The American Solar Energy Society featured Wagner Custom skis’ ultra-modern, clean and green ski factory in its December 2008 issue of Solar Today magazine.  Solar Today recognized Wagner Custom for its industry leading energy and recycling initiatives.

Wagner Custom is by no means perfect.  However, the company has several energy and waste reduction initiatives in place that help reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

Regarding energy, Wagner Custom first focuses on simple energy efficiency and conservation measures to minimize their overall energy loads.  The company’s entire factory floor is heated by a large solar thermal array (see image above).  To offset its electricity loads, Wagner Custom purchases high quality wind-energy credits that support farmer-owned wind turbines in the Midwest (see Native Energy Farmer Distributed Wind Projects).

Regarding waste stream reduction, Wagner Custom recycles it’s steel and plastic scraps while reusing (and selling) its wood core scraps as kindling.

The Solar Today magazine feature can be seen on page 25 of the December issue at http://www.solartoday-digital.org/solartoday/20081112/

Last winter Wagner Custom skis and snowboards picked me up as a factory team rider. It was pretty wild - I was standing on the podium after placing 4th in Telluride’s freeskiing competition when Herb Manning of Wagner Custom suddenly handed me my first pair of Wagner Custom skis and informed me that I’m sponsored. Damm was I excited!!! I had myself a pair of the sickest skis on earth.

The first time I took them out I was ecstatic. Instantly I was in awe at their performance and incredible endurance. I used those skis for the rest of the winter and took them to 3 more freeskiing competitions after Telluride where they outperformed every other pair of skis I’ve ever owned. Before riding on Wagner Customs, I went through 2 pairs of skis in less than 2 months including one pair I wrecked after just 3 days. Then I obtained the Wagner skis and they held up beautifully throughout the rest of the season. I remember seeing other competitors at the freeskiing events with broken skis and foot long strips of p-text hanging off there skis and all I could do was laugh because I skied my Wagner’s super hard and nothing would happen to them. I would jump off of cliffs onto rocks, even ski over rocks, without even thinking twice about it. When I would get to the end of my runs I would look at the bottom of my skis thinking that they would be wrecked and to my surprise there wouldn’t be more than a small scratch.

Eventually I was purposely trying to wreck my skis to test their durability and I couldn’t do a thing to them. Wagner’s are by far the best skis I have ever had the pleasure of skiing and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
-Travis Hart Wolfe

Ideal corn snow conditions led us to the point where we had abandoned our shoes for hard shell boots. Drew and ‘Perro’ patiently awaited us there. Regressing through the volcanic debris back toward the Gendarmeria, we were consumed with a sense of satisfaction, dehydration, and hunger. A ‘parrilla libre’ (all you can eat grilled meat) was awaiting us back in San Martin.

Sitting in my assigned window seat on the bus the following day, I struggled against the desire to sleep and glanced out the window to get one more view of Lanin as the bus made its way across the huge expanses of Argentina. Consciousness gave way to dream state and in a seemingly absence of time, I was being served dinner, as the bus made its way through the night en route to Buenos Aires.

Here’s an issue you rarely hear the big factories talk about: Bearing surface. That’s the area of base plastic in contact with the snow, and it has a direct effect on the way a ski feels in powder.

A typical narrow straight ski (take for example the 1995 Rossignol 4SV, 203cm, 64mm waist) had a bearing surface of about 1150 square centimeters. If a 165 lb. skier stood on one ski, the pressure underneath would be about .14 lb per square centimeter.

Doesn’t sound like a lot. But the 1990 Atomic Powder Plus — the first of the superfat powder skis — had a bearing surface of about 2000 cm2. A 165 lb. skier put about .08 lb./cm2 on that ski.

Neither of these skis is very versatile. They lie at either end of the soft-snow performance spectrum: the Rossi slalom ski was designed for hard snow and in deep snow liked to go to the bottom and stay there. The Atomic was famous for bobbing around on top, denying the skier one of the great pleasures of powder skiing, the face shot.

