Finished my skis just before Christmas, so time to upload some pics.
I will add comments later! COMMENT IS FINALLY ADDED!
Buuk
The skis core is made out of ash, I did choose for this type of wood because it was not that expansive and it has good properties. On the image you can see the wood being ripped into strips. The strips are arranged in such a way that there is symmetry (as far as this is possible) around the length axis.
I glued the wood together using Titebond III ultimate wood glue and this gave a rocksolid bond. I used way too much glue as you can see on the image and it buckled a bit because I clamped a relative thin surface with quite some clamping force. A lot of improvement can be made at this point.
To cut out the contour for the ski I cutted out a template using a water jet cutting machine at university. This worked nice, but had the disadvantage that I had to make the template out of two pieces.
Above you can see both the metal contour templates mounted on a piece of MDF to copy it to the wood core.
Here I routed out the core and I am fine tuning the wood core using a chisel.
And this is the result after creating the two wood cores.
Afterwards I glued the sidewall to cores using epoxy. I treated the sidewalls using a UV-ozon method which uses some special type of striplight to get oxygen in the surface to be able to bond it. I also used the flame treatment method which also seemed to work good enough. I hope to perform some test with both methods later on.
After gluing the sidewalls to the core I first planed the cores and then routed a groove for the edges.
Then I builded a profiling table and profiled the core, this was quite easy. I hope I have the possibility to make a profile using the water jet cutting machine next time to get a smooth slope in the profile.
Close-up of the profiling process.
Then, a few weeks later I cutted out the tip and tail spacers and glued them to the core using Loctite superglue (cyano-acrylate glue). I didn't really have time to reduce the thickness of the tip/tail spacers to the core thickness, because I wanted to finish them before my wintersports.
Then I started preparing the mold for pressing. I used a aluminium plate at the bottom and top of the layup to obtain a smooth layup surface.
Then I started the layup process. I first putted 200gr/m^2 UD fibreglass on the base...
Then 420 gr/m^2 biaxial fibreglass...
And wetted this...
This is what the result looked like.
Now I added a the white topsheet.
Then I placed a aluminium plate on top, placed the firehose and the top mold and packed it in painters plastic.
Then everything went into the press at about 4.5 bar pressure and the next morning after about 16 hours and a sleepless night, the first ski came out.
My first completed ski next to the materials for the second ski. As you see in this picture, I also used damping rubber above the edges and in the tip and tail.
This is during the flashing process. It took me quite some time to find the correct setting for my jigsaw.
And this is the final result!
And this is me showing the ski! (location is Nendaz, 4 Vallées, France)
