:: 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

Kelvin Wu and i produced our first pair of skis on Monday, January 23, 2005, in the new press we built. our ski press took us about 3-months to build, only because we took our time. anyway, our first pair of skis is the Ahma, shown below:

the dimensions are: 135:108:125mm and length: 178cm. the skis have an asymmetric sidecut. the radius of the inside edge is 25 meters, and this side i call "good". the "evil" side (outside edge) has a 21 meter radius cut.

shortly after pulling them out of the press (4-days later), i flew to Salt Lake City with Michael, Corinne and Kristina to meet up with other friends to at Alta and Park City. The Ahmas' first day on snow was at Alta on Saturday, January 29th.

here's a short movie (*.asf format) of me skiing the Ahmas in 6" of new snow

40 mph!! isnt that rather fast for tele

I am very intrested in how the ahmas held up as i am in the process of making my skis

no, not really...

speed is relative...

the ahmas are great!! they skis very well. i'm amazed at how well they perform on the hardpack. i skied them a couple weeks ago at whistler. whistler/blackcomb hadn't received much snow and so some runs were bullet-proof. surprisingly, the ahmas held a strong edge. they even handle high speed skiing well too. the only thing i would add to them is more damping elements. at very high speeds they do resonant a bit.

Cool they sound like a solid ski

how did you guys get the white writting and the black K to look so sharp on those skis?

the lettering was cut from card paper, using a sharp utility knife. (thick cardpaper does not become translucent when soaked with epoxy, otherwise the lettering doen't stand out.) the letters were placed beneath clear topsheet.

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.