A friendly PSA

K2 should be close to true size as well, lay em on the ground and break out a tape.

sad, and true, this is how we end up with kids skis when your tall.

Many ski companies list their ski length as the length of the material before it goes into the press. Depending on the rocker profile of the ski, a 188cm ski (length before the ski goes in the press and the length the manufacturer will claim) will come out of the press at ~186cm. ON3P is one of the few companies that lists the length of their skis by their true, post-press length.

Not super scientific because they are not all lined up but in order from left to right sizes are 186,181,174,185 and 179. The 179 Hellbents are as big as the 186s almost in person.

dkelsMany ski companies list their ski length as the length of the material before it goes into the press. Depending on the rocker profile of the ski, a 188cm ski (length before the ski goes in the press and the length the manufacturer will claim) will come out of the press at ~186cm. ON3P is one of the few companies that lists the length of their skis by their true, post-press length.

In my ski building experience, a 183cm unbent presses into a ~180cm ski with lots of tip splay. Especially for a small operation, measuring pre-bent is just simpler for the design and production (2d sketches only, better idea of how much material you are using, etc). Obviously it's pretty useless for the consumer though, so I side with ON3P on this.

I think that saying 2-3cm shorter isn't a bad rule of thumb (obviously this changes with rocker/camber profile). Better still is to look up a third party measurement (such as SoothSKI, NS roofbox reviews, Blister reviews) for an unbiased measurement. If I remember correctly, SoothSKI found out that lots of manufacturers measurements aren't really as accurate as you'd expect, such as waist width being a few mm's narrower.

I think 1000 skis also measures post-press.

Despite our factory’s dislike, we measure our skis as tape pull true length. For them, they would prefer always using the material length to save on any chance of error in material prep.

As for width variation, ski base material is very temperature sensitive and so if there is a large variation in temperature either in the cutting, any storage or in the layup process then you can get inconsistency in the finished width as they cut to the side of the edge and the edge position is determined by the edge of the base. Another source of variation is if the edge isn't attached tight to the edge of the base then the width can be off.

In a small production like ours, the factory times the final cutting of the base and attaching of the edge to be a max of an hour before pressing, so there is less chance of the base warping. Whether this get done in bigger productions I don't know, they might have climate control processes and storage solutions.