How Do You Make a Skishoe?
We advertise that our skishoes are handcrafted in central Pennsylvania. But what does that mean? How do we do it? It may sound simple in theory, but it gets complicated. I must confess that not every part or component of a skishoe is made here, or even in this country, but we do our best to keep things local, or at least made in the United States. The main component of our skishoe is the ski, actually a hunk of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic, the same #2 material you see in common plastic jugs. For small quantities, we have the ski machined from 4’x8’ sheets of material by MPC Industries, a machine shop in Lancaster, PA. Machining doesn’t lend itself to offering different colors. The material comes in black and red, and black is cheaper, so we go with that to keep our costs down. The skis are machined straight, so once we get them in house, we form the tip on the front end. We do this by heating it with a torch and then bending and holding it in a fixture