:: View topic - July 12-13, 2005, San Gorgonio Mountain and Jepson Peak, CA

i'm down in So. Cal. visiting family, including Little Kam. it's good to see his setup and every moment that Little Kam and i are together, we talk about building skis or skiing. and all this talk about skiing makes us want to ski. but in So. Cal., finding snow in the mid-July is tough, but luckily there's some left way up high on San Gorgonio Mountain. Little Kam and i spent two days in the San G area. we skied the north side of San G and Jepson Peak. Little Kam tested out his new Taos and found them to be excellent. "the titanal makes them snappy," he says. anyway, i'll leave it up to Little Kam to write up a trip report and for him to talk more about how his new skis performed.

on this trip i rode the Ahma BCs and they were great, except i took a minor fall over some rocks that caused the topsheet near the tail of the ski to rip off. it's not surprising that the topsheet peeled because the ABS material that Kelvin and i used did not bound well. it's better to use specially abraided P-tex material, i think.

below are some photos i took of Little Kam dropping into one of the north couloirs of Jepson Peak (11,205 ft.). he cranked some beautiful turns on his new Taos.

i've posted a trip report on Turns-all-year for those interested...

-big kam

Cool ski! Looking forward to how it rides.

With no tip spacer does the tip and tail sidewalls blend into the end grain of the core?

Have you been able to find p-tex topsheats that are thinner then the average base material?

You guys are quick to pump out new designs

you can get thinner p-tex from Durasurf.

-kelvin

you can read more about them here:

http://www.skibuilders.com/gallery/doink.shtml

i skied them this past weekend on Mount Rainier in 4"-deep mank. they worked great. i'll write more about how they skied soon.

Ok, Kam, spill the beans. It's been weeks

I won't spill all the beans, but lets just say that you probably won't see Kam on regular skis very often.

Paul:

patience, my friend. i'm in the process of writing up some words about the Doinks and how they ski. in summary, they kick arse!! i put three days on them in the backcountry, and i love them! for example, last Sunday (at the Silver Skis Race) i managed to ski from Muir to Paradise in around 16-minutes, even with the following mechanical:

.

sidecut is overrated!

as for your request, let's talk and build it. how about we design something up next week, and start constructing? drop me an email.

You should start designing a tele binding that won't break. A real innovation.

I'd love to build a pair of boards. Lemme see if I can draw something up in ProE.

more of my thoughts about the Doinks are up:

http://www.skibuilders.com/gallery/doink.shtml

sumary: they kick arse. sounds like Kelvin likes our new Krusts, too.

another photo and short ski movie related to the Doinks can be found here:

http://www.skibuilders.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=33

These started out as a complete joke and ended being quite an involved project.

The idea was to take an old 170 powder ski (atomic powder plus), rip off the edges, bend them into reverse camber to make a short spatula type ski for a freind.

Taking off the base above the edge was thge toughest part. These skis are the toughest I've ever met, much stronger than a Volkl Explosive. They have a lot of metal and fiberglass above and below the core, extr wide edges with holes rather than serrations on the inner lip.

With the edges removed it was qite easy using a belt grinder to re shape them. I ground a notch in the side of the base and re-attached the edges with epoxy and brass screws, then base welded over the whole mess.

I clamped the skis in reverse camber for several days, heating them when I was around with an electric heater.

Bending these monsters didn't realy work, I got a tiny bit of revesrs camber.

They skied great on soft snow, but were a twichy nightmare on anything hard. They proved to be impervious to rocks and other obsticals. My home replaced edges showed no sighs of damage dispite concerted efforts to blunten them on rocks to reduce the twitchiness

I painted them up for a laugh, they proved quite amusing.

Eventualy in an effort to get more reverse camber and stop them catching. I cut slots in the topsheet, bend them again. While clamped I epoxied and screwed plates over the slots to hold them together. They now look like Frankenstines monster but they ride much better for it!

sweet

very creative, and i'm glad they worked. thanks for sharing your work.