Crown Skis is pleased to announce the product launch of our 2009/2010 Kensho and Satori skis. To celebrate, we are inviting all of the Crown Skis friends and family out for an evening of great times with excellent people.

*FACTORY TOURS*
Between 4:00 and 7:30 pm we will be hosting an open house tour at our 3914 West 19th Ave Factory. Feel free to stop by to see how and where your skis are made. Light snacks and beverages will be served.

*LAUNCH PARTY*
Starting 8:00 pm at The Dunbar, come join the Crown Skis owners and staff for the grand celebration and your chance to win cool prizes including:

• FREE customized topsheets
• Crown dollars
The grand raffle prize…
• A BRAND NEW PAIR OF CROWN SKIS!
and more to come…

This is a great opportunity to be a part a local community and meet like minded people. We at Crown Skis look forward to connecting with all of you and hope to see you there.

We’re just getting ready to send out the first pair of Black and White Satori 183s to our good friend Jeff Tibbets in Alaska and they look sharp.

Imagine designing your own ski… but not having to learn the difference between 25oz tri-axial fiberglass and 22 oz bi-axial fiberglass.

Imagine telling us how you want your ski to feel and watching your new ski design itself on our computer screen.

Imagine being able to compare how your new ski flexes to how your old ski flexes.

Imagine being able to fine tune your new skis so they have everything you like from your old ski and nothing you don’t like.

Imagine being able to choose environmentally friendly materials over traditional materials when designing your ski while still achieving your desired flex.

We can imagine it!

I’m excited to currently be working on a project that will allow us to design a ski just the way you want it. In between pressing skis I have been busy researching the physics behind skiing, the properties of snow and the bending properties of skis to make this dream reality.

You’ll tell us that you feel that your current ski is too stiff in the tip and dives in powder, and we’ll say “No problem, we’ll fix that.” We input your weight, the type of snow and the ski geometry and the screen shows you not only that your ski won’t dive in powder but also exactly how much it will flex.

After you help us design the inside of the ski, we’ll even let you design the outside. You’ll be able to choose from a variety of base colours and die-cut options as well as designing your own graphic in order to create your own “pro model” ski.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Roni Jones and I am a recent graduate from the Materials Engineering program at UBC. I have been a ski and snowboard enthusiast since my parents took me skiing at the age of two. In 2005, I moved from Toronto to beautiful Vancouver in order to pursue my love of the mountains and to do a little learning on the side. I am really pleased to able to pursue my passion and apply my knowledge while working here at Crown Skis.

I have been working here for almost a month now and am really enjoying myself. The atmosphere at work is like no other job I’ve had. It really helps to motivate me when I see the enthusiasm with which everyone here goes about their daily work.

During this first month I have been working on understanding and improving the way in which we obtain the camber, tip and tail shape in our skis. Some of you may have noticed that the Beta Model had very little camber this past season. It is designed to have some rocker, however it should also have a more traditional camber underfoot.

We quickly got to work in hypothesizing why we weren’t achieving our design dimensions and planned a number of experiments. I’ve included some pictures of Corby and I hard at work building our test pieces. The results look promising, and I’m just now taking a short break from applying that data to our new designs.

For me one of the most exciting things that I’ve done is actually build a ski. Niels and I went to work building one last Beta Model, this time with a new topsheet design. Watching that ski come out of the mold and go through the finishing stages of production was so satisfying. I look forward to making more pairs, maybe even a pair for you. Check out our newest skis below.

I look forward to posting up here regularly and will do my best to help keep you up to date on the progress here at Crown Skis.

Roni

Hello skiers! Niels again…

One of the things that we’re most looking forward to at Crown is making meaningful customizations. We’re wanting to offer a lot of items that can be modified from the stock to reflect a ski that’s truly you. Just one of those ideas is to customize the stiffness of the skis according to what you weigh and the kind of skiing you like to do. This would be tantamount to tuning a suspension on a car, depending on how many people are in it, and what the road is like.

But how do you know how stiff you want your skis? As skiers all we know is how they feel on a run. I’ve definitely been in situations where my skis are way too soft, and also when they’ve been way too hard. So we know when it’s not right, and when it feels good, but that doesn’t translate directly into what kind of sandwich we want. We’ve all grabbed a ski in the store, propped it up with one hand, and pressed the waist as hard as we can with the other. But the only thing that really tells you is that the ski bends. If you’ve done it enough, you can probably tell which ski is stiffer, but it just doesn’t tell you how it’s going to ski.

