Advice on these please

Think about a wooden ruler being flicked on a school desk top and the Booooooiiiing noise you used to make. That wooden ruler is like the wood core of your skis. Now think what would happen if you glued a thin strip of very hard and brittle metal to the ruler.

Top description.. never thought about it like that.

My very limited knowledge of skis (I'm better on crop rotation) is that ideally you need different ones according to the conditions and what sort of ski-ing you want to do, after you've picked the right ones for your height and weight and pocket.

But, it would be somewhat impractical to go on a ski holiday with a dozen or so pairs of skis, and you'd need a very strong caddy/sherpa ski-ing behind with the spare ones.

So, you need to compromise, and either use a general purpose type, or put up with them not performing quite so well on powder/ice or whatever.

Personally, I hire mine, and all I do is tell them my height, weight, ski-ing ability and what I plan on doing. And I'm not good enough to know whether I'm ski-ing like XXX because of my skis or because I'm just a rubbish skier. So sometimes I notice my skis are slow, for example, and sometimes they are very fast, but I never know why. And it takes me a while to adjust to them.

But I don't know anything about ski construction. In fact, I thought they were all made of wood and metal (thank you Trencher for your excellent description). Next holiday I will try putting one on a desk and going Booooooing with it (as long as the teacher isn't watching!).

Ally

There are more combinations of ski construction than you could ever care to imagine. One variable is the wood/combination of woods selected to construct the 'core' of the ski. The cores are not always wood though, a few manufacturers have experimented with a foam core of sorts but they weren't very well received to my knowledge.

Ally - will you be attached to the ski when you do this booooing technique?? )
This post has been quite an eye opener and very educational re ski construction and use.