summer 08

[plywood]

guess who`s back!

school kills creativity (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_ ... ivity.html), it`s so true!
this year i had as many exams at university as never before. so i had some pretty painful last two months with basically nothing else than sleeping a little, eating and studying. along with this i built up a "creative vacuum" over time.
now that i have holidays this vacuum had to be filled with all kinds of stuff. to start a bit off topic:

i`ve printed some shirts with my logo:



i`ve built a kite in shape of my logo:

it became heavy as shit and needs at least a hurricane to get some air


i`ve built a purse out of some pieces of a snowboard backpack - i didn`t need this thingy to put in a snowboard anyway :P





i`ve built a slalomskateboard entirely out of 3mm aramid honeycomb in sandwich with 1mm plywood. it works surprisingly well!



i`ve improved the design of existing powder bands for skiing. hopefully i`ll recover lost skis faster next season





so in a way school kills the time to be creative, but creative ideas "happen" anyway. at least in my case. so now i`m just in the right mood to start skibuilding.

so back to topic:

i`m not yet sure with what to start. i`ll have to do some modifications in the shape of the attila, my 190cm superfatty. basically i`m going to change the tip a little, make it a little higher and so.

then i`m going to build a shorter 172 superfat ski for my female buddies. also with rocker and the same shape as always. i`ve already built the cores for those skis in my last building session, so i just have to find the right shape for it. so i`m probabely gonna start with this project, called valkyrie - mainly because those skis are for the girls and this name really suits in my whole "framework" of namegiving as it refers to some ancient tales of the germanic/norse mythology which i started to like. but i`m still looking for inspiration to connect the grafics with those tales. somehow.

and last i`m going to go even bigger with a 199cm long version of the attila. i`m not sure about how to call this pair. i`m also thinking about using fins on this pair, but this is not yet sure.

[burny]

i still dont understand youre logo ... what is it?

good luck for youre skiprojects, sound promising!

[davide]

i`ve built a slalomskateboard entirely out of 3mm aramid honeycomb in sandwich with 1mm plywood. it works surprisingly well!

Supergeil!!

[plywood]

a long time ago since my last post. what a summer! i started working so i had absolutely no time to build.
now that i started building everything goes wrong (jigsaw and router collapsed) and takes longer than intended. BUT! there is light at the end of the horizon. i`ll post my progress soon

@davide: yes, the skateboard was supergeil. but sadly i destroyed it: the honeycomb collapsed... i think it`s just not made for those shearforces that occur in a flexy slalomboard. it sure would work for a stiff board without any flex...

[davide]

Scheisse!!

It is really difficult to make flexible objects (like skis) using honeycomb.

[plywood]

haha are you improving your german?

well, just a little teaser of what is to come:


from left to right:
sigurd, 199
the ultimate uberfat powdertool. i have to do some work in the tip though, i don`t like it right now. a bit too straight... and there will be a swallowtail

attila, 190
never change a winning team - so the shape is the same as last year, i`m just gonna modify the camber/rocker thing a little

gunnar, 182
shape stays also, but camber/rocker changes a lot. the only twin i`m going to build. all the others are "flat" tails with just some rocker in it

valkyrie, 172
is going to have the same camber/rocker as gunnar, but without twintips. basically a fat powder ski for the girls.

[davide]

Why skis for girls are shorter?

I remember you told me you really like that shape.
So, no more experiements?

I plan to learn Tuetch when I will be back from Japan.

[plywood]

well, why the gilry skis are shorter? because the girls are shorter too
they are around 175 or so. my gf spent her whole last season on the evil twins - whenever there was powder. so the evil twins are 177, but twintips. as there is hardly a reason for fat powdertwintips because most of the people never ski powder switch i decided to just "cut away" the tails on the new shapes.
of course the new 172 is far away from the evil twins, i progressed since then for sure.

so the new shape...it`s not one particular shape but more of a "shaping concept" which i really like. but there is still quite a lot of potential in it to vary the particular shapes. so i wouldn`t say no more experiments. the experiments just go in a more specific direction



but now: the building of the mold!

i planed my old mold flat, built two wedges for the rocker and finally a tip and a tail block. this will give me quite some freedom to change the mold for different lenghts, different rocker, twintips, flat tails etc.

i`ve taken some pictures of how i did a tipblock so you can imagine how it`s done. for all the parts listed above i used the same method which involves quite a lot of routertablework.

first of all: i built all the new parts of the mold out of fir. the cheapest wood i could get and it`s pretty easy to machine. i like fir a lot for this kind of work, far better than mdf. so i started with cutting some sheets roughly into shape and glued them together with woodglue.



afte the glue cured i flipped the whole block and profiled one side completely flat. also with the router table.
then i cut some templates out of some wood: standard procedure. draw the shape on 3mm mdf, cut it out with a jigsaw, level out all uneventies with a file so that the template is perfectly in shape. clamp template to wood and copy it with a routerbit with ballbearing. tadaa:



then: fix the templates on the sides of the wooden black which should become the mold:



et voila: perfect guide for a router bridge!



and here`s the final result. the gaps will be filled up with 2x3mm MDF sheets. this creates smooth transitions between the different parts. the different parts get fixed with some dowels



so this method worked pretty well for the flat part of the mold and the two wedges. there it creates a perfectly flat and even surface - it`s far more accurate than the method from skibuilders.com.
for tip and taip blocks it did work too, but it was a bit of a...pain in the ass. the tips have snowboardstyle radius, which is minimum for a router bridge. so i`d recomment to do the tip and tail blocks in the old fashined style.