I think the key to understanding is to have a comparison to skis you know in situation that you know. So to report the stiffness of a ski, I would choose a situation appropriate to the ski and the skier. Lets say for example, that you’re a 150lb skier, and you want to do GS sized turns in bottomless champagne pow. You’re going to want to know that the ski doesn’t dive, but that it’s stiff enough to go the speed you like. Here I would report to you a picture of how the ski would flex in the middle of the turn (where you experience moderate to high turning forces) and in the transition (where you’re unweighted). If the ski is not flexed enough in the turn you know that it will dive. If it flexes so much that it has a tighter radius than the turn you’re making, then you know it’s not stiff enough. You could also compare it to other skis that you know, and other models that we make. The skier and the situation can be varied to match you and your skiing.

This opens up the ability for you to choose the right stiffness without having to guess at how it will affect performance; or, if you need something that’s not on the shelf, it means you can customize your stiffness to your situation. Our ability to do that is a long way off, but we have a clear idea about how to get there. This week the research took its first step forward under the hand of our new intern, Roni Jones. Roni has been investigating the way straight ski components picks up flex from the mould and pressing process. We expect to apply this research to our moulds for the upcoming season, and to use it as a stepping-off point for our research into flex and twist customization.

Hello skiers, Niels here again. I’m one of the engineer/designers at Crown and am currently wrapped up in the designs for the 2009/2010 season. We’re making a lot of progress on two fronts, we’re extending our designs and line-up, and we’re working hard on the construction issues we faced last year. I’m really quite excited about it all, but in this entry I wanted to focus a little more on the root of the whole thing – what is the driving force behind our designs?

In my mind, there are two very big shortcomings in the way skis are currently made and marketed. The first shortcoming is the baffling array of skis that you can choose from when you look at the rack at a retail store. There are so many shades of grey – so many skis that are just fractionally different from the ones next to them, that it’s hard to know which ski is the one that will do the job you want. The differences between skis of the same line up are so marginal that I don’t believe I would feel the difference by moving up one or down one millimetre underfoot. These skis don’t have a reason for existing other than the company saw a small gap in their line-up and filled it up before someone else did.

The other great shortcoming about skis is the way they’re discussed in the retail environment. In trying to understand the difference between all the skis on the rack, retailers and reps (who are poorly informed, but not by their own fault) have a tendency to tell you about the technical differences, such as “well these skis are stiffer than those,” or “this one is five millimetres bigger underfoot than those…” It may be true, but it begs the question what is it going to FEEL like when I’M on them? Or what is it going to FEEL like on MY favourite run? The point is, the discussion is not based around skiing sensations, it’s based around technical details. Not all of us are ski designers, and we can’t necessarily translate what a technical difference will mean when we’re skiing.

There’s also a large amount of misinformation, or as we all call it: BS! Try this next time you’re in a retail environment talking about skis. Ask the rep about skis with a titanal layer in them… Ask them what titanal is, and most will tell you its an advanced titanium aluminum alloy. That’s BS. It’s named that way to let you think that, but the truth is titanal contains no titanium. It’s mostly aluminum and zinc. You can find the supplier link here: http://www.amag.at/AMAG-Titanal-R.1193.0.html?&L=0 Yes, it’s an advanced light-weight aerospace alloy that’s changing the face of skiing, but that’s no reason to be lied to…

The point is, as a consumer, its hard to be properly informed when you’re buying your next pair of skis. The information you get is hard to interpret, and what’s more, you can’t even be sure it’s true. At Crown, we’re doing our absolute best to keep from falling into that trap.

When we design a ski at Crown we follow a specific path, a design philosophy that guides our decision making, and keeps the discussion centered around the on-snow-experience. The starting point is “what’s the purpose of this ski?” The ski needs a job, or a role before we begin to talk about its shape or features. So the discussion starts with the snow, with a day of skiing, or a specific place to go skiing, or with a specific part of the season. The point here is to make it easy to understand how the ski is supposed to feel and it make it easy to evaluate its performance (does it do the job we identified initially?). It’s a skier-centred approach.

Then next stage of the discussion is to break it down into three critical aspects. They are the Skier, the Snow and the Terrain. We discuss each aspect in terms of being on the snow, not in terms of the ski’s construction. So we talk about what kind of skier we have: we might identify the skier as an aggressive skier who prizes adrenaline over everything else, or we might say they have a “flow” to their skiing that needs to be served. From this we get an idea of what kind of tasks the skier will ask of their skis. The same goes for snow – we identify what kinds of snow the ski will be in when it’s doing its job. This may be a whole variety, or a specific type. Finally, we talk about the terrain. The features (rock formations, vegetation, massive slide debris, etc) and aspect that the skier will be on are considered here.

