Maker

the sidewalls and do some final touch-up work with a file. From there on, it’s the same as with store-bought skis: bindings have to be mounted and a base grind and tuneup will be needed to get them performing at their peak. The entire process (minus the binding mounting and tuneup) can be done in a long day.

As complicated as it all sounds, by your second pair of skis, you may already be saving money compared to buying high-performance skis off a rack. “Costs to get this setup can vary dramatically, but depending on your scavenging skills and ingenuity, ^D a setup can be as little as a few hundred dollars,” Big Kam says. “We highly recommend that first-time builders try to scrounge up as much material (free or discounted) as possible to lessen costs.For the tooling, which includes pneumatic press, core profilers, sanders, routers, et cetera, I would estimate the total cost to be near $600. The material to build one pair of skis can be as low as $50.”

To date, the guys behind skibuilders.com have added about one pair of skis a month to their site’s ski gallery. They’re now up to almost 30 pairs. There are reverse cut and reverse camber creations, traditional-shaped skis, twin tips, and swallowtails. Most are either based on existing, off-the-shelf skis, or are exotic, flight-of-fancy creations. Making them quickly and testing them is, at least for now, more important than long-term durability. In fact, each member of the site has a good delamination story.

“Getting things to bond well is a tricky process,” Little Kam says. “Last season I was skiing on a pair of skis on which I tried a new method of using fabric paint for the graphic. After a few icy landings in the park the topsheet completely ripped off … the paint separated. I decided to ski with the topsheet flapping around for the rest of the day, much to the confusion of Southern Californian snowboarders.”

Wu admits that the group still has a lot to learn about the building process. “There are a lot of material treatment and bonding issues that we need to figure out, and how best to do it in a garage shop,” he says. “I think most of our delamination could be eliminated with proper treatment and cleaning. Also, there isn’t a lot of empirical data on how the flex, sidecut, length, and other aspects of ski design work together and how they affect the ski’s performance. We also still need to figure out how best to control the camber of the skis in a heated press. It seems that the heat and the

E

Fig. D: When they come off the press, the skis are attached to each other by the fiberglass sheet. Fig. E: Using a router to shape the sidewalls.

differences in thermal expansion of the materials make it really hard to predict how the ski will turn out once everything cools down.”

THE TEST

After spending a day on a pair of garage-built skis, I was hooked. I can honestly confess that they performed as well as the all-mountain, high-end K2s I’ve used for the last two seasons. The garage skis garnered a lot of strange looks from the lift attendants but they were an absolute blast on the runs. Granted, I was worried the whole time that they might delaminate in the middle of a steep run, but they never did. And, even if they do break, I now know how to make more!

Seattle-based Jason Verlinde usually writes about guitar, not ski, builders for his magazine the Fretboard Journal ( fretboardjournal.com).

32 Make: Volume 10