This project was born out of the love for chasing the floating sensation from deep days on the mountain. Driven by a curiosity and interest in exploring ski manufacturing methods and CNC machinery, three friends embarked on creating their own powder riding vehicles. Inspired by surfboard shapes, the snowboards pictured feature designs from their wave riding counterpart.

Design

The large spoon shaped nose increases surface area for lift.
Shortening the tail and shifting the stance back makes it easier to drop the tail during riding for increased lift from angle of attack.
A swallow tail is a shape that features a V cutout in the center of the tail.
This cut helps with reducing total tail surface area, making it easier to drop the tail, while maintaining effective edge length.

Construction

The ski construction process can be divided into three groups: molds and templates, the laminate, and the press.

With access to a CNC router and laser cutter, the building approach relied heavily on the machines, taking advantage of its precision and labor. The ski molds, core, and base material templates were cut using the machines.

Using the CNC was not plug and play—it didn’t come without its limitations or learning curve. Workarounds had to be created for the molds and cores that spanned longer than the cutting bed. I had to learn how to use Mastercam and program G-code to run the router. It took trial and error to dial in the right feeds and speeds to make sure that the material wasn’t chipping. And a whole lot of dust was created.

Molds & Templates

Forming a flat rectangular piece of material into a curved rideable board takes molds and templates. A flat template for the base material was laser cut out of Masonite. A router was then used to cleanly cut the base.

The bottom mold was CNC cut out of stacks of MDF. Once cut, the mold provided the 3D rocker profile of the board.

Laminate

A laminate is when layers of material are glued together. In this case, it was a combination of base material, composite weave, a core, rubber strips, metal edging, epoxy, and a top sheet.

Base: 4001 grade base material
Weave: carbon fiber and tri-ax fiberglass
Core: poplar wood
Top sheet: clear to show wood grain

When sandwiched between thin layers of sheet metal, this is known as the “cassette.” Release film is applied to the sheet metal, making it easy to take the whole thing out of the mold, and lift the board out of the with layers of sheet metal to put in and pull out of the curing easily,

Pressure

Pressure is needed to have the laminate take the shape of the mold during curing. Typical ski manufacturers use 40psi of pressure.

To apply pressure to the mold, we inflated a fire hose with an air compressor using Airtech ports. Housing the mold and the hose was the ski press we built, comprising of steel extrusions and threaded rods. In between the hose and the cassette was the top mold and the cat track, a series of small aluminum extrusions to more evenly distribute the pressure into the laminate.

From bottom to top, the cross section of the press:

Bottom of Press > Rocker Mold > Cassette > Cat Track > Fire Hose > Top Mold > Top of Press