sitting a couple years since I pressed last time, and I think it must have gotten damaged during a workshop reorganization...

It's been a while since I pressed a pair of skis, but this afternoon I decided to finally layup a pair that has been sitting ready in the mold for almost a year. wetting everything out went well, and I got them all setup, in the vacuum bag, and turned on the pump... then I realized that the bag had ...

I made a pair of maple cored skis (the better rockets in the gallery). They are really really heavy and stiff. But, I use them for kite skiing which means that I go really fast over very uneven windpacked snow and they work amazingly well. The extra weight helps them to power through everything, and...

I use a compass... like the one used for reading maps. Magnetic caps help, but I would imagine that you could get enough interference as long as the inserts are not stainless steel.

So, seeing as how my research group works very closely with research on ptfe, friction, and ski friction... I am going to give my opinion. I haven't contributed to the forums for a year or two, but was very interested in the topic. PTFE is an excellent friction material against snow. PTFE particles ...

I thought I would add a second addition to this post since almost three years have passed since these skis went into retirement. This year I got a kite and am now doing a lot of snow kiting. I remounted alpine bindings on the 'Better Rockets' and they have now come out of retirement. The insane stif...

I had halfway decent luck by taking a razor blade and slicing trenches in the skis. Angle the blade so that you can cut out a 'flap' that will grip in one direction. As a test, I took a 40km tour on the sea ice (very stupid idea on wide skis) and the flaps worked great, I had traction and could slid...

We did a snowboard without a topsheet. Instead, we had a graphic printed out on a photo quality laser printer. The graphic covered the entire top of the snowboard, and we simply soaked it in epoxy when we laid up the board. A couple coats of glossy varnish after the board was out of the press, and w...

200 cm long
160 mm wide max
There is absolutely no need to build skis larger than that, as far as I can see.

Now, if you wanna go water skiing, or kite-skiing, then maybe a little wider would be nice.

If you want to make XC skis, then you will need quite a bit of extra length as well.

Since you posted that method, I too have been using it and it works wonderfully. The only difference for mine was that instead of glue, I use sheetrock screws. I also got an old table top with a smooth laminate surface. I routed a 2 mm deep groove on each side to use for aligning the profile curve p...

I have pretty much concluded that anything is skiable, and usually the closer to un-skiable they are, the more fun they are to ski. It is all about being free in the mind. That being said, the only real drawback I can see to the square tip is that they could get hung up on bushes and sticks, etc. I ...

My first pair, the Bremallows (they are in the ski gallery) had a stained core, and it worked just fine. The skis failed because of other reasons, and the stained area actually bonded better than the rest of the ski.