Each ski may be slated to perform one job (a so called “quiver” ski), or may be mandated to perform in a variety of situations. At this point in the discussion, everything is wildly optimistic and idealized, and, most importantly, still based around the on-snow-experience. We may not be able to meet all the objectives in one design, or it may take a few prototypes and some revisions to get there, but the point is that we have a straightforward discussion about the ski, about how it FEELS on the snow, and based around YOU, the skier.

Only after this discussion has been flushed out, does design work begin. From here geometric features and their identified effects are determined to be either dominant, slightly dominant, incidental or adverse. Trade-offs for performance and construction are identified and the design work begins in earnest. But that’s another blog entry.

Crown Skis Day
Whistler, BC
March 14th, 2009

The day started with snow. Recent dumps had restored some of the favorite stashes to tasty again, some for the first time this winter. It was a promising beginning.

The point of the first annual Crown Skis Day was to get the community together for a day of riding where we could share our Beta experiences of the season so far, and to get some valuable feedback first hand from our testers. That’s exactly what we did. This being our first opportunity to ski with them, we’ve learned that most everyone on a pair of Betas is what you’d call a “shit hot” skier. Very encouraging.

The highlight for me came just before we took a lunch break. As a group of 19 Beta testers (!) we took over Gray Zone on Blackcomb mountain. I stood at the bottom snapping photos and delighting in the spectacle of Beta testers, one after another, stomping down the final powdery pitch. We looked like an invading army storming the beach having just made an amphibious landing. Quite a sight.

Conversation at the lunch tables was also valuable. I spoke with some of our testers regarding their experiences around the binding mount position … a valuable learning point for us. It seems most people have enjoyed riding their Betas with the bindings mounted between 2 and 4 cms back of the recommended boot centre mark, and that feedback will be invaluable moving ahead with future designs.

Fresh snow, new friends, and of course, après beers at Merlins to celebrate the day. A big thanks to all those testers who came out to support us, and we look forward to hosting the bigger, badder, 2nd annual Crown Skis day next season.

Thanks again everybody, and may your remaining ski season require a snorkel.

Hi Folks! Niels here, one of the engineers and designers at Crown.

It’s been a tough season to get out there and shred; coverage has been spotty and injuries abound; however, our intrepid beta testers and Crown team have been out on the hill putting our beta through its paces. Based on our own skiing and your reports (thanks SO MUCH to everyone who’s given us some feedback) we’re getting a really good idea of what the Beta can do. We’re quite proud of how it’s been handling, but we have some ideas for improvements none the less.

The betas have proven themselves to be quite an aggressive ski. They handle best when you pressure the front of the ski, and so they’re quite suited to anyone who likes to get their weight forward, or charge down a steep. If you’re the kind of skier who likes to stick their skis to the backside of a terrain feature rather than pillow-shot off of it, then the betas are your ski!

In the alpine you can really open up on these skis without worry of them diving when you finally need to rein in your speed again. I have found them to be quite nimble at high speed provided I’m comfortable enough to get my weight forward – you just gotta trust those big progressive tips.

The betas are very good at handling churned up snow such as a slide path or the bottom of a bowl where it’s all tracked out. Even at high speeds through the crud, they maintain their grip and smooth ride.

In the trees and transition zone, I have found the betas to be positively dreamy when there’s lots of snow. Again, they respond best to aggressive and fast lines, and are quick to transition when you’re pressuring the tips. The one place I have found them wanting, though, is in the trees when it’s totally tracked out. When the hill starts to look like a bobsleigh course designed by a tree-hugging M.C. Escher, the betas are just too aggressive to really enjoy the trip.

Finally, the bumps and the groomers…. Yep, they hold up well here too. Any ski that’s supposed to be an all mountain, or a slackcountry ski has got to be able to get you back to the bottom of the hill in style, and the betas have no trouble with that (nor have they wanted for testing in this area).

We’re going to keep the beta in our line-up for next year, but are thinking over the improvements we’d like to make. For one, the beta is unforgiving when your weight is back. There have been several moments this season, with its poor coverage, where I just wanted to get my tips up in front of me to keep from hitting something solid (a stump or downed tree). The beta seems harsh and responds without any finesse. The same can be said of pillow shots, or of landing on the tails coming off a wind-lip. This is something we’d like to address for next season – to make them more forgiving when you’re back or in trouble.

Don’t get me wrong, the character of the ski won’t change. It will still be a hard charger that eats up the vertical with gusto. But we want to give the rider just a little more room to be sloppy, a little more margin of error.

