I'll start with what I think is my most banger project. I could go to extreme lengths to describe the history, chain of events, and thoughts that led to the creation of these skis but honestly there's so much to it that it would just turn into a big assed wall of text. With that they did evolve into something more refined over a few pairs of skis anyways so that progression should speak volumes for itself.
In short with this one project I wanted a really unique pair of pow skis that were designed with maximum surfability in mind. In my mind that translated to a totally edgeless, tapererd, and rockered ski. That sounds rad and all but in the off chance you hit some snow slightly harder than a potato, shit would turn into kamikaze ops real quick. Would edges prevent that? Maybe, but when you pile on the taper and rocker you really start to lose effective edge and don't make much grip in the end anyways.
My solution? Fins, short ones that protrude a few millimeters below the base. Enough to anchor the ski through a pretty ripping turn, but not so much that you're dragging claws through the snow. They're akin to what the OG DPS Spoon was aiming to do with it's cleats, and purposefully alike runners on a snowmobile ski.
Here's the 3 pair that have been a part of the project so far:
The pair on the far left are based off of my 'Oliver' shape which isn't even close to my full design intention. I had a pair being built in that shape though and decided to scrap them as a traditional build and turned them into a finned build to see if there was any merit to the idea. The other two pair are my 'Sir Fin' shape, with the blue sidewalled pair being the latest evolution.
Scope the fins here:
So the skis evolved from the pair on the left to the pair on the right. On my original 'Oliver' pair there were 4 fins per ski. Originally they had a super aggressive shape and the fin location was more or less a direct rip on what the Spoon and it's cleats were doing. This pair was absolute hell to ski. They were so locked in that I literally couldn't turn them on hard snow. I eventually ground the fins down to a much lower profile and that made the skis functional however they still felt very hooky in the tip and tail.
From there I decided to switch to 2 fins per ski, directly under boot center. That way the ski would sort of pivot around them, and they would get more pressure on them from the skiers weight while turning. This pair was a massive improvement over the last, they felt like pretty normal skis while carving through boiler plate snow. The new 'Sir Fin' shape was way more aligned with what I wanted for a pow ski as well. The big issue with these ended up being how far in the fins were mounted, too much angulation ended up lifting the fin of the ski away from the snow and that dumped all grip immediately.
That lead me to the latest pair which had the fins underfoot again, but this time they were placed directly on the sidewall which was another huge improvement. Overall they feel really good on firm snow. I enjoy blasting around on the latest iteration of the 'Sir Fin' more than any other ski in my quiver. You can lean them over quite well, ski them really fast, and still butter the nose and tail really well as there is absolutely no edge. At that the base and edge across all 3 pair have a round over on them to improve that surfy feel on all types of snow.
All of that being said I definitely need to get some footage of these bad beasts. The only riding I've had on them has been on some fam shreds at a local resort. While the fam is great, none of them are exactly eheath when it comes to filming. So unfortunately I kind of have to blue-balls everyone until next season, cue "OP must deliver...!" I have some other plans in the works for this project over the summer as well to make it more rad, longer lengths, wider, more taper, more rocker...
I could also prove the relevance of these skis by making some weirdly photoshopped photos that have no relevance, talking about how I'm skiing on several axis, attest to the power of healing crystals, and go out stacking some wicked gopole shots. That's not in the cards though, trust me we'll get some sick shots for you guys.
Associated photo dump below:
Shoutout to all the squad who's helped me out one way or another over the past few years. You guys are awesome, keep that up, I like it, I owe ya a cold one.
That's that. Fire away with questions, tell me how I'm 70 kinds of crazy, let me know if I should rename all of this shit fartcarve, etc... If you do like this though I've definitely got some more stuff up the sleeves for a later date. I don't know when, probably whenever I damn feel like it though.
