Christmas in July!

Woohoo! The ski press is here! Erik came by yesterday and dropped it off. You may be able to see the smile on my face in the photo. This is my own Red Rider BB gun. My pony. My Radio Flyer wagon. My Schwinn Typhoon. My flexible Flyer sled. All rolled into one! Now we simply need to buy a bunch of wood and glue and p-tex and learn how to build skis. We have done a lot of research, and have a training video on the way. Then Erik has in-house training scheduled with a master ski builder. By the real Christmas day, I hope to be skiing on some skis that I made myself. If that works out, maybe one day you too will be skiing on a ski made in Berkeley, California! We will try to have it on display when we have our Fall Parking lot kickoff sale in late August. In the meantime, I need to try to focus on the sale instead of the new toy. I know Erik will be hard at it as soon and as much as possible. Looks like some late night ski building??

Enough vacationing already?

I have not been blogging this summer, as usual. This week however, there is some interesting stuff going on at the shop so I felt the need. I have certainly enjoyed the summer so far. Last night I got back from what may be the last road trip of the summer. Some camping, biking, and hiking in the redwoods trees of Humbolt County. Absolutely awesome! A few days in Eureka with friends to wrap it up, and then back home. Very relaxed. But now I have to shift gears again. A lot will be going on at the shop this week.

John and I will be finishing up our new boot bench. The boot lab also has some new added features that we have to implement. Most of what we need to finish the projects will have arrived while I was gone. A lot of appointments were scheduled last night after checking email and phone messages on the work phone. Back to the grind stone for a bit.

One other exciting thing for this week is that we will be setting up Boone Ski's (http://www.booneskis.com/) new ski press in the shop later this week. A ski press is the largest and most important piece of equipment in the ski building process. This will be really cool. Eric Boone and I were chatting in the spring. Eric wanted to buy a ski press to do more in-house work on prototypes and the like. He had nowhere to park it currently. I had a shop that was not used for a large part of the year (when he will be needing it). We decided right there and then. For the time being at least, the ski press will be at California Ski Company. Eric has a ski building clinic scheduled later this week. Then we will see what can be done with the unit. While it is not my press, I am still psyched to be able to learn how to use it and learn more about the process. I am also happy to be able to help out a local ski company. Eric is a great guy who is doing skis for all the right reasons. I would love to see him continue to succeed and grow. This could be really cool! I am psyched!