TR: Making skis in Reno, Nov 7-13, 2006

[shera]

Question: How's a girl to ski the fourteeners all by her little lonesome when she hasn't got a touring rig?

Answer: Let the wind blow through the swiss cheese holes in her blonde head for a while. Scroll through the address book. Call Pat Keane. Problem solved.

Let's cut to the chase. Making skis at PM Gear involves:

1) Massaging steel edges exactly around precut bases and tack gluing them so they'll hold until pressed

2) Gluing rubber/plastic sidewalls onto precut wooden cores

3) Using a router to cut a groove into the core - basically a slot for the edges to fit

4) Assembling the parts of a ski to be pressed onto a mold. From the bottom up with epoxy/hardener brushed onto each layer:
- Base and edge
- Rubber strip around periphery of ski
- Fiberglass sheet
- Core/sidewall and tip/tail material
- More fiberglass
- Topsheet

5) Sending the skis into the press under heat and pressure which compresses the layers together smoothly and squeezes out the excess epoxy

6) Cooling in a rack

7) Cutting away the excess fiberglass with a jigsaw

8) Grinding the bases smooth and level and polishing

9) Polishing the sidewalls

10) Checking for blems and flexing

11) Stone base grinding at a different shop to make channels/open up for wax

12) Shipping


Every single step of the process involves an incredible degree of craftsmanship and care. I'll never look at a pair of skis in the same way. Here's my little story of going to Reno to participate in this process and get a pair of skis for myself.

This is PM Gear's third season making skis. I remember splat talking about the possibilities when we road tripped from San Diego to Telluride. But the skis he made inititally were mansize and onesize. Cool - if you're a man.

Then he started talking about a 179 length and my ears really perked up. A lightweight ski with a wood core and full sidewalls and versatile proportions. Hmmmmmmm, this ski would work for me as part of an AT rig. So I start daydreaming about ultralight, with Dynafits. Splat said the soft pairs could weigh as little as 3.5 pounds each and could be stiffened up with carbon fiber.

But when my 180 Explosivs with Freerides were stolen and marshalolson set up a maggot fundraiser and got me Naxo 21s and a trip to Reno, it was pretty clear that I should get a beefier ski that could charge and huck. A stiffy.

So that's what I set out to do. I told splat that I would do whatever he wanted for a week, in exchange for room and board and a pair of skis. I also promised him that I would take them on my solo 14er trips and document their part in my adventures. Not a problem!

Splat picks me up at the airport around noon on Nov 7th and we make the first of many, many trips to Starbucks on the way to his place. He's got all the Starbucks women wrapped around his pinkie finger, or is it the other way around? With an endless supply of caffeine in the form of chai tea (with silk), I am put immediately to work.

The garage ski operation had spilled out into the backyard, with a collection of saws and belt sanders and electrical cable looking like a post apocolyptic landscape. I was given heavy gloves and a stack of skis to finish off for shipping. When skis come out of the press, they look like this:



You can see the ski embedded within the fiberglass rectangle. A jigsaw is used to cut the ski out, closely along the steel edges and at a 15 degree angle. The sidewalls are black and rough and have to be polished with a wet sander. My first contribution gets a little smoochysmooch.



I finish off a few more and call it a night sometime around midnight. I'm joined by a good looking stud muffin.



Sometime during the week I spent more time outside, working on bases. They are belt sanded with increasingly smooth grits, until they are level and polished and the edges are perfectly flush with the base. We also put a polish/grind on the sides of the edges at this stage.

The next day there are skis ready to ship. I box up five pairs after being trained by Pat on how not to use a tape gun - see the taped finger?



From left to right that's Pat, the mastermind. Next is BobbaG, an ultra cool Hawaiian hombre that Pat brought on to put some life in the party. Next is Gary, Pat's sensei. So I figure there's some extra cool vibe in every ski he makes. Finally Idris, a maggot from Cham, and pretty much an engineering genius. He's also pretty cute and a really nice guy.

Not pictured is TeleRob, who showed up for a couple of days of drinking and ski making. A ripper and a Kirkwood local that has stood by Pat during this entire project. Idris and Rob helped Pat get the press back from Quebec and set up fab in Reno. They worked through all the technical issues and made it possible for PM Gear to continue in the ski making business. They've both gone on to do other things now, and Gary and BobbaG and various interns and bums such as myself have taken up the mantle of production.

This is just a little glimpse of the way that Pat brings people together to make things happen. It's a real privilege to see how he inspires loyalty and camraderie every single day.

Every day that I'm there, Pat is doing a million things at once. Taking calls from customers, talking to suppliers, checking every single bit of work and demonstrating how to improve the process, making chai runs, keeping up with emails, thinking, plotting and planning. Every day he's working on getting the lease for the new building, getting it painted, getting the lighting right. The devil's in the details. When the lease is signed he's orchestrating the move - getting a uhaul and making that happen. And he's buying better equipment. The man has no life outside the business.

