| Summary: | Growing up as a passionate outdoorswomen and now an engineer, I have always loved to do two things: skiing and building things. As such, it only felt natural that for my undergraduate thesis, I should attempt to build a pair of skis and see how close I could come to creating professional grade skis. To do this, first a detailed design of a freeride/powder ski was created. From there, and with lots of learning and guidance in the machine shop, a pair of skis and a press were manufactured. When it was all said and done, the skis looked like skis; albeit homemade skis but skis nonetheless. There were clear areas for manufacturing processes improvements that would have improved the physical appearance of the skis but also would have decreased the risk of delamination of the skis. However, to understand how close my skis got to professional grade skis, an experiment was designed to measure the modes of vibrations of several different types of skis to be able to characterize ski behavior. When analyzing and comparing my skis to professional skis, the nose, which accounts for in theory over 80% of energy absorption in skis, compared very closely to that of professional skis. The peaks happened in comparable places, with comparable amplitudes. However, the tail demonstrated abnormally high amplitudes in their key frequency zones. While this is likely a result of our skis having a lack of bindings unlike other skis tested, this could also indicate some issues in layering and manufacturing of the skis. However, the only way to fully know is to test them out on a mountain. So in 7-8 months, the on snow ski testing can validate which one it is!
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