and so i did!skibuilders.com - testing wrote:There's only one real way to test your homemade skis: ride them and ride them hard.
finally it snowed a bit here. sadly just about 20-30cm in my homeresort. because it was warm and rained up to the top the last days/week under these 30cm of snow there was...nothing
just grassland. more or less. but later more.well, it had powder. and powder has to be ridden, especially with new skis designed for powder
so after the first 2 turns on the slopes i left them for offpist. and they performed great! all my hopes, expectations and calculations seemed to work!
i can not say what exactely caused all the good characteristics of these skis... but they floated easily, the tips stayed on top in every situation...no matter what i did, they didn`t dive! for normal powder riding i just had to "lean back" a little bit - i guess this is because of the width of the ski and the lenght/bending of the tip
they turned so quick! if you wanted to, you could do very narrow turns by "sliding" with the back of the skis through the powder (it`s hard to describe this) well, drifting with the back was generally very easy to do, and it was still controllable - i suppose that this effects are caused by the relatively long and wide gap in the swallowtail.
but on the other hand they were also very stable with higher speed! on the afternoon i rode tracked powder, and it felt like untracked one. they just flew through it - this could be the result of the relatively high stiffness of the ski.
an other advantage of these skis is the weight. compared to the volant machete i rode bevore the feel much lighter. i recognised, that weight has a big effect to your riding skills. for small cliffs/bumps you just had to jump a bit and the skis left the ground. it was so amazing!
so overall they were so much fun to ride and easy to handle in nearly all conditions. they even felt in control when everything was in fact a bit out of control
they just had one disadvantage: on very hard and icy slopes i recognised something strange. if you try there a turn, it happens sometimes, that the skis begin to vibrate. so if your orthoganal to the trajectory of the hill and you give some pressure on the edge it can happen, that the edges grip - lose grip - grip etc. and this causes some "vibrations" and flaps which can bring you to fall. i guess this happens like this: my skis are stiff, so the edges grip mainly on tip an tail where the skis have the widest area. so if the edges grip there, the ski kind of wraps torsional. because of this the edges lose grip. then the ski "wraps back" to the normal position and the edges grip again etc. what do you think about this?
well, and now to the grassland under the 20-30cm of snow. unfortunately there were also some hidden rocks under the snow. and in the afternoon one son-of-a-bitch-rock wanted to kill my base. so he hid under a bit snow, just enough for beeing invisible, sharpened his teeth and waited for my base to dash along. and then he showed his ugly face!
here the result:
well...maybe you see the little scratch on the second pic
hehehe well, i think i have to repair something, right?i suppose that the area around the edges is a bit more sensitive on this ski because i just sanded the edges before glueing and forgot to clean them with some chemicals...but even if it hadn`t this weakness the base would look terrible - it really was a bad rock!
