The World’s First Ever All-Aluminum Skis Have Arrived

Brian Rosenberger has worked for years astatine an craft manufacturing institution with, coincidentally, lineage backmost to the Glenn L. Martin Company. On agelong drives successful 2010 from his location successful Texas to the snowfall of Colorado, Rosenberger, with his lad and friends, would screen a batch of topics, but the 1 that Rosenberger kept coming backmost to was to marque a snowboard (his plank of prime astatine the time) successful the mode of immoderate airplane parts—out of a azygous portion of aluminum.

One person successful particular, Ron Chambers, yet got bushed of each the speech and said he’d concern the effort to get things started. In 2013, Rosenberger connected with Leif Sunde, laminitis of Denver Sports Lab, an olympic-level skis tuning shop, to commencement investigating flex qualities of assorted composite snowboards connected the market. By 2014 Rosenberger had immoderate all-aluminum prototypes acceptable to test. Apparently, the on-snow results were precise encouraging.

Over the years much prototypes were made, and the power was made from snowboards to skis. In July of 2023, Metal1 Skis Corporation (M1 Skis) was formed: Rosenberger arsenic CEO, Chambers arsenic COO, Sana Fathima heading up fundraising and strategy, and Sunde arsenic manager of product.

Why Aluminum?

The archetypal question that comes to caput for galore is whether the metallic associated with soda cans oregon cooking foil is beardown capable to tolerate the rigors of the mountain—especially on the edges, traditionally made of steel.

“Aluminum is harder by an bid of magnitude than the crystal a skis volition encounter,” says Rosenberger. The trade-off successful galore materials, including metals, is the harder they are, the much brittle they become. Aluminum, according to M1, is hard capable to grip the crystal but is ductile capable truthful it won't easy spot oregon shatter erstwhile it encounters rocks, adjacent successful acold wintertime conditions. Indeed, immoderate skis manufacturers opt for a softer alloy borderline erstwhile making park-oriented skis due to the fact that the harder alloy is much apt to spot oregon ace from sliding connected the rails successful the skis park.

Core shots—when the ski's halfway is exposed to moisture and leads to warping oregon rotting—will ne'er happen, due to the fact that determination is nary core, and the aluminum basal volition deflect rocks mode amended than immoderate extruded polyethylene base. And, for that reason, nary stone volition ever rip the edges out.