Ski Builders Forum

Nice! Thats the sort of thin I had in mind.

Well, if people think it will be of help I can put something together explaining Classical Laminate Analysis (CLA). It might look a bit tedious and may feel like going back to school but it could be pretty useful for ski design.

One of the things CLA generates is the ABD matrix, a 6x6 matrix that is the equivalent to the Young's modulus (stiffness) and Poisson's ratio of a regular material. The downside is that a 6x6 matrix is more complex than just two numbers, but the 'D' matrix it generates (bottom right 3x3 sub-matrix) will tell you the difference in longitudinal, transverse and torsional stiffness of the sandwich.

With this you could do stuff like design a ski to be really rigid torsionally under foot by less torsionally rigid towards the tip to make it less 'hooky'. Other stuff that you can do is design the lay up so that as the ski is put on edge and flexed the layup actually twists to increase the edge angle and push the ski into the snow. This is used in Aerospace, Formula 1 etc...For example the wing on an F1 car is designed so that the amount of down force it provides varies with speed, there no mechanical parts, the layup of the composites in the wing is just designed to change shape with speed. Another possibly cool idea would be to engineer the layup of a pow ski so that as the ski is bent up the tip curls in to create a boat hull type profile.

Yes! Do it! I'm interested.
I will probably buy some time in our calculation clusters. :-)
If this goes on, we will probably have more data and info on this site than the whole industry! Long live open source!

Although I have to put in, (my personal view...:-) you don't have to put this in the algorithm), but there is always the "look and feel" factor. If a ski doesn't appeal, it won't feel good either. Stiff or soft.
I don't know if there are any golfers in here, but when you adress the ball with the club and you don't like what you see, it won't be a good hit. The human brain is not always hooked on techincal evidence....:-)

I'd say go for it. There's plenty of engineers who would get a lot out of something like that. Then there's guys like me that will get some general info from it and hope for the best.

I agree w/ OAC, what the final numbers represent can really turn out to be subjective based on the skiers/boarders likes and dislikes. So it turns out to be kind of relative in a way.

I'd like to see the hard data!

OAc I see your brain point but I don't look at my skis when I shred so I really only care how cool they look on the lift or in my basement. I see your point however.