Hello fellow ski builders!
We are a couple of fellows from Bates College in proud Lewiston, Maine that are building some sick boards for credit at the school! I don't know how, but we convinced them it was an academic pursuit, and this tutorial has been very helpful, along with the helpful posts from other people's builds.
Above is a picture of the first blank that we made. It is a poplar core, 130mm tip, 100 underfoot, and 120 tail, 175cm long. A real fatty for destroying the New England crud and rocking it out west, when we do get around to real skiing.
Here is an image of the template, created in photoshop, 'cause CAD is hard for art majors:
You can notice the neat little insignia at the tip, here is another version: (It is the profile of a woman, we think we are going to name the skis "Mother Skis", then have models like "Mother Huckers", "Mother Boards", "Mother Ships" you get the idea)
Eventually, this will be used as an inlay in veneer into a different type of veneer for the topsheet, STEEZY!
Here is an image of the mold that we built, without the 1/8" masonite over it:
We built it so that the tip and the tail and the camber are modular, so they can be swapped out without building a whole new mold.
As for the press, we had some difficulties getting fire hose, so we built the whole thing after Buuk's idea:
However, we decided to operate it with carjacks instead! Inbetween the top mold and bottom mold we are going to use 3" dense foam to hopefully equally distribute the weight across it. Also, we build the mold as a double-wide, so hopefully we can press an entire pair of skis at once
We just got the base material today, from Durasurf, who were rather helpful, and we received the edges, from snowboardsupplies.com, who were rather slow, and hopefully we can get a pair of skis done before next friday, when we are having a class trip to Jackson Hole for Febuary break!
-- at the very least the marriage of art and engineering?! your design is creative; can't wait to see the final results...
