Background

ScottyBob decided from the beginning that he wanted the construction of his skis to add as much as possible to the asymmetrical design.

Everything we do is performance based and the search for greater performance guides all of our designing.

Unlike other manufacturers we handcraft two different skis for each pair. Obviously, our production costs are much higher. When we looked at the ski industry business model, we realized that very little of the final sale's price actually goes toward producing the skis. We knew that in order to produce the finest skis possible and sell them at an affordable price, it would be necessary to sell them direct to each customer. More than anything, we didn't want to be subject to the competitive price constraints that force other manufacturers to look for the cheapest way possible instead of the best way possible. We can give skiers a better deal and more consistently helpful service by selling direct. The bottom line for you is that we put much more money into each pair of our skis than any other manufacturer.

Core Theory

Like everything else, we also have a very different approach to construction. It's strange how you hear so little about the core of the ski. Companies are always touting some extremely thin, but sexy sounding, laminate layer that doesn't do squat. Meanwhile, the core material is by far the largest component in any ski, and in fact, the material in the core and the precise shape of the core are the most important determinants of performance outside of edge shape.

So, it should be no surprise that we see the greatest opportunities to improve ski construction in this area.

Perhaps one reason you don't hear much about cores is that their traditional role is merely to take up space. A ski has a top layer of fiberglass and a bottom layer of fiberglass. The amount of space between these two layers determines the stiffness at that point along the ski's length. The core material itself has little impact on stiffness. The core's job is to take up the space between the layers of fiberglass, and slight changes in the thickness of the core exact large changes in the stiffness of the ski. The thickness of the core (the space between the fiberglass layers) is tapered to achieved the desired flex pattern along the length of the ski.

Given the traditional role of the core to merely take up space, and the fact that consumers look at topsheets and not cores, it's understandable that ski manufacturers would look for the cheapest core materials around. Various types of inexpensive wood and synthetic foams are used. The truth is that the core does much more than take up space, and when it's designed well, it becomes the most important element in a ski's construction.

A Bowling Alley In Every Pair

The Sugar Maple tree is well-known for the delicious maple syrup made from its sap. It also produces wood that is so hard that it's commonly used for bowling alleys. It's twice as hard as other maples, much harder than ash and oak, and just about three times as hard as the commonly used core material, yellow poplar. Forget about foam and synthetic core materials.

Unusually hard woods make great ski cores for a number of reasons. A hardwood with a high modulus of elasticity like Sugar Maple, doesn't like to be bent, and when it is bent, it tries to straighten out back to its steady state. This is what makes BobTails lively and gives you that snap out of the turns. Harder cores also increase torsional rigidity and transfer more energy through the ski to the edge. In addition, wood fibers absorb vibrations and give a damper and more stable ride.

Companies that use wimpy woods and synthetic foam cores can add various laminates to approach the performance of a great wood, but they can't come close to the durability of Sugar Maple, which has a very high modulus of rupture. It hates to be bent, but when it is bent it is unusually resistant to breakage. But that's only one part of durability.

It's easy to see when a ski has snapped in two, but the often overlooked aspect of ski durability is the longevity of its peak performance. Most skis don't break, they just wear out. Ordinary repetitive flexing breaks down cheaper woods and foam, and every time you smack into a mogul or land some air, the effect is to compress the core of the ski. As the compression causes small changes in the shape and fibers of the core, the performance of the ski begins to degrade. The flex gets mushy, the ski loses its liveliness, and often the camber flattens out.

Bowling alleys are designed to withstand the standard 16 pound bowling ball which hits the wood with a force of over 2,000 pounds per square inch. That's why we put a bowling alley in every BobTail. By using the hardest core material of any ski, BobTails are made to get pounded and keep on performing like the day you first got them.

Core Shape

Picking the right core material is the easy part, shaping it to get the most performance is the hard part. To shape a BobTail core, it takes an extraordinary amount of workmanship as well as specialized machinery.

Standard skis have simple cores which have a perimeter shape and a thickness which tapers from the middle of the ski down to the tip and tail. They are flat on top. To improve performance, our cores have another dimension. Look at the top of one of our skis, and you'll see that it isn't flat. That isn't cosmetic, that's the shape of our core inside.

Look across the width of the tail as shown above, you'll notice that the thickness of the ski varies across its width, with the thickest part toward the inside edge. Through completely innovative construction, we isolate the flex along each edge to optimize the stiffness for the linear pressure received on that edge. We go to great lengths to make the flex exact on each edge and to ensure that both skis in each pair match perfectly. We are the only ski manufacturer who produces their cores in matched pairs. And to make sure the flex is precise on each edge and in each turn, we now use an unprecedented thickness tolerance of plus or minus one thousandth of an inch (.025 mm) between any part of the left ski and right ski of each pair. The result is that the flex on each pair is perfectly matched, despite the complexity of our asymmetrical flex profile.