[Nick's Sticks]

It looks like I am working on a similar pair. I'm going to try out the long straight tip and tail idea as well. Mine are 185-190ish. How long is your tip section? The distance from the tip to the widest part of the ski. I can't wait to hear how they ride. Cheers.

[plywood]

hey nick, sorry, somehow i forgot to answer you. well, my tip section... the mold on the picture above is about 180cm long. tip and tail are about 20 cm and rocker in tip and tail is about 25cm. zero camber. distance from tip to the widest part of the skis... maybe around 20-25cm. mine are shaped more like the pontoons in terms of width in tip.

so, summer 08 gets winter 09 but hopefully i`ll soon be able to show you some new skis. all the preparation work took me way longer than expected. but now i`ve got 6 different tip&tailblocks in stock and 4 woodcores in the pipeline, just waiting to get used.



6 tip/tailblocks + 2 rockerblocks = enough to have fun for a while. i like my new adjustable mold!

[plywood]

finally all the talking has an end and i`m able to show off some new sticks:



i was really busy skiing recently so i hardly found time to build skis. now the first pair is out, it`s called alberich and was intended for some slope skiing allmountain stuff. basically built with leftovers: still had a full ash core laying around and some small base material left over. that`s why those skis are not as wide as usual. dimensions are 183cm long, 124-88-114. as the core was 100% ash i expected the skis to get quite heavy. surprisingly they are 1640g per ski which is not that bad at all. it`s pretty good indeed!

this time i used a 2mm thick aluminium sheet underneath instead of plastic as before. it`s much cleaner and aligning is ridiculously easy. i just superglued the base with a few drops to the alu sheet - great success. the rest was done as usual. well, not really. i built them as cheap and easy as possible, no torsion forks or other bands. those skis are just not wide enough for such things, so i used just plain biaxial fibreglass and unidirectional one.

as those skis are going to be my everyday slope skis i wanted to make them flat, 0 camber. but...somehow...something....don`t ask me why or how... now they have negative camber so i can`t wait to get them on the snow to see how they ride and if they are skiable.otherwise i`ll have to change my mold somehow.

topsheet is local walnut with some stencil prints in the tail. looks beautiful. now i`ll see how it holds up.

i`ll post better pics as soon as i`ve made better ones kind of hard to get a good shot of the topsheet. in the meantime there is again some magic happening in my press...

[plywood]

time for a little update as i`ve finished the 3 pairs in the pic below and a 4th pair, not pictured.



on the left: mimir. in the middle: alberich. on the right: mimir again.

i`ve already written a few words on alberich in the previous post. mimir is a real twintip, 176cm long, 130-100-130, radius about 16m, mounted in true center (pressure point should be directly over true center which is kind of difficult with rental binders, but at least on my personal skis (the ones on the right, not mounted on the pic but mounted now with duckstance) i did a true center mount).

the fourth pair is called sleipnir and is also a real twin. 176cm in lenght, 126-86-126 which results in a 11m radius. they came out pretty soft - the tail was too soft for skiing park, but they were great on slopes. but compared to K2 skis those are the ubernooodles in terms of stiffness

anyway. what do all those 4 skis have in common?!
they are all flat/slightly reverse cambered.
and how does reverse ski on slopes? actually there wasn`t much of a difference! they railed nice on hardpack, the edgegrip was good and they were stable at higher speeds and not squirrelly. as i mounted rental bindings i let a few friends ski mimir and sleipnir and they all liked it. they didn`t feel any difference due to the reverse. overall they liked mimir better than sleipnir because sleipnir is simply too soft. but i`m pretty sure this all would change if it got stiffer as the 11m radius really kicks ass.

so my theory on reverse cambered skis on slopes: they are not worse than other skis. in turns the skis get bent "upwards" anyway, so it`s not much of a difference if there are 8mm of camber or 0. you may want to build them a tad stiffer than regular skis, but only a tad.
furthermore i`ve got the feeling flat/reverse skis aren`t that hooky. regular skis with a narrow radius can need quite some effort to keep them straight on a longer, faster straight downhill passage. i guess this is because the greates pressure results, due to camber, in tip and tail and therefore the edges start to grip there and the skis tend to ?blend? (don`t know the english word). if you build the skis flat you take away some of the pressure in tip and tail and therefore the edges don`t start to grip this soon and the skis aren`t that hooky and it`s easier to control the planks and keep them straight. but that`s just a feeling up to now.

sadly a friend crash landed a jump on the mimir with rentals and now the skis are jarred. lesson learned: park skiing abuses skis pretty hard!

and lastly, as i mounted one pair of mimirs straight with rentals and the other one duck i was able to do some further "research"on duckstance. i can ski straight mounted skis, but it just doesn`t feel that comfortable as duckstance. skiing turns is not much of a difference but on straight mounted skis i find it harder to keep the skis running straight. with a properly mounted duckstance the skis carve as good as with straight mount.

[chuck]

Very, very nice work. I like the wood/simple graphic combo. Very clean.

I found the same with my reverse camber. If only slight it skis pretty normal. Only caution is better on edge than flat straight-line in the really hardpacked. The benefit of great float is worth it!

[billl]

plywood -

wow! those skis look amazing! My question is: how do you protect the veneer? Varnish/clear epoxy or clear plastic topsheet?

Anyways, really a job well done, very impressive (as always)

[shopvac]

Plywood, beautiful skis. What veneer did you use and how did you do the black graphics over the tops? Lovin' it.