Birch Skis and What to Buy

This module reconstructs North House Folk School’s four-day Craft of Birch Ski Making: Making Your Own Set, taught by Ian Andrus. Students make “a custom pair of birch skis” sized to their “height, weight, and intended use,” covering wood grain, bending wood, bindings, and use. It is “not a log to ski course”: the instructor does preliminary steps beforehand, and the $150–175 materials fee depends on whether you choose leather bindings or bring your own ¹. The class’s own plan isn’t published; this follows the sources cited.

The class before

Greg Fangel took the class when Mark Hansen taught it in 2 1/2 days. Hansen pre-cut the birch; the blanks went into a hot-water bath heated by the wood stove while students adjusted their molds, “including the camber below the foot,” and the skis set overnight. The next day they cut, gouged, scraped, and chiseled the bent blanks into skis, with a bandsaw to speed things up, and added carved tips and decorative lines. The last day was finishing, pine tar, and leather strap bindings: a rawhide strap for the foot, soaked, cut, and punched, and tanned straps sized to each student’s boots ². Andrus’s four days follow the same arc with more time.

The Nordic ski

Skis are old in the North, and Sámi skiers were among the most skilled. Linnaeus described Sámi skis made of compression wood (tjur), the dense wood on the lower side of a leaning Scots pine; in the 1930s Anta Pirak described birch for the outer part of the underside and compression pine for the inner part, the combination giving the right bend ³. Norwegians used ash, birch, and pitch-saturated pine ⁴. Telemark in Norway gave its name to the classic shape that 19th-century makers copied ⁵.

Size and shape

E. C. Richardson’s The Ski-Runner (1909) describes the Telemark ski in numbers that still work ⁵:

• Length: the tip “reaches to the middle of the fingers when the hand is held above the head.” A Wisconsin maker sized his to the wrist with the arm up ⁶. North House adjusts for weight and use ¹.
• Size: about 3 1/2 inches wide and 1 inch thick in Richardson’s general description.
• Arch (camber): no more than 3/4 inch; too much and the ski runs on its ends.
• Bend (tip): a total rise of 5 to 6 inches, starting so gently “it should be impossible to say just where it begins,” like a good bow. A thin bend is less likely to break than a thick one.
• Sides: slightly broader at the bend and the heel than at the middle.
• Groove: about 1/12 inch deep and rounded on Telemark skis; about 1/8 inch and square on Swedish ones.
• True: a line from the middle of the tip to the middle of the heel must split the ski into two equal halves, or it will run in a curve.

Wood

North House uses birch ¹. Richardson preferred ash and hickory and found birch light but “apt to be brittle,” though Norwegian makers used birch impregnated with tar ⁵. For hardwood skis, lay out the blank so the growth rings run parallel to the width of the ski ⁴. Talbot looked for air-dried rather than kiln-dried wood because it bends and holds a bend better, and paid $28 for his rough ash ⁶.

Buy yellow birch from a hardwood dealer in 5/4 thickness, clear and straight for the full length, a few inches longer than the finished ski. Sight down each board; any twist in the grain will make the ski run crooked.

Try it

Hold your arm straight up against a wall and mark the middle of your fingers, then your wrist. Those two marks bracket your ski length. A shorter ski turns more easily among trees; a longer one spreads your weight over more snow.