These are our three first pairs.
Winter is coming, it´s already snowing outside so... guess the time to use my homebuilts has arrived.
I thank all of you guys envolved in this web and forum.
This is being agreat experience
Oh I almosto forgot it.... here go some photos of my home mountain (2o kms from my home).
beutiful skis!
tell us more about them.
the ones to the right, ilooks like a 3d shaped core with a wood veneer, how did u acieve that? vacuum?
how did u shape the cores?
Hey, thanks...
All of them are ash, ash/oak or ash/samba vertical laminated cores and triax fiberglass. The big ones have uhmw sidewall, and the others wooden sidewalls.
All of them have been pressed with a neumatic press.
When we shaped the core of the pair at the right we noticed that the waist was a litlle softer than we expected so we decided to fix an oak plate to make it more stiff. Then we pressed the skis with the bladders on them, with out the mdf layer that we use under the bladder, and the result was surprisingly good. I think that next pair will have those plates too, they look real good.
ok.... some more info.
The first pair we made is the one in the middle.
We made some mistakes. The dimensions a re 128-71-115, and it´s avery stiffi, maybe too much. One of the things that we worried about while making it was to make a stiff ski... so we used a 50/50 ash/oak core...2 alu layers and 2 triax fiberglass layers.
Our doubts blew off when we took the skis out of the press..:yes you can build a stiff ski at home, even you can make a too stiff to be skied ski, hoho.
For the second pair (the one at the right) we used the same templates... but we tried to civilize it a little bit. First of all the core, just ash, and some urethane rubberc to make it lighter an damen vibrations (very very good results)
sorry... i submited it by mistake.
we placed the urethane rubber forward the waist.Second thing was to make civilize the tails reshaping them.
Some more fiberglass (no alu this time), rice paper encapsulated graphics...
Oh I almost forgot it.... the ist pair, the darkest one has an special wood looking nylon as topsheet... it looks pretty cool, and it´s cheaper than plastic.
(and can be printed on a home printer)
How thick are the cores on your first pair? That should have a greater affect on the stiffness than the core material because it moves the strongest part of the ski, the fiberglass, further away from the centroid of the ski in the bending plane. Causing there to be a greater "I" Value (Second moment of inertia) which causes there to be less deflection under equivalent loads. Dont get me wrong, the core material will have an affect on the flex of a ski (and how its vibration is dampened and how much "energy" the ski has) But the thickness of the core and what materials you use on the outermost layers, i.e. metal and how many layers of fiberglass you layup, will have a much greater affect on the stiffness of a ski than the core material. Think of it as an steel I-beam If you have a taller I beam it will be stiffer than a shorter beam.
Ey Chaka! How are you? Have you already tested the skis? I´d like to know how they ride.
I´ll soon upload pictures of my homemade skis, I rode them last friday on powder and they worked quite well.
Good luck with yours!
Hey 4 pairs tested already... all of them work great but specially the pair you can see at the right. They are really soft but work grat at high speed.... very light, and versatile.
keep working on more pairs. Maybe I start a custom ski company this spring.