He realized that the fab was going to be shut down for a few days during the move and told me on Thursday that I was going to make my skis that day. Wow. So he taught me how to glue on edges and let me get after it. The other guys got trained at that too, but found it frustrating work.

First, I pull my pretty red base out of the box.



Then I fit the edge onto the base and cut off the excess at the tip.



Finally, I clamp the whole business down, glue it, and let it set.





I had found a piece of the process that I was good at, so I kept putting on edges for the next couple of days while the guys moved heavy equipment over to the new factory. Later on the week Pat let me work on a new mold that had some challenges in getting the edges layed in. I hope that's working out well for them now.

The next stage in the pre-assembly process is getting sidewalls attached to cores and running them through the router. First we pick a beautiful piece of wood. Can you see how there are strips of aspen glued together? And the wood is milled for the sidecut and tapered from the middle out to the ends like a bow. This is a big part of the reason the ski has such a wonderful life to it on the snow.



I glued on some sidewalls after Bobba showed me how to do it and he ran the router to cut in the grooves where the edges would fit.



We ended up with a lot of bases and cores ready to go to the new factory. One last step before pressing is to run the torch over the plastic to prepare it to bond with the epoxy.



I had been eyeballing a couple of skis that were made with clear topsheets and loved the way you could see right into the ski. With torch in hand, Pat encouraged me to put some burn art into my cores. I made an ultracool cheetah print that is truly one of a kind. Mine all mine.

Up to this point I had been participating in every part of the production process. But the next step was pressing and with Idris leaving any day, it was important that Gary and BobbaG learned how to press asap. So Idris took over and taught the guys how the most complex step is accomplished.

All the materials are layed out dry on the table, in reverse order. Then the hardener and epoxy are mixed together and the clock starts ticking. The layers are quickly and carefully built up from the bottom half of the mold with a thick sluice of epoxy brushed onto each layer.

One of the layers is a thin sheet of rubber in a one inch wide strip over the steel edges and a wide strip on the tip and tail. This provides a better bond and a thermal medium to buffer the rapid contraction/expansion of metal against fiberglass directly. Once again I was encouraged to be creative and cut out a cool peace sign onto one tip and the PM Gear mountain logo onto the other. Very shwank and I understand that the mountain logo is being worked into all the clears now. Give peace a chance!

continued...

[shera]

Anyway, back to fab, the layers of the cake, er ski, are built up and the top of the mold is fitted on, with very careful attention paid to the alignment of the ski inside the mold. This is a deal breaker and must be done perfectly or the ski will surely be a blem.

Then into the press with a new timer set and voila out they come, looking just perfect. Thanks to Idris' care and precision, my skis were smooth as silk. So happy - it feels like giving birth, to twins.



When the skis come warm out of the press, the go onto a cooling rack. As they cool, the camber is formed.



A soft Bro ski has a sheet of glass under the core and a sheet of glass above. A stiff bro has an additional sheet of glass on top. This construction was tested at Hood and well received. But there was some talk of trying a stiffer tail and as you know my former skis (Explosivs) have some of the stiffest tails you will find anywhere, so I wasn't afraid at all to try something new. We considered putting carbon fiber down the back length of the ski, but settled on a three inch strip of glass from the toe all the way back. You can see it plain as day when you look through the clear topsheets.



So there's a ski inside that rectangle that needs to come out! Gary showed his skill with the jigsaw from the first day he came to PM Gear and I knew I wanted him to do the surgery. And he was just learning the rest of the steps involved in finishing off the ski, so I was happy to let him practice and learn on my pair.

After the ski was cut out, he ground the bases out flat and smooth. Then he gave the vertical part of the steel edges a couple of swipes - so shiny after that. Finally, he polished the sidewalls just as I had done on the day I first arrived. Beautiful!

I brought them home to my buddy at Christy Sports for their stone grind, waxing and mounting with my new Naxo21s. He had already taken care of a pair the previous year and commented on the progression of the technology on these skis and how perfectly flat my bases were. We mounted at 993, which is a little forward for some folks. But that's how I roll.

Time to ski these pretty girls. A nice powder day at Loveland and I walk up to the bottom of chair one to find the usual suspects standing around. I get lots of oohs and aahs over my sweet setup. Everyone wants to flex my tails. I am so proud that I think my head is going to just swell up and explode. I took them down a fast groomer right away to see how they would carve and behave at high speed. Let me tell you, these babies load up in a turn and then power you out the other side like a rocket. Yessirrybob! Then I took them over to the steeps to see how they would do in moguls and powder. At 4.3 lbs each, they were super easy to swing around in jump turns and they had just the right kind of shape and float for skiing OTR on opening day too.

