Epic Planks Skis

[Buttepacker]

Wow great story! Good luck with the business. Selling close to 30 skis your first year is pretty good.

Thanks! Yeah, we are definitely excited about everything so far. Last winter sucked of course... seems everyone was bumming about the crappy winter, and everyone had slow sales, including the big guys. We're pumped to keep moving forward though, lots of exciting stuff in the works.

[powderho]

Thanks for sharing the Epic Plank story. I'm pretty jealous as I've been wanting to send it myself for a few years, but here I am still working for the man. It gets harder and harder passing on a dependable pay check, ya know. I realized that even though I really love building skis, I hate selling skis. Anyway, it sounds like you guys are going to be building your own cores now, but if you aren't, be sure to check out Revolution Mfg. in Orem, UT. They are easy to work with and turn out a great product. There is a minimum order of 40, and it has to be placed by the end of May. I bought 40 last year (still have about 15) and they worked great. The price for a shaped/profiled, p-tex sidewalls attached, core was about $10 more than my raw material price. The order did take a couple of months to complete though. They had to order new belts for their profiler to handle my ash cores. Send it all!!!!

[sammer]

Nice, thanks for the story.
Would have liked to get out to Fernie Wilderness with you guys.
The guides there are a lot of fun.
I left my ugly reverse/reverse skis up there this year.
I know there was a guy from Sweden skied them for a week straight.
If you get the chance to get out this way again look me up.

sam

[powbrewer]

Hey Sam, yeah FWA is definitely one of our favorite places to ski. Great laid back atmosphere with fun guides and a great lodge to hang out at. We are actually going to try to visit there next year early season, so it may work out to meet up. We will keep you posted as our plans come together. How was the snow in Fernie this year?

Nice, thanks for the story.
Would have liked to get out to Fernie Wilderness with you guys.
The guides there are a lot of fun.
I left my ugly reverse/reverse skis up there this year.
I know there was a guy from Sweden skied them for a week straight.
If you get the chance to get out this way again look me up.

sam

[sammer]

Hey Sam, yeah FWA is definitely one of our favorite places to ski. Great laid back atmosphere with fun guides and a great lodge to hang out at. We are actually going to try to visit there next year early season, so it may work out to meet up. We will keep you posted as our plans come together. How was the snow in Fernie this year?

We had some pretty epic days this year, -25c and 50-70cms make for pretty blower conditions.
Unfortunately I had to work for every storm cycle so only got leftovers.
Guess I gotta pay the bills somehow.
Ya, keep me posted, with a bit of notice I should be able to get some much needed time off.
Still have a prepaid day left at fernie wilderness.
Probably buy a couple more for next year.
Should have a couple new designs built by then.

sam

[Pirenche]

thanks for sharing Epic Planks... great story..

[Buttepacker]

One last quick post to bring us up to present day, and then pretty soon we’re going to start posting about the move into our new manufacturing facility in Grand Rapids, which we are stoked about.

This last 11-12 season was the first year we sold our Vaporizer model, which is a true symmetrical twin, center mount, camber underfoot and rocker on the tips and tails, at 117-93-117. This was our first rockered park/all mountain ski, and was actually built with the same core profile as the Crop Dusters (economy of scale type of thing with keeping our tooling setups as similar as possible). The skis turned out well, very playful and poppy, and it was our first full year of park durability testing with a stable of riders beating on them. They were a little too stiff though because of the Crop Duster core thing, so we are going to end up shaving them down a little bit again next year. We’ve also been trying to build somewhat lower tip profiles (i.e. less rounded) just to do something different, and the actual tip height is pretty close to what a regular camber ski is anyway. The low profile tips also seem to get caught up less doing stuff like mutes. The tips seem to weird some people out though, and they are a bit less optimal landing in pow, which we also tried to design for. For next year we’re going to round them up a bit more, but probably still not up as high as a traditional ski.

Bringing the skis from the backcountry to the park did bring to light some durability issues, which we learned from and adapted to for this summer’s press run. It’s a lot easier to keep skis properly put together when they’re mostly seeing soft snow. Our nylon topsheets got beat up pretty quickly, so it’s going to be a material change again for next year to a different type of sublimated nylon – we also thought screen printing UHMW topsheets, but are sticking with nylon because it’s denser and more elastic. We also had some issues with delamming which we found out had to do with the press not being set to just the right pressure. We had some issues with edge breaks, but as we were using top notch edges are chalking that up to more of the beating skis take in the park. Sometimes there’s not a lot you can do. Overall though, we’re stoked about the Vaporizers and think this summer’s changes will do a lot for next year’s durability.

