Telemark Talk / Telemark Tips Forum

Making the gear. I can either pay more money than it is worth to buy something that might do the trick. Or I can made something.

Right now, I want to tear off some kinda fleshy stepbottoms right off the bones of some Goodwill Brand waxless track junk and be left with something I can graft back into some wider bases. This leads to wondering how the skins are affixed in the first place... laminated on with a glue and pressure? Heat? I don't know. What might be a good tech for stripping it off? Slice it off with a razor? Solvents? hot air torch, use termites to remove the wood?

Anybody know of a good glue for the reverse process? I got a darn nice jointer/planer should rip a perfect groove in a ptex base on some greasy slickbottoms, drop in the custom sized and locate stepbottoms and then you got what you want, customized for the slope angles you usually abuse.

It could be made as a kit for hobbiests.

Where Do they get the stepbases, fab them each company titself?

What would be a good thin cold weather greasy plastic cement?

I saw somebody doing some of their own work, was it on this site? I guess I'm too stupid to Google...

Sounds like you want to strip a waxless p-ptex base off one ski and replace on another (whose base was also removed)?

My guess/gamble is that these are usually bonded with some form of Epoxy (2-part glue), but also done so under pressure or vaccum.

I have re-glued an entire p-tex base back onto an old ski. the ski was 20 years old or more and there comes a time when a glue no longer glues.. in this case, it had turned to powder and the p-tex unglued right off when i first tried waxing the skis. To re-gluem, i used G/flex epoxy from West Systems (105/205 should be fine too i presume) cause I have some lying around for royalex canoe work. I glued the p-tex in several steps cause i only have a few clamps at home. used saran wrap on the ski and wood slats to even out the pressure. it might be a good idea to clean the p-tex base with acetone and a light sanding before you start too. its quite a bit of work. others have messed around within melting (hot metal) a waxless pattern into a wax base. lots of work too...

now for pulling the p-tex off, you might be in good luck if they are old skis. try freeing an end with a sharp tool and see if pulling the ptex off like bark from a tree does the tricks....

regardless, you risk damage as you do this, but maybe you don't care...and your just looking for a ski hobby to pass the incoming summer?

P-tex is polyethylene and is difficult to glue with anything as little will stick to it. I believe it is applied with pressure when hot and somewhat soft, and allowed to freeze or fuse (technical terms) in place.

I think your best bet to attach P-tex to a ski bottom are screws which are countersunk to sit lower than the P-tex. You could then put some epoxy on top of the screws, or melt some P-tex into the holes.

I am surprised that this isn't much more common, that these sort of simple structural details would be well known. I don't know them obviously, but I thought I was just uneducated.

Thank you for the responses, I am put into the memory of when I decided BITD that there was no reason a woodshop couldn't turn out nice speaker cabinets. Many people told me the acoustics would never be right, etc. One pair of those cabinets still survive 30 years later and they sound fine. Turns out the acoustics are all boil down math to simple guides and rules of thumb. Ports bear a relationship to interior volume, etc. What I couldn't do was compete on price with China.

An electric plane will take off anything I rub it against to a precise depth and width. Should take about 5-10 minutes setup and 16 seconds of doing, eh?. Maybe a half hour, gotta clean up. Then I need a carefully cut piece of ptex to drop in. It just can't be that hard. The ptex can't be over a 1/16 inch thick, I've tore through it often enough, so adhesives not screws. I've skiied the old screw-in edge era gear and would never use a screw for anything I wanted to keep. Too thin of material anyway.

But there are plenty of tiny ski building companies, or used to be. You can't need vacuume presses just to attach a little base plastic. I know nothing much common seems to work well as adhesive on basecloth, thats why I call them Greasy Plastic. But I guarantee you there is something that works, I'll use Barge (ground up shark scum...) if I have to, a little thick , water it down w/ solvent maybe... And heat may be used in the curing of a glue but the plastic is not laid down hot.. Using them in cold with flex is an issue, not a barrier. Use the right stuff, should be fine, just, what is the right stuff?

Given how tiny you guys parse every weight-shift, dice up a skis' every trait and mangle every binding to its metallic origins, I'd a thought you guys would all know every stinky detail of a skis construction. That you'd have little shops in the back of your stores customizing gear. Even Bike shops do that.

And the different companies clearly seem to use different compounds as well as different patterns... how? The base material has to be a most important consideration, who is designing it? Who makes it? Which company has the best combination of pattern and material, I would expect them to be the company with the smallest strip for a given application.


I actually expected that my answers to this would be off-the-shelf with helpful posters pointing me to existing archived threads and a chuckle about how poorly informed a Jong I was.

Whats wrong with you guys, anyway? Don't Americans have any Manual Skills anymore? Anybody remember Shop Class?

check out http://www.skibuilders.com

Rokjox wrote: I actually expected that my answers to this would be off-the-shelf with helpful posters pointing me to existing archived threads and a chuckle about how poorly informed a Jong I was.

Whats wrong with you guys, anyway? Don't Americans have any Manual Skills anymore? Anybody remember Shop Class?

Yeah, cause we all have vacuum ski presses in our garage and build skis for all our friends over the summer cause we just don't know what to do with ourselves when it rains...

