How skis are made
A ski is a hot-pressed sandwich of plastic, glass, steel and wood, and 40 percent of its core wood ends up as sawdust.
- stations
- 8
- things upstream
- 77
- raw sources
- 24
- steps from the ground
- 8
The short version
A ski is built in layers. Workers lay a plastic base, fiberglass, steel edges, metal reinforcement and a shaped wooden core into a mold, add a printed top sheet, and close it in a heated press. The resin bonds everything into one stiff, springy plank. Trimming, base grinding and a flex test finish the pair.
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Glue up the wood core
Two wedges of wood are glued together to form one core blank. Atomic's Austrian factory uses laminated ash, beech and poplar from nearby forests, chosen for strength that lasts.
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Mill the core to shape
Robots and CNC stations cut the blank to the outline of a ski, thick under the boot and thin at the tip and tail. Workers then shave, grind and fit the reinforcement by hand. About 40 percent of the wood ends up as sawdust, which the factory recycles into chipboard.
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Print the top sheet
Graphics go onto the top layer by digital, sublimation or screen printing. Sublimation prints the design on paper first and then transfers it, which suits many colors, while screen printing suits designs with just a few.
Goes in -
Stack the layers in the mold
A worker builds each ski by hand, base first, then fiberglass, steel edges, a layer of aluminum alloy and rubber strips along the sides, wetting the layers with epoxy resin. The wood core goes in next, followed by more rubber, fiberglass and metal, and the top sheet last. One worker assembles 50 to 60 skis a day, and the mold has to be cleaned between each, since any residue can spoil a ski.
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Press under heat
The whole stack needs strong pressure and heat to bond. Atomic's ski presses run on heat piped in from a wood-chip power plant next door. When the ski comes out, excess resin has squeezed out around the edges.
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Trim the overhang
Material hangs over the edge of the pressed ski and the base is smeared with spilled epoxy. The ski is cleaned and clamped into a separate machine that cuts the overhang away.
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Grind the base
Stones grind the base flat and cut a fine texture into it that helps it glide. Today most of this is automated, but at Atomic the ski tip is still ground by hand, in a shower of sparks.
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Bend and match each pair
An inspector flexes every ski by hand and pairs it with another that bends the same way. A stylus drawn along the base checks that the ground texture is even.
Worth repeating
- Skis predate the wheel. The oldest wooden skis found, from Russia, Sweden and Norway, are thousands of years old.
- Steel edges were invented in 1928 in Austria, long before they became standard on every ski.
- A single ski carries a QR code that lets the factory trace who assembled it and when.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and ski starts as these 24 raw sources.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How skis are made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/ski