Making wooden skies
Wooden skis, created from scratch. Watch a video of some off-piste skiing further down.
I have a great passion for skiing, particularly the kind that takes place off-piste and in mountaineous areas. My collection of different types of skis has grown over time, including different types of cross-country skis, roller skis, and backcountry skis (this is not uncommon in Norway, we are unfortunately one of the «best» nations in the world at buying outdoor equipment).
For many years now, I have been almost exclusively skied on skimo racing equipment, both in and outside competitions. This type of skis (including the binding and shoes) are versatile, and perfect for long days of accumulating elevation gain. While they are not exactly comfortable when skiing downhill on tricky conditions, I use them for everything from lowland powder skiing to couloir skiing. What bothers me, however, is that they are very expensive, quite fragile, challenging (if not impossible) to repair, and relies on a long manufacturing chain that hardly can be reproduced with simple means. I felt the need to liberate my passion for skiing from the dependence on large-scale manufacturers, and decided a few years ago to try to make my own skis, from scratch. My aim was to make skis with as simple tools as possible, and avoid any power tools.
I found a couple of old documentaries online – one was a short Norwegian TV-show segment showing how a craftsman made wooden skis, another was a documentary about Russian trappers living isolated in the Siberian taiga – and I tried to glean as much information as I could from them. The missing parts I had to fill in through trial and error.
The main stages of the process included felling the tree, debarking it, cutting it down to suitable length, and splitting it into two halves. This was followed by shaping the wood, first using an axe, and then hand planes. The final polish was done using a knife and finally sandpaper.
The most challenging part came afterwards: Steam bending the wood to give the skis a raised tip (a "shovel"). I had trouble getting the wood soft enough to get a proper bend on it, and ended up using a combination of boiling and steaming to achieve this. The result was less than optimal, but I learnt some lessons on how to achieve a proper bend for the next pair of skis.
During the whole process, from felling the tree to polishing the shape, I only used axes (two different kinds), a set of hand planes, a knife and sandpaper. Recently, I made a pair if children's skis as well, following the same process as for the first pair.
A dream came true when I could descend a mountain on my very own self-made skis – watch a recap here:
Below I have included a series of pictures from the process of making both pairs of skis.
Debarking a newly felled tree.
Trying to split timber.
Finally managed to split the wood with only ax and wedges.
Shaping the wood with an ax and a plane.
Sometimes it's useful to work inside, although it can get messy...
The ski has soon gotten it's final form.
Comparison before and after sanding the ski.
After boiling the front end of the skis, I put the ski tips in a frame to give them their shovel (raised tip).
A picture from one of the first trips into the mountains with the skis.
Children's skis: One shaped and one unshaped.
Boiling the skis to soften them.
The softened skis are put in a frame.
The skis are covered with tar to make them water resistant.
The finished pair, with bindings.
Two generations of wooden skis.