Skis that are flat on top across their width are not the right shape for transferring the skier's energy to the edge. Imagine a rectangular piece of metal roughly the same size as a ski. Now grab it with both hands a few feet apart and twist it. Now grab a metal pipe of roughly the same dimensions and see if you can twist it. Good luck. You know that pipe's not going to twist. The rounded shape of the pipe has the highest torsional rigidity. This is the same principle behind the arch, and it's also the same principle that inspired the Radiator Cap.

The top of the core in front of and behind your boot is machined into an arch shape for maximum torsional rigidity. Then we modify this shape out to the tip and tail by using low angle diagonals that start out wide in the middle of the ski and gradually get narrower as they approach the tip and the tail. The result is to progressively radiate your turning energy outward toward the tips and tails and downward along the entire length of the edge. This design transfers more of your energy from your boot to the edge. The further out from your foot, the greater the proportion of the energy transferred by the diagonals, causing edge pressure to be much more uniform along the entire edge. This balanced total edge carve feels awesome on groomed runs and knifes through ice without skipping a beat.

Ordinary cap designs only exist to reduce the manufacturing costs associated with sidewall construction. Our Radiator Cap is unique in that it is shaped to become a structure for increasing torsional rigidity and radiating your boot's forces out along each edge.

The Radiator Cap also has the benefit of reducing swing weight, making our skis much easier to maneuver when initiating turns. By putting the heaviest part of the construction in the middle of the ski, we achieve a large improvement in weight distribution. This is another reason why the responsiveness of our skis surprises people.

Our sidewalls are made of solid pieces of hard rock Sugar Maple that have been treated to withstand the abuse of the elements. The beauty of the the wood grain on the sidewall lends speaks to the craftsmanship that goes that goes into each pair.

It would be cheaper for us to make a full sidewall ski and it's certainly much cheaper to make an ordinary cosmetic cap ski, but our Sidewall/Radiator Cap construction is well worth the extra cost.

Similarly, if you see another ski with a three-dimensional shape on its top, you can be sure they're not going through the expense of crafting a wood core to that shape. They'll take the easy road and stick a foam core in there, and then if it's a high-end ski, they'll have to add a bunch of other laminates to get it to ski like it has a wood core, but it will have a much shorter useful life and it won't weigh any less. The irony of foam cores is that their only redeeming benefit is that they are lighter, but by the time you add enough other laminates to make them ski well, the ski turns out the same weight or even heavier than a well-designed wood core ski.

A lot of skis cost their manufacturers less for a finished pair than it costs us just for a pair of our cores. We're proud that our skis have the most complex wood cores ever. You'll never see the core, but you'll feel it in every turn. Our design is difficult to produce correctly, but the underlying principle is simple. Never substitute an excellent material with an inferior one. Instead, take an excellent wood having superb qualities and then figure out how you can utilize its shape to do more.

Our Sugar Maple core is surrounded by triaxial fiberglass. The triax/Sugar Maple/Radiator Cap combination provides extraordinary amounts of torsional rigidity for total carving power. The triax is topped with a silk screen reprint of a watercolor painting done by Colorado artists Emily Jean Shenk and Jared French.

ScottyBob Bases

ScottyBob Bases are the hardest in the world. We don't just use a sintered base. Our sintered UHMW is the longest molecular chain polyethylene used on any ski, making it the hardest and most rock resistant base material there is. You'll love it when you smack into a rock expecting a gouge and find only a superficial scratch. It won't sand as easily as softer bases, but it's superb at maintaining a stone grind structure for high performance.

The Snout

The lower the center of gravity in the ski tip, the less chatter it will have at high speed and on ice. With less chatter, you get more stability and better edge grip in the front portion of the ski. Pointed tips don't make sense as they just add extra weight up high that detracts from performance. ScottyBob's Skis don't have tips, they have Snouts.

The main design innovation of The Snout is that it achieves a lower center of gravity not simply by shortening the tip as in other designs, but instead, by using a longer radius for the upturn. Thus, the rise is more gentle in The Snout, allowing for a low center of gravity and still a lot of surface area that is curved. This combination provides great floatation and also great stability.

The Snout really shows off in the crud. Whereas traditional higher tips bash up against the crud and toss the front part of the ski around, the Snout just cuts through the crud like it's not even there.

People ask us how we come up with our design ideas. Actually, we have a really simple approach. It's based on the way in which ScottyBob came up with the asymmetrical shape. He didn't know anything about making skis, so his thinking wasn't restricted by ingrained industry beliefs. Now we have to make sure that we're not creating our own dogma. One way we can keep it fresh is to occasionally get together around a table and brainstorm design ideas.

For one memorable brainstorming session we pretended that we were from another planet and didn't know anything about how skis are made, then we tried to approach ski designing from an alien perspective. Those prototypes didn't work very well on planet earth, but the design meeting sure was a trip.

"If you want to think outside of the box, you have to live outside of the box."

ScottyBob