5-12-10 Mt hood white river

Recently a friend asked me why I didn't try building my own skis, as I am a wood worker, and it seemed the natural thing to do.  Included in his email was link to skibuilders.com.  To make this short, I bit.  It was about a 6 week process of research,  tool building, material acquisition, and building the skis.  Today was test day, and since I built a pair of light, stiff, narrow mountaineering skis, the day was perfect.  hard ice in the early morning, as I left Timberline and headed east to get in some quick laps, followed by softening corn by mid-morning.  The perfect conditions to test a spring and summer mountaineering ski.  Due to the exposed nature of the white river drainage I stuck to east aspects for descents, as west aspects were melting out, and lots of rock, and rock fall are occurring.  I skied in all three tributary drainages reaching over to Mt Hood Meadows terrain, and back to timberline, doing multiple laps at elevations between ~5k - 6.7K.  The skis performed perfectly, and i am really happy with all the work and time I had put in.  The ski specs are 172.5cm with a running length of 149.5cm.  105mm - 73mm - 94mm.  weight is 4#13oz with binding and skin per ski. core profile is 15mm at the boot and 3mm at tip and tail.  Poplar core with ash sidewalls, tip and tail filler. 19oz triaxial glass sandwiching the core, with 5oz carbon x 2" wide as the bottom ply for added longitudinal stiffness.  polycarb clear cap.  for these first skis i used tap plastics marine epoxy and fast hardener.  As to the skiing characteristics, they carve like nothing i have skied before (good), have very good speed stability (something I have missed in my noodley mid fats), excellent edge grip, and are light, so they tour well. on a side note I observed 3 marmots emerging from winter.  quite a treat. They are much easier to see on the snow then in the rock of summer.