[skibuilder]

Hey ladies and gents,

Just signed up after lurking awhile. I'm from a small northern Michigan town called Traverse City. Have slowly been building a little basement workshop and have completed some nice projects like window planters, cedar deck, home build-ins, etc. My user name comes from my growing downhill ski manufacturing business, Epic Planks, which also involves a lot of woodwork for our wood ski cores (vertically laminated, resawn, and crib-planed poplar and maple).

Looking forward to learning new tricks and seeing projects. Great to see such an active woodworking forum.

Cheers,
Brian

 

[woodnthings]

Welcome, nice to have another Michigander

Please post some photos of your work ....skis, planters, whatever.
You might want to look up Joe Stearns an old friend right in your area, who plays a mean Bluegrass banjo and builds some wild furniture:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=ytff1-tyc-inbox&p=joe stearns furniture&type=

bill

 

[cabinetman]

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[bigcouger]

Welcome Aboard

 

[vursenbach]

Welcome to WWT. It has become a summer addiction for me.

Sent from my iPhone using Wood Forum

 

[BernieL]

Welcome - it's exciting to build a workshop. This is a good active site with lots of good folks.

 

[khowald]

Welcome, post pics of a ski build if you can; sounds very interesting...ken

 

[skibuilder]

Thanks for the welcome!

Here's a few pics of projects so far. (had to do this in two posts because I exceeded the image limit)

First up, here was first project when I bought my house two years of years ago. There was no pantry in the stairwell adjacent to my kitchen so I built one. This is all pocket hole screwed and glued. Figured out my walls weren't perfectly square AFTER I built the perfectly square frame to hold the melamine, haha. :thumbdown:











Here are a couple of Coleman lantern boxes I built out of leftover cedar.





Some cedar windowboxes (painted white before they went up).

Built a couple of these single ones:


And then a "double", actually one piece built to look like two, for under the dual front windows.



Here's a little glove/mitten holder I built into the front closet.





A little trellis for climbing plants from some leftover poplar:

 

[skibuilder]

So THIS was fun. Started off as a project to tear off my old trailer park looking front step (it's a modular house).



Resulting in my discovery of disintegrated flashing and water damage to the rim joist and subfloor under the front door:



And a few feet to the left and right of the door:



Damage removed:



And repaired:





And then I finally got to build the replacement cedar deck - now aged and ready for cleaning, brightening and finishing this month. I'm also going to run the steps all of the way down and paint the kickplate white. Will post pics of the full thing when it's complete.




Surfboard project started a long time ago that I still need to finish.




Here's my dog and I (perspective thing, he's not THAT big, but he is big )



I'll post more pics of the ski thing later - we are going to put together a full start to finish tour of our production run this year. Here are a few teasers though.

Here's what cores look like when ready for layup. These particular ones are very short and have snowboard inserts in them because this was for a OEM project for a bike-ski kind of deal (they mount them to downhill mountain bikes and ride on snow).



Here is the press fired up to press the bike skis. We use compressed air in a fire hose to pressurize it.



Pic of a tip mold:



Press in full length ski mode.



Almost everything on this machine (except for air rams, heater elements, etc) was designed and built in our factory in Grand Rapids. We have a CNC machine that is used to cut the aluminum.



And this was our display area at our first trip to Denver for the gigantic retailer show (SIA) last February.

 

[rayking49]

Welcome to WWT. Nice work there.