Loading ...
Pete Wagner, CEO and founder of Wagner Custom, strips a thin protective layer off a newly made ski at the Wagner Custom ski and snowboard factory near Telluride Colo.
Avid skiers love the buttery smooth ride of an aluminum or titanium ski. Achieving a steady ride without vibrations—coined as “flutter”—at high speeds is a major challenge for any ski designer because most vibration reduction techniques are parasitic; they may reduce vibrations but with a weight penalty and without adding more value to the structure. So, when a Colorado custom ski builder with a mechanical engineering degree focused on composite materials and computer aided design partnered up with the maker of a visco-elastically dampened carbon fiber material, it was a match made in skier heaven.
Pete Wagner, CEO and founder of Wagner Custom got into building boutique ski gear out of a personal need. He had a pair of mass-produced skis he didn’t like. After working as a design engineer in the golf industry for ten years developing technology for fitting professional golfers into custom equipment, Wagner figured he could do the same with skis. He tweaked the design software he had created for the golf industry and made himself a custom-designed pair of personal skis.
In 2006, he founded Wagner Custom, an engineering and fabrication shop outside Telluride, Colo. “Big ski companies build custom skis for their top Olympic and World Cup athletes, tailor-made to ensure the athlete does their absolute best. That’s what we do for recreational skiers,” Wagner says. Each pair of Wagner skis is designed based on what he calls the “skier’s DNA” – not just height, weight, ability, style and favorite terrain, but also what a skier aspires to accomplish with a new pair of skis. Since 2006, Wagner has done extensive in-house materials testing and R&D in order to design the perfect pair of skis for his customers, including partnership with one composite company.
Pennsylvania-based Materials Sciences Corporation had already developed Countervail, a continuous fiber reinforced polymer product that provides integral vibration damping in performance-critical composite structures. “The composite product, originally developed for the aerospace industry, was designed to dampen vibrations in tubular satellite truss members, where conventional constrained layer damping techniques are ineffective because loads within the structure are in the plane of the laminate. As a result, our product forestalls flutter in the carbon-fiber surfaces of supersonic aircraft,” says Anthony Caiazzo, Materials Sciences Corporation’s chief technical officer.
“When I recently watched a World Cup ski race on television,” Caiazzo says, “and saw the ski tips ‘chatter’ and listened to the experts talk about the inability of the racers to hold an edge on icy, bumpy turns, I immediately understood the skiers’ conundrum. The idea is: Less vibration amplitude equals more time the ski edge spends on the snow, hence more control,” he says. “It is very difficult to reduce vibrations in skis, which are essentially core sandwich constructions subjected to flexural loads, without adding parasitic mass or compromising stiffness and strength.” Determined to find a solution, he began looking for a partner to make the carbon composite skis.
Friends of Caiazzo who used Wagner’s skis brought Wagner to his attention. “As soon as I called him up, I knew Pete not only understands ski design but also how advanced materials technologies could improve ski performance,” says Caiazzo. The Materials Sciences Corporation had been collaborating with large ski factories, but Wagner was the one able to figure out how to make the structural fiber work on skis. Wagner ran a series of tests to determine the mechanical properties of the Countervail material then plugged it into his design algorithms. According to his blog, Wagner reports that Countervail consists of a thin viscoelastic polymer cloth with fine strands of carbon fiber woven along its length in a sinusoidal or serpentine pattern. Because the stiff carbon creates a two-dimensional pattern, it provides strength in both flex and torsional axes. The harsh reactive stiffness of the carbon is moderated by the viscoelastic fibers. “As a result, you get a ‘light, strong, whippy but self-damping structural layer without the fatigue, bending or delamination problems common with metal skis,” he says. “We built the skis using a sandwich construction in a wet lay-up process, the Countervail of course being the structural layer.”
Over a period of two years, Wagner’s crew built, took to the slopes and altered several prototypes. Finally the team had a sleek carbon-composite ski, effectively giving his ultra-high performing lightweight skis the desirable smooth feel and stability with substantially reduced chatter.
“The Countervail kits in Wagner skis are a carbon fiber, so there are cost implications,” says Caiazzo. Wagner skis start at around $1,800 whereas others range from between $300 to $600. However, Wagner says they still have an upper hand. “We are a small but really nimble high-end manufacturer. We’re not discouraged by more expensive, more exotic materials and are willing to spend more time on product development.” he says.
“While most of their skis are made with FRP or aluminum alloy, these products create a ski with a damper feel than standard carbon fiber. Thus, we began offering an upgrade to the Countervail carbon composite on all his designs for almost a year.”
Sandra Henderson is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colo.
