ALCHEMY SKI COMPANY

I'll never forget the day that my brother Ethan came up to me and our friend Jonathan and suggested we make skis. I thought he was insane. Ludicrous. Preposterous. Skis are hard to make, right? And you need a bunch of tools, right? I was in 9th grade--how was I supposed to know! A few days later, we started looking into it. As it turns out, it was incredibly difficult, but not impossible. After all, we loved skiing, we loved building things, and we loved mixing those two things and doing something cool just because we could. 

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To build skis, the first thing you need is a ski press--effectively a large steel coffin with the ends open. Upon researching ski presses, our dream quickly died as we realized ski presses were tens of thousands of dollars and we were in 9th grade and had nowhere near that kind of money. But nay, we realized we could build our own ski press! We drew up some quick plans, then combining our savings, purchased enough steel tubing to assemble our own ski press. You also need something to expand pneumatically to provide pressure on everything inside the ski press. Using nothing more than a hacksaw and our dad's old drill, several weekends of work later, we had our 150 lb ski press built.

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The second thing you need to build skis is a core profiler. If you look at a ski from the side, you'll notice the tip of the ski is usually much thinner than right underneath the binding. You need less material up front so your ski can flex correctly and more material under your foot so that you have a sturdy base. A ski's core is almost always made up of long strips of various woods, sandwiched together. We came up with a great idea of how to profile the cores so they were varying thickness, then went to Home Depot, bought some wood, and made the core profiler. One step closer to ski making!

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The third thing you need to build skis is a mold. When you look at a ski from the side, you'll notice how the tip rises up ("rocker") and underneath the binding, it is usually a bit concave ("camber"). This is called a ski's camber profile. In order to give a ski rocker and camber, you need a mold that holds that shape. Every ski has a different profile, so you need a new mold for every ski. The mold is several pieces of wood stacked together with the camber profile cut into it, with a male and female side. For our first mold, we took the shape of a ski we all liked and directly traced it onto a piece of wood, then cut each piece to shape and glued it all together. We had a mold! We were so proud!

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The fourth thing you need to build skis is a template. When you look at a ski from above, you'll notice it is usually small at the tip, then goes a bit wider, then has a large radius and is very narrow under your foot, then is fat at the tail again. A template matches that shape for every ski you have. You want a new ski shape? You need a new template. For our first template, we took the shapes of several skis we liked and averaged all the values. It had to be perfect, right? When you average out good things, you only get great things, right? We cut out our first template and were so excited. That was the last piece of tooling we needed!

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The last thing you need to build skis is, well, materials to build skis. These were going to be the greatest skis of all time, so we gotta buy the best materials right?? Well we know skis have carbon fiber, so lets buy a bunch of that. We know we want to go fast, so lets buy the best base material that you can buy--usually only for Austrian race skis. 

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After several months of work and prep, we finally got all of our things ready to make our first pair of skis. We laid everything up in our mold and then put it in the ski press. A few hours later, once the epoxy cured, we decompressed the ski press, took the mold out, and had our first skis! We were ecstatic. Our dreams had come true. After convincing a friend who worked in a ski shop to tune the skis, we were on our way to hitting the slopes on our homemade skis. 

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The day had finally come. The months of work. The draining our life savings. The no social life because we spent every weekend building things. We finally hit the slopes and..... they were awful. By far the worst skis I have ever skied in my entire life. You had no control. For some reason, turning left was easier than turning right. There was zero flex, so you felt like you were strapped onto 2x4's. No matter--being the risktaker my brother was, during his turn, we went to the top of the steepest chute in the resort and took them on a test run. He crashed instantly and the ski slashed open his arm--bad enough that we went to Ski Patrol. After bandaging him up, they had to go through the regular procedure of asking him what brand was his helmet, what brand were his bindings, etc. etc. Then they asked "What brand are your skis?" To which he said "Uhh we made them." The ski patroller said "well that's one of the coolest things I've ever heard."

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At that point, we knew we couldn't give up. We had to keep iterating. We needed to learn more about ski design, wood, composites, and manufacturing techniques. Over the next year, we built 10 more pairs of skis, all getting increasingly better and better. We learned that certain woods are more forgiving than others. We learned that UHMWPE (the plastic used for ski bases) thermally warps a lot, so we need to be quick about working with it. We learned that composites put in the ski at a +45/-45 angle give the ski more torsional stiffness. There is a surprisingly small amount of information on the internet about ski building, so many of these lessons were taught simply by iterating. 

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Once we got our process a little more dialed in, our imaginations started running wild. What kind of skis can we make? What have we always wanted to ski? What kind of skis are nowhere on the market? We got to experimenting and had a ball testing our own equipment. One standout was a pair of skis that were modelled off of downhill skis, meaning you could barely turn them until you were going 50+ mph--we named them Mjölnir, after Thor's hammer. Another favorite was a pair of skis so wide that you had to stand like a cowboy when you were standing in lift lines. We designed them specifically for very deep powder days, so you would be lifted out of the powder unlike any ski you could buy. Fittingly, we named them Icarus.

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After we hit our 18th or 19th pair of skis, we decided it was time to go into business and register as an LLC. Being big fans of science, folklore, and general history, we settled on the name Alchemy Ski Company. Over the next few years, we would end up selling about 15 more pairs of custom skis to friends, friends of friends, neighbors, etc. We always wanted to do this for our own sake of doing cool stuff and learning, but getting to a point of selling skis and making money on it was unbelievable. 

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I will always be so proud of the fact that as high schoolers, we looked at something we wanted to make, taught ourselves everything about it, funded it entirely ourselves, and even ended up making money on it. The number of lessons I learned from Alchemy are far too many to even list.