Ski Builders Forum

This afternoon I met someone (Dirk) from a Dutch ski forum who is doing a course on evolutionary product development for his study industrial design at Twente University of Technology (The Netherlands). For this he deconstructed a Dynastar Troublemaker ski, below you see the layup around the binding area.



Some dimensions of this piece of the ski (from bottom to top):
Base: 1,3 mm thick (for 1,9 mm edges)
Biaxial fibreglass: 1 mm thick
Wood core: around 7.5 mm thick
Biaxial fibreglass (2 layers): 2 mm thick
Top sheet: 1 mm thick

Sidewall: 3 mm wide at bottom, 2 mm wide at top.
There is also no damping rubber above the edges, but only in the tip and tail pieces.

In the above picture (and in the picture below between the wood and on the right) there is also some white UHMWPE material inside the woodcore. This is probably implemented using a circle saw to cut away some wood and afterwards the UHMWPE is glued into the woodcore.


In the picture above you can see that the wood core of the ski consists of two pieces of that are glued together below the binding area (for indication, this piece is 18 mm wide, depth).

Maybe this gives a little more insight to how the big ski manufacturers construct their skis.

Buuk
with thanks to Dirk

Buuk, thanks for posting the info (also thanks to Dirk). i love seeing the guts of other skis; it's like peeking into a candy store...

suhweeeeet! i love that ski, rides amazing. cool to see exactly how they put them together. a lil different than i thought. the polyethylene in the core is odd, dampening? binding mount?

I'm the person that "deconstructed" the TM. I think the layer in the core is ABS, but it might also be PE. It seems similar to the sidewall material.

I think they use these inserts to prevent the bindingsscrews from tearing out. ABS and PE are tough materials, they have good resistance to impact. The inserts are probably able to soak up forces that would usually tear the screws out. The inserts will also give a better damping, but I don't think that it's their primary purpose.

darn awesome! Good work showing the layers like that. That core is very interesting.. hmmm