Useing wooden sidewalls

[ski_or_die]

When useing wooden sidewalls, like maple, what do you treat the material with? If you do? Before or after pressing the skis?

[davide]

I put some epoxy or some topcoat, to prevent water from get into.
I do that as the last step.

[collin]

It might be worth to mention that Igneous skis uses end grain wood sidewalls. This seems to be a good idea to me if only because having the end grain exposed means it'll soak up more epoxy, and the epoxy would penetrate deeper. Though you're going to be glueing shorter lengths together, which means more work.

I think the Kam's/Kelvin were having problems with wood sidewalls getting beat up pretty quickly (on the White's maybe, I forget). Davide, are they working well for you? K's did you do something different on other skis that worked better?

[littleKam]

yeah, for our first few pairs of skis the wooden sidewalls got chipped quite a bit. we switched to p-tex topsheets which helped protect the sidewalls, but they still get damaged. for some of our later skis we used p-tex or abs sidewalls and so far they seem to hold up well. we'll have to see how this season's skiing will harm them.

[davide]

I use horizontally laminated wood core, without any sidewall. Actually the sidewall is the core itself.
In my first pair, I let the core sidewall at 90° respect to the top layer, and actually the upper edge got smoother after few runs. Then I made 30° angled sidewall (see below), but I did not do very much testing, just 2/3 days at the end of the last season; anyway it seems to be less exposed to damages.
I suppose it depends also on the way of skiing.
I think that a thick layer of topcoat would help a lot to protect the wood from scratches.

[bigKam]

Collin: the wood sidewalls hold up okay. since we used P-tex as a topsheet, we've seen significant improvement. one thing to do is to use some sort of wood sealant on the sidewalls to keep water from degrading the wood. i highly recommend just using wood for sidewalls when you first learn how to make skis. it makes the process a lot easier and faster. once you figure things out then you can get fancy and incorporate sidewalls and other neat stuff...