I’m back East now - currently visiting my good friends at Fischer US. Actually, Fischer and Swix, since Andy Canniff (who’s putting me up for the night) just moved from Fischer to Swix. On Wednesday I fly over to Norway for the Beitostolen World Cups where I’ll be working with the USST service staff. From there I’ll accompany the team to Kuusamo for the second World Cup weekend, and then fly back to Vancouver on December 3rd. I’ll be difficult to reach while I’m gone, and I won’t be grinding any skis until I return!

Last week was nuts. I ground over 200 pairs, almost entirely by myself. I had help from Chris Werrell before he headed off to Silver Star and from Amy when she got back. In between I had a huge amount of help from Gunnar who spent a couple of very long days in the shop. Once or twice he’s said that he wants to work on skis when he gets a job. Now he wants to be a baker in a pizza store. The only place we went aside from the shop was the pizza store, where we got to watch the guys toss the pizza dough. That looked a lot more fun than working on skis.

I’ve started to get some feedback on grinds and skis from the CVTC athletes. Chris Werrell went to Silver Star last week with about 60 pairs of Salomon skis for the X-C.com team and demo fleet. We ground a handful of the skis for Chris to test, and Chris did flex evaluations on the whole bunch of skis. It was a great way to get to know the characteristics and parameters of a brand-new product. And since arriving in Silver Star Chris has had the opportunity to put a bunch of these skis on the snow and correlate snow-feel and performance with our flex evaluation information. None of it means a thing until you have the on-snow component! Thanks to Phil Villeneuve for facilitating this.

On the grind side of things Chris reports that a variation of the C44 concept (actually, an inversion of the concept) has run really well in mixed old and new snow. I made a handful of these (labeled C40) in VT before I moved everything out west. All told there are eight or ten pairs of these in circulation, all with people who can give me good feedback.

I ground all of Kris Freeman’s skis before sending them off to Pete to carry over to Beitostolen, and I’ve started getting some feedback on those as well. Larry Poromaa, the new head of service for the USST, had asked me to put on a grind that has a very good reputation throughout Europe and Scandinavia. This grind is a Lars Svensson invention (called TF02), which Lorentz Soderhjelm calls an R20. I have had absolutely terrible luck with it over the years. The main component is a Lars Svensson CD021 and when I got back home from the Olympics in 2002 I immediately started testing it. It had a good reputation, but it didn’t run fast in the East. I made a “super CD021″ or SCD021 for a while which was just the CD021 over true linear channels. I didn’t know that Lars had started doing the same thing (with different spacing on his channels) and named it TF02. The grind continued to be hit or miss for me, and it only hit in narrow range of fairly wet conditions. Meanwhile, it was becoming an almost universal standard in scandinavia. When I went to Sweden and Finland with the Stratton team in the spring of 2005 I started to get an inkling of why this might be. I didn’t have a CD021 with me, but even below freezing my “wettest” structures were running really well.

Anyway, thus far, in Beitostolen, the TF02 has been the best grind on Kris’s skis. I didn’t make a whole lot of other structures for him to try, but I did give him a Z40, a ZR1 and a Q1-3. In my experience all of those structure would be preferable to a TF02 in anything other than quite wet snow. It’s clear that I’ve got a lot to learn. It’s equally clear that I’ve got a good opportunity to apply an open mind to the new Olympic venue and make good use of the next couple of years. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing some new structures emerge from my testing.