What I shared with you about epoxy works. It DIY repair/mod. Try it or don't. Why you would even bother gluing an old waxless base on a wax ski? I've got no clue. Have you never used wax???

For more info, I'll leave the google and forum searching to you, nothing better than Doing It Yourself!

Send us a pic of your masterpiece when its done! Take care Rox.

Rokjox wrote:IWhats wrong with you guys, anyway? Don't Americans have any Manual Skills anymore? Anybody remember Shop Class?

I'll tell you what's wrong with me: my high school did not have a ""Build your Own Skis" option in Shop class. You are pretty lucky to have that cool of a shop class!

There's shit-tons of used scaled skis out there. Maybe try a few of them before going to the trouble of making your own?

I've got a friend that developed his own scaled skis: https://marquette-backcountry.com/ I gave them a 'college try' (as the Québécois nuns used to say...). They are not my cup-o-tea. They are a bit heavy and too short, plus, no metal edges. They ARE a good for replacement for slowshoes though...and they climb like goats.

Bri7 knows how to make his own skis.

He had some pics of the exact thing you were asking but he was making his own scaled, Ptex insert to put in, not scalping it from another ski.

He has access to quite a bit more tools than the average Joe though, and a job that doesn't care if he uses them.

Anyway I'm a little confused why you'd go through all this trouble when you could buy a pair for relatively cheap.

I generally only attempt to make stuff when:

a) I cannot afford to buy
b) I think I can do a better job than what I can buy
c) for fun to pass the time

A isn't a viable options very often, because these days, it's almost always cheaper to buy someone else's used stuff. We're a throw away society and some people go through skis like underwear.

B is certainly not the case. I do not have the knowledge or capability to make skis, unless perhaps it was a simple, old style ski make of wood.

C, well, making skis isn't my idea of fun. Skiing is. I've designed and built all sorts of things from amps to race cars. In the end it's always more fun to do the end job than go through the trials and tribulations of design and built. Plus it's kind of my job now. And most people tend to get burned out if they do that kind of thing all the time, I know I do.

Lots of fractured alphabet around here. I think I want to talk to the kind of Skiiers that go into the backcountry, side country, whatever, chasing distance and elevation in the real world. The only packed trails you use are the ones the guy in front of you just made. Or following a snogo track through some powder, cheating the depth of the bottom.



Its getting obvious we need varible profile skis. Some kinda gismo that we can shift on the fly.

Moving in and out of trees and using different slopes in the spring makes a joke out of the idea we can use one ski profile the whole day. Or for an honest ten minutes, for that matter. I want something that I can dial 2 inches of shaped floatation in or out of the picture. Skinny when there is a trail or road, crust or firm subsurface and I'm wandering across the approach lake, medium as I begin the climb and full on Gibson Girl when the second half of the day begins.

Skis have undergone very little innovation really. Things look just about exactly the way the did ages ago. You guys measure everything in millimeters to try and emphasize the differences, but that really points up the small changes that are considered important. A trait of a mature tech, not an innovative one.

I want better. I want the kind of change that took me from 5 tube superhet radios to a IC chip radio embedded in my sunglasses with bone conduction speakers... ((oops, that comes in about another decade)) But you understand. Skis are OLD tech. there has to be better. Wood cores? In an age of synthetic, built to performance materials? Why are nobody revamping the hexel core material idea in a synthetic poly form? I don't even see many foam cores, although I actually don't know a lot of skis, I just go through piles of used gear whenever I see it. When fisher first made those e99's my buds and I used them, they have a solid place in the snow, but the snow needed to be right, and you wore them long for float so a carved turn had a pretty large radius. Not great on crust... etc. So now I use dead heavy plastic, wires and fat heavy skis. What kind of improvement is that?

Time for a full court press on tech again. The ski rags seem to suggest (scream) that BC skiing is all the growth and rage in skiing right now...

I say there is rooom for innovation and a much better product. NNN has its niche where it seems to shine, and it was an innovation. I want the same for Light weight snow skis and boots. I want what splitskis did for snowboarders, a whole new world opened up. When downhill skiers wanted to stiffly walk even a little uphill, they came up with AT. Pretty crappy for small guys and long distances, but great idea if you think you need releaseable stepins to ski the steep backsides of lift areas. Opened up a new world for them.



I got some lighter plastic boots for mixed terrain, they just don't quite make it for the steep downhills. I know that some are working on this, I just cant wait. Maybe a better stepbottom with a varible grip, smooth when dialed out? I want a ski that suddenly add 5 miles to my training tours. That makes me want to take every extra siderun off the trail, like I used to. Put back those ten runs on every ascent that I did when I was 30 years younger.

When I am moving up, I carry a full on 20-25 lb pack, when I am skiing the practice runs, I drop the pack at the top or wherever... Controllable camber? A little knob on the ski you use a wrench to tighten it up?

Controllable camber has been done before. There was a cross country ski company offering a ski, with a knob, that let you adjust the camber/stiffness. Apparently they were pretty fragile, but maybe modern materials and processes could make them strong enough for those willing to pay?

There's also a patented alpine version:

http://www.google.com/patents/US4577886