Building skis with my boys

I know every snowskater has gone through at least a couple of situations where friends or strangers have been kinda blown away by riding without bindings. As a builder its even more intense when they learn I made the snowskate. Its fun…sometimes, to share with interested parties the why and how of snowskating. Most of my friends are accustomed to seeing me on a skate so now there really isn’t any more wide eyed looks from them. I bring a new sub into the house and the kids are always nice and say that it looks good but no one is blown away any more. So I was a bit surprised at the reaction I got after making a set of skis with my boys. Let me say that my boys do snowskate but they LOVE to ski. They have a group of ski buddies, they watch all the vids and they follow the pros. They love to ski! So when I started on this ski project the difference began with the kids being waaaay more interested in the shop process. Always asking if we could go out and work on the skis. Then all their buddies got excited then the parents of the buddies got excited. People were asking me crazy questions like did I drip all the ptex onto the core to make the base, or how did I bend the wood. How much did it cost, how long? Were did I learn to do this? Where did I get the material? And these are from people who have been watching me snowskate for years and know I make all the parts on the skates??

Well I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I do live in a ski town. But that’s ok cause I have an ulterior motive for building skis for my boys and that’s to try and make a super fast sub for snowskating. Maybe its because I’m a bit worried about our el nino winter prediction and how it often leaves us with few pow days. My guess is it falls into the summer wacky idea category. Way back in the early days of bidecks, a company from england named Barefoot tried to start a revolution with skate decks mounted to full size skis. They looked a bit wierd and disappeared soon after buying a full page add in starfish. But there is no reason a long narrow sub with the right dimensions couldn’t instill confidence when going really fast. It might need a high truck mount and I’m kinda in the dark as to radius but hey that’s the fun part when building a product so few people understand.