ExoticSkis.Com

"Wagner Custom is your prototyping shop, dedicated to building skis uniquely suitable to your style, strength, weight and mission profile: the kind of snow and terrain you intend to master."

"First of all, we're carbon-neutral and fully renewable on energy use. If you visit our little shop in Placerville, Colorado, you'll recognize us by the impressive array of solar thermal panels on the roof. They provide all our space heating, radiant heating and hot water supply. We buy wind power to run our fluorescent lights, computers and shop tools. That leaves the product itself. The plastics and resins that go into any ski are derived from petroleum stock. We can't change that. But we can cut waste to the absolute minimum. First, of course, we use clear, straight–grain, finish–quality hardwood for our cores, rather than injection-molded foam. Wood is a renewable resource. Molding foam uses up a lot of petroleum, and generates a large volume of fairly toxic gas as it expands. In a big ski factory, the filthiest room is the grinding line, where molding flash (the overflow resin from the molding process) has to be sanded off the ski. This process creates many cubic yards of black chemical dust – it looks and behaves like coal dust. In a typical large factory, this stuff is flushed through drains in the floor and has to be filtered from the discharge flow to prevent going into the groundwater. Through careful hand assembly and layup, we make sure that we use only the minimum amount of resin to get a bombproof fiberglass structure. The ski therefore comes out of the mold with little or no flash, and we can cut most of it off clean with a carpenter's draw knife. We flush nothing from the floor. We can clean up after a shift with a push broom."

"You now enter the zone customization White Cristal, one of the only manufacturers offering ski & snows of personal, with manufacturing and integration of the decor that fits your style! All this in unity, in small, medium or large series! White Crystal brings manufacturing and personalization equipment in a new dimension through to meet technical passion for surfing and the art! You finally have the opportunity to express your character through a wide choice of shapes developed by our engineers and riders, or even to conduct your own personal ratings and sizes, or to adapt the product to flex your style to ride! Finally, you can apply your own decorations during the construction and obtain a ski totally unique quality, easily competing with larger manufacturers. White Cristal develops its creation through its own designers and guest artists (9th Concept, Way of Spray, Wido of Marval ,...) you can use Decos, but mainly you can send us your own creations or seek our services to develop your graphic line with our in-house designers. Start by choosing the type of equipment that you should then see the proposals shapes and sizes offered, and finally made your (your) choice. Contact us to receive the template of your product to your choice. Its creation is not yet online service available at the moment, but you can order by sending us a message, then drop your decoration as well as (the) model (s) want (s) by e-mail or select One of our decorations. The creation of a shape and size for a single or several models leads to additional costs of manufacturing standard, in this case please contact us for a quote. Live your passions in depth and expand your personality to your hardware! "

"I'm a 50% owner in a new company called "White Dot Freeride" www.whitedotfreeride.com I guess it's still to early to advertise that we're live as we're still testing our ski construction but we're pretty sure we've got our shapes nailed and have produced the moulds.

We're going to carry on testing the construction over this season and will have the skis available to sell on a limited number to friends and family or people who have supported us then we plan to hit the market for the 09/10 season.

Our models are

"The One" our park ski in 166, 173 and 180cm. 119/89/113

"The Preacher" our back country explorer in 169, 179 and 189cm. 155/112/133

"The Redeemer" our charger. 190cm 148/128/138 rockered.

Our bindings are 816 and 412 VISTs with covered branded White Dot Freeride.

Both myself and my business partner, although avid skiers, have had little input into the shapes. We've left that to the skiers doing our R&D.

Although as a company we're registered in England, I'm from NZ, my business partner and investor is from Scotland and our home resort is Val Thorens France.

When we're happy with the construction, we'd love to get you a couple of pairs to test to see what you think.

As a side note I wanted to put down why we started WDF. I know many people say there are already too many ski companies out there and I know I'll not make millions owning and running WDF. It's simple. I get to ski, I smile each morning and I shed a tear of pride when I hold a WDF ski.

Thanks

Andrew "