Finally, I just want to throw on a quick note about mounting position. If you have your betas mounted on the line, you may notice that they have a tendency to dive a bit (I certainly did). Since the design we’ve had a lot of feedback about mounting position, and have done extensive testing of our own. We’re finding that the best position seems to be 4cm back from the boot centre line for a traditional mount, and 2 cm back for a modern. For all the pin-heads out there, sorry, we don’t have enough feedback about the tele mount position yet, but we’re working on it.

Keep the comments coming! And I’m looking forward to skiing with all of you on March 14 at Whistler.

Cheers!
Niels.

In February, Niels and I had the opportunity to check out the Western Winter Sports Representatives Association (www.wwsra.com) at the Mission Ridge ski resort in Wenatchee, Washington. This show is an opportunity for retailers in the Pacific Northwest to meet the equipment representatives and demo the gear for the upcoming 09/10 ski season.

Niels and I are not retailers, so were we the guest of a most gracious host, Adam Justin, who owns Pro Ski Services in Seattle. (www.proskiseattle.com) Not only is he a stand up dude who can throw down on the mountain, but Adam runs a tight shop that appeals to a gear savvy, backcountry clientele; testament to the fact that he knows the difference between bona fide ski concepts and the fads. If you’re ever in Seattle, I recommend dropping in on Adam’s shop for an experience that will restore your faith that there are some solid retailers out there who know their head from a bomb hole in the snow.

The day was cold, and the snow was typical of what we have had around here for the season … “machine groomed powder” as they like to report on the Whistler website, or boilerplate as my dad used to call it. That is to say that Mission Ridge is hurting for snow, and venturing off piste means certain death for your skis. Certainly we would have liked to have had better snow; conditions were not ideal to really judge the performance of a ski.

At the risk of disclosing any proprietary information, I can say that we had the chance to ride some interesting gear. There were only one or two new concepts that caught us by surprise, but more interesting is to see the evolution of concepts that have been around for a few seasons, like the reverse camber or rockered ski. For instance, there is a company out of Salt Lake City in Utah called Surface. They have taken the rocker concept to a new extreme with their 3 stage rocker concept. Instead of a gradual curve that you’d see on a typical rockered ski, Surface has built their line up with 2 hard chines separating the 3 rocker stages, making a very angular looking ski. Riding these bad boys was … how shall I put it … “washy”, but like I said, the conditions were less than ideal. A ski like this can only be fairly judged when you’ve riding them in conditions that require a snorkel. In any case, though they be the competition, its great to see these guys pushing the boundaries and we wish them the best.

It was also a cool chance to link a few turns with Beta tester Andy Friedlander. He has yet to mount his Betas, so he took advantage of the opportunity to ride Niels’ and mine, both of which are mounted back of the centre mark line. Niels’ skis are mounted an astonishing 6 cms back of designated centre, whereas my skis are mounted 2 cms back. The evolving consensus seems to be 3 or 4 cms back of centre is the preferred mounting position. We look forward to having Andy’s feedback from his Betas over the remaining season and next.

On a completely unrelated note, check out this picture of the waste from the Beta program. It has all been separated into components for recycling and only the barrel on the left of the image is garbage … the rest is plastics and they were recycled!

This is Mathieu here, one of the founders of Crown Skis. Rapid introductions: I grew up in the French Alps (half an hour away from Chamonix), ski raced for my resort’s ski club as a kid / teenager, and moved to BC in my early 20’s. It was many years ago (sigh…), but I still get to go and taste the beautiful French snow once in a while…

Anyways, I was just there for a few weeks over New Year’s, and of course took a pair of Crown Betas with me. The pair I took are a slightly modified version of the “normal” Beta design… Quite a bit stiffer, and with a different topsheet construction. I wish it’d snowed every night and been sunny everyday… But only the sun part of my wish came true, day after day after day… So, my dreams of face shots, pillows and cornice drops were quickly erased and replaced by an obsession with speed, corduroy, and laser-drawn carving tracks. You might argue that a 102-underfoot semi-fatty with a mini-rocker may not have been the best weapon for the task at hand, and to be honest I was skeptical myself… But they delivered beyond my expectations, proving both super fun with their short turning radius (23m), and super powerful. The extra-stiffness gives them the extra power, but also makes them more exclusive and a little harder to handle, so I’m already working on addressing those issues (i.e. tweak the flex pattern to retain the power / tank-like stability while making them more accessible). But overall, a very promising design… and that’s before they’ve even seen what they were designed for - pow, crud, trees!

A big thank you to my little bro for putting together the quick video below. It should hopefully give you a good idea of what I’m talking about… I hope you enjoy it, and as always, welcome any and all feedback.

Cheers!


Crown Skis in Europe from Crown Skis on Vimeo.