PlyBoard - Spear Pickle

Steve, the link to the bigger picture set worked perfectly. It's cool to see V1 vs V2 in your design process. More rocker, second center piece for extra strength, etc. Seeing the pictures again of V1 had me thinking it looked too thin, but that could purely be a misplaced asthetic judgement on my part as I have not personally worked with that level of quality birch wood ply.

Years ago I built a nice pair of ash wood snowshoes. The issue there is in board selection (really straight pure grain with no imperfections). The board I ended up buying at around my 3rd lumber yard was about 10-12 feet long which I rip cut into about 2 x 2s before taking them through multiple small passes on a plane. You can imagine the kind of curvature you need to pull off the nose of a snowshoe and I had to build a steam chamber and build jigs to frame them in once I pulled the wood out of the steamer all warm, toasty, soggy, and flexible. Snowshoes have "rocker" in the tip too you know so the jigs were as hard to set up as any other part of the project. They turned out to work pretty well in terms of balance, weight, etc, but not as good as a commercial set. But as I know you would appreciate, they were sweet to trudge around in because I had made them.

I was just joking about the skis. I live in a ski town (Park City, UT) and folks will practically pay you to take old skis off their hands just to get their wives to stop #@%$#!ing about the garage clutter.