At the Boyne Test Fest in March we unveiled our new model line for 12/13, which is going to keep the Crop Duster and Vaporizer, get rid of the other traditional cambered skis in the line, and add a new design called the Ripper, which is turning out to be a ton of fun for big mountain. It’s cambered underfoot for turns, early rise for float, tapered tip, and 139/104/130 with a 17m turn radius (185). It likes to go fast. We’re keeping two versions of the Stash board, one for park and one for all/mountain, with both rocker/flat and rocker/camber setups. All in all we’re really pumped about our line, and hoping that next winter doesn’t suck as badly as this last one did. Sales across the entire industry were way down but we still sold some pairs and are looking forward to next year. Setting up the shop over the next few weeks should be an interesting time and we’ll make sure to post some pics.

Here's a sneak peak at our 12/13 ski lineup graphics:


2012 - 2013 Epic Planks Ski Line by Epic Planks, on Flickr

Cheers.

[twizzstyle]

God I love your guy's graphics. Top notch work.

You said you chalked your delamination issues up to not quite the right pressure. I'm curious, was the problem too much, or too little pressure? (you don't need to go into numbers if you want to keep that to yourselves, I'm just curious)

[powbrewer]

Thanks! We had uneven pressure, with too much pressure at the tips/tails of the Vaporizers.

God I love your guy's graphics. Top notch work.

You said you chalked your delamination issues up to not quite the right pressure. I'm curious, was the problem too much, or too little pressure? (you don't need to go into numbers if you want to keep that to yourselves, I'm just curious)

[powbrewer]

Also, we have started to try to capture more and more video of what we have been up to. Below is a link to our first season of doing webisodes (image is a link). Our series is called Germination...check it out and let us know what you think. This year, we plan to work hard on documenting and sharing our ski/snowboard building activities via video and also taking Germination to the next level.


Click to Watch Epic Planks Germination Web Series

[skidesmond]

Great videos! You guys seem to be doing everything right.

[Buttepacker]

Thanks! We had uneven pressure, with too much pressure at the tips/tails of the Vaporizers.

.... which squeezed out too much resin. The glass had been properly wetted but ended up too dry because of the issue. D'oh.

[Buttepacker]

Great videos! You guys seem to be doing everything right.

Thanks!

[Richuk]

Totally respect what you guys are achieving, but was wondering why so many people were being thrown backwards upon landing? Have noticed that you tips look fairly redundant, even in the deeper stuff.

I'm left wondering whether there a fore/aft balance issue within the flex pattern of the core - too much steering being transferred to the heels IMHO.

I really think you guys are doing a great job, so I hope I'm alone in this opinion!

[Joe]

Totally respect what you guys are achieving, but was wondering why so many people were being thrown backwards upon landing? Have noticed that you tips look fairly redundant, even in the deeper stuff.

Hey Richuk, I'm Joe, one of the designers for Epic. Our skis aside, these are the conditions that cause a rider to end up backseat (aside from technique): generally it's a result of too much tip, either due to a ski that is too soft in the tails, bindings that are mounted too far aft on the skis, or skis that are simply too short. I'm not sure what video you may be alluding to or what skis in specific you had issues with, but if you give us specifics we could probably help you tweak the setup or we could certainly learn from the feedback.

Regarding the tips- we really like a truly functional tip. We see a bunch of kind of gimmicky tips popping up. I don't mind them if I can understand the function, but a flat tip meeting a hidden stump might mean a knee injury, whereas a properly rounded tip would deflect off the stump. We feel our gently rounded tips give a nice balance of weight, flotation, and deflection from straightline tip strikes. We'll definitely be playing around with them though.

I'm left wondering whether there a fore/aft balance issue within the flex pattern of the core - too much steering being transferred to the heels IMHO.

Interesting thoughts. Flex design within a core is a enourmous field to study at times. We are realizing that if you really want to make innovatively designed skis you must have a CNC planer on site or you'll never really get the flex pattern you are looking for. As most people know on here, you could design a core for a ski with a certain thickness an infinite number of ways. It's definitely something we're going to be prototyping on an almost daily basis once we get the factory up and running in the next couple of months. It's been hard up until now, because making any modification to a core involved retooling which takes a ton of time and money. But I hear what you are saying. It's such a hard tradeoff- we've got some phenomenal athletes riding our stuff, and when you (broadly speaking) soften the tail you end up with a ski that is more forgiving, easier to play around and butter on, but perhaps less stable on big landings and at high speed. When you stiffen it up, you get the reverse effects- but our riders want a ski you can butter off a cat track lip and then straightline down some gnar on, so it's definitely on us to find that secret formula. Good news is we aren't going to be so secret and we'll definitely be pretty open sharing our experiments with everyone on the board.

I really think you guys are doing a great job, so I hope I'm alone in this opinion!

Thanks, we hope we hear lots of opinions and want to hear as many as we can!