If you live to porpoise in and out of deep snow, you want something midway between these extremes. For resort skiing, with a firm surface under the new snow, you may be comfortable with a pressure pattern of about .11 or .12 lb/cm2; for backcountry and bottomless powder, .9 or .10 lb/cm2. For that 165 lb skier, this would imply a bearing surface around 1400 or 1500 cm2 for the resort ski, or 1600 to 1700 cm2 for bottomless snow.

There’s a set of simple formulas for figuring out bearing surface based on length and sidecut dimensions, but as a rule of thumb, with today’s sidecuts, at a length of 165cm, a 70mm waist will give you about 1200 cm2, 74mm is about 1300cm2, 80mm is about 1400cm2, and 90mm is about 1500cm2. If you need more surface, you’ll need to go longer, Big Guy.

Seth Masia
Vail Ski School

Pete mentioned that some folks have adapted to the smooth, stable feel of Volkls. Some people like very lively, energetic skis. Some skis just feel steady and predictable in funky weird snow, and some skis feel bouncy as if they can’t wait to get a new turn going. The difference usually lies in the nature of the materials. Some materials are “quiet,” some are lively.

The ski is a spring, built to flex and rebound. Like any spring, it likes to vibrate at a characteristic rate based on its length, weight, stiffness and internal friction. Think of guitar strings: Heavy strings vibrate slowly, light strings vibrate fast. Shorten the string and it vibrates faster still. Switch from steel strings to nylon, and it vibrates with a softer tone and fades off more quickly. The fade-off is called damping. The rate at which your ski rebounds — its general energy level — depends a lot on the same things that govern the quality of sound in a guitar string: length, weight, and damping rate.

Big ski factories like to talk about damping, as if it’s a good thing. When you ski on a lot of ice, you do in fact want to dampen out vibration along the ski’s edge so it doesn’t chatter out of its own track. But snow itself is the world’s best vibration damper: It compresses, but doesn’t spring back, so the compression energy is removed from the system. Because of that, it’s easy to build an overdamped ski. Put too much viscoelastic foolishness inside a ski and it begins to feel like a long rubber eraser. It grows slow to rebound when flexed in powder, seems to take forever to return to the surface — and in any kind of wet snow the glide speed goes to hell.

To get a lively ski that rebounds quickly in bumps and comes arcing up in powder, you want hard structural layers, like steel guitar strings, that vibrate at a very high frequency and low amplitude. Carbon fiber will do this, and certain very high-quality grades of fiberglass/epoxy matrix. (High-zinc aluminum skis, made of Zicral or Titanal alloys, have great vibration characteristics, until the metal fatigues with age, or bends from overflexing in bumps.) Because these materials are quite stiff (an engineer would say they have high modulus of elasticity) they have to be used in very thin layers.

To get a damp ski for tracking on ice, you can use thicker layers of “softer” glass mat in a more viscous epoxy blend, or build rubber layers into the ski. In general, when a ski has a lot of layers that “shear” against each other, the effect is to soak up vibration energy. It’s converted to tiny quantities of heat and lost to the snow and air.

The core material can also contribute to a ski’s energy level. Vibration travels nicely along the grain of a tough hardwood, and dampens out in shear between the lignin fibers in softer woods. Most polyurethane foam cores are natural damping materials, while some very light, expensive acrylic foam cores don’t have enough mass to absorb much energy.

Another mode of energy control is called mass damping. If a ski has a heavy tip (some skis actually have weighted tips) it tends to behave a bit like the bob-weight at the end of a pendulum: It takes some energy to divert it from its trajectory, and then it’s slower to reverse direction and come back to neutral than a lighter tip would be. When the combination of materials don’t give the ski the vibrational feel the designer wanted, one fix can be to tune a ski’s vibration rate by putting metal weights or thin strips of rubber at strategic points on or under the topskin.

A properly designed ski made of top-quality materials shouldn’t need external vibration dampers.

Seth Masia
Vail Ski School