It’s early August in Salt Lake City, and it’s hot. To the west, the sun is setting into the heat like some sort of satanic mirage. To the east, the final patches of snow linger hopelessly on the high granite peaks of Little Cottonwood Canyon. But in a cramped garage workshop in the sleepy suburb of Cottonwood Heights, Dwyer Haney isn’t thinking about mountain bike trails, splitter cracks, or clean mountain lakes. He’s thinking about snow—the endlessly deep fluffy kind that explodes with every turn and gets all over your face. And he’s building skis. Big ones.
Dwyer thrusts a lukewarm Bud Ice into my hand as he gives me the grand tour around the humble home of Hardwood Skis.
Inside this haphazard workspace, amidst the scraps of wood, empty beer bottles, and various power tools, is where Haney and his brother Porter have spent nearly every night this summer. Ski posters plaster the sheetrock walls, and the thick smell of epoxy and sawdust permeates the air as they unload their custom-made ski press that Dwyer designed and built in his parents garage a year and a half ago. In a day or two, Dwyer has to start the drive back east to finish his degree in mechanical engineering at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, so tonight they’re putting the finishing touches on several different pairs.
A hulking iron frame that looks like a giant metal accordion makes up the press itself, which Dwyer designed and welded himself for about $2,000. A custom wooden mold that holds the skis slides inside, outfitted with multiple wedges that determine the amount of tip and tail rocker the ski will have. A specialized heat blanket cures the epoxy, while two compressor-inflated fire hoses deliver 40,000 pounds of pressure (the equivalent of 8 Suburbans, Dwyer says) to keep the skis layers from shifting.
Despite Dwyer’s engineering background and apparent carpentry chops, adjustments are constantly made on the fly and much of the process is still trial and error.
“There’s not really a place you can go online and download a PDF or a CAD drawing of how to build a ski press,” Dwyer says. “Without a factory line, so much of it is human precision. It’s all about fine-tuning your process and finding little things along the way to make it go smoother.”
Let’s be clear about one thing—Haney isn’t building your dad’s old school skinny sticks. The ridiculously fat powder planks that come out of this garage can only be described as behemoths. The average Hardwood ski clocks in around 120mm at the waist and 150mm at the tip—about as big as production skis come these days. The Haney’s have also incorporated new school elements like rockered tip and swallow tails into the nine pairs of skis completed thus far.
“We take the elements we like from different skis we’ve ridden and try to combine them,” Porter says.
After a few minutes of hissing decompression, Porter and Dwyer slide the wooden mold out of the press and peel back the fire hoses and heat blanket to reveal their finest work to date—a super-fat monster with a slick wood finish and blue plaid graphics on the tip and tail, complete with the initials of the friend they were made for. The brothers unscrew the boards from the mold and pull them out into the driveway to get a better look. The skis, which look more like water skis at this point, came out perfectly, and Porter quickly snaps photos with his iPhone.
“I’m stoked on these things,” Dywer says. I’m betting his buddy will be too.
For more, check out www.HardwoodSkis.com