So they passed through their inbounds paces with flying colors. Now I needed to get them out into the real world for some hucking and deep powpow. I was able to skin for a tiny little way with my Naxos before my skins came off (need new glue), long enough to appreciate that these bindings have a better motion than Freerides. Onto my back they go and a couple of hours later I'm at the top of one of my favorite runs. After hauling Spats around for a while, these skis feel completely weightless and I can't even remember they're on my back.

Adrenaline and excitement are coursing through me as I go through the ritual of looking at my landing and stomping the inrun. Aaron takes his sweet time with the camera (as usual ) and finally he's ready. 3-2-1, dropping and I have that sublime moment of freedom in the air that makes me want to huck and huck and huck again. But the earth calls too soon and, poof, I'm down in the snow at the top of 2000 feet of the goods. I gotta say that the landing I had off this little rock was better than any I can remember - I got popped up and out and sent off down the hill with the sweetest smoothest turns. I live for moments like these. But a picture tells a thousand words, so here's two thousand for you.





At this point all I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you to Pat Keane for hooking a sister up. You are da bomb. I will try my very best to take these skis to the most beautiful places I can find. And I hope you will let me come back again and sweep the floor and take out the trash. It's a privilege and an honor.

And thanks again to all the maggots that have supported me. You paid for my flight to Reno and you bought me my Naxos. I'm also eternally grateful to Marshal Olson aka The Enabler. I salute you all from > 14K!

[The Kids Are Alright]

ive been waiting for this one for a while. Those look so sweeeet!!!!!! Nice job, now go rip em

[summit]

nice report!

[DEVO]

Wow.......that was a cool "trip" report and good to finally see those skis. They look great by the way.

[bcrider]

Damn SheRa (and maggs) that is some good shit right there!

That MUST have been really cool to help build your own sticks. I didn’t know about the 14’er thing, good luck mang!!!

[Squatch]

way to not disappoint. those are some sexy looking skis. I'm glad that, once again, a lot of good has come out of misfortune.

[Steven S. Dallas]

Emoticons cannot express the feelings that piece summoned up within me, but this one comes pretty close.

[OtisTheDog]

Hey, when you coming back for snuggles, baby?

[PlayHarder]

[jwelch]

Awesome TR!

[Tippster]

FUCK YEAH, MIR!

Nice Sticks.... I SAID STICKS!

[Raps]

Wow looks like you had an awesome experience and those custom boards look money........

[FrankZappa]

Excelent report! You and those sticks will have many happy times together.

[marshalolson]

NICE MIR! great write-up.

and splat, idris, et al... congrats on your product these days. i am super stoked to have seen your growth from the first brototypes through all of the production hastles, to now having your own space and making very very nice stuff. really, the level of finish on these new skis coming out is amazing. after mounting a couple of the latest gen's, all i can say is congrats and

[berko]

Nice.

I love stories with happy endings.

[skiergirl]

Fantastic write-up Mir! I want to echo how great Bobbah (sp), Dan, and the other people working with Pat on this are! It's cool to see a manufacturing process where everyone that works on it is stoked on what they are turning out.

How far forward did you go on the mount and how are you liking it? I'm putting freerides on mine and was thinking of going 1" forward. Mine are softs...

DHL is still showing them leaving Sparks yesterday at 3:44 w/ estimated delivery of today. Refresh refresh refresh.

Edit: Mir... where's the door-tech description? Heh.

[bubba-k]

Cool TR, always good to see things moving full force out there at PMGear headquarters.

[Dside11-11]

STOKED:



I actually read this whole report. I never do that for with TR's anymore. SheRa's new skis are the HAWTT SHIT! I was there for her first run on them and boy was she psyched. Happy ending to the theft story fer sher.

[Steven S. Dallas]

Oh, yeah, the flame-cheetah topsheet looks retarded good.

[Pow4Brains]

Very cool Mir. Thanks for sharing!
Pat and Co - Awesome and inspiring.

[Buzzworthy]

That was a perfect lunch read TR!!

Not only nice skis, but that was a great write up and I enjoyed every word of it.

Thanks for sharing!!

[Biscosity Breakdown]

such sweet skis. Have fun on those babies, I know you will!

[Magnoe]

That was a fun read. Can someone help clear me up on something though: who all on this forum works at PMGear? Splat works there, of course. Is he pictured anywhere in this TR? Also, does Tyrone Shoelaces work there? On the PMGear website it shows the footage of one of the owners bagging Hospital Air (Ron Shevock). Is that Shoelaces? What's his real name?

I'm just trying to clarify who is who, it helps following along on these TR's.

Someday I hope to buy one of those sweet skis. Great TR, SheRa

[Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo]

Niiiice work Mir and Pat et al. The cheetah pattern is sweeet