A need to save money sent Drake and company to China; 14-hour days in the factory became the norm and piles of pre-preg carbon were wasted, and yet . . . a quiet but persistent buzz was building about a company at the leading edge . . . For three months Drake continued to wrestle with one problem in particular: twist. He and his assistants made six different skis a day, each time with slight variations. Sometimes the variations came from engineering theory, and sometimes they were just creative, artistic guesses. Drake’s assistants would take the ski out of the mold, grind off the excess, sand the bottom, and lay it on a clean, flat table in a workroom thick with sawdust. Drake wanted all four corners of the ski to sit flat on the table. If you tapped a corner and it vibrated, the ski was twisted and thus no good. He wanted to hear a dull thud, four times. Instead he was hearing a lot of rattles. Then, ironically, one tropical day in the summer of 2007, Drake tried an extraordinarily different way of laying up the carbon fiber. The first four skis that day still came out twisted. He made minor adjustments. Around dinnertime they tested their fifth ski, and heard a distinct thud at each corner. They had made a ski without twist.
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Paradise
This, however, did not constitute success. “We had been through this same emotional roller-coaster many times before,” Drake says. “We’d get one good ski and think we had the problem solved, but then we couldn’t replicate it. The key was to make two in a row.” So following the same methods as ski number five, they layered components into the mold, set it in the press, turned it on, and waited nervously. For the next hour, Drake worked at his laptop, eyes on the clock. The press heated up, then shut itself off, cooled down, and popped open. Factory workers took the ski out of the mold, cleaned it up, sanded it down, and handed it over to Drake. At about 8 pm, both worried and excited, he laid it on the worktable and began to tap the corners. The first contact point produced a good, dead, thud. So did the second. So did the third. Hunched down, eyes level with the side of the ski, Drake prepared to thump the fourth corner. Would it rattle, or thud? It made a resounding thud. Drake stood straight up, holding his breath. He looked at the others, walked out of the room, across the factory floor, down three flights of stairs, out the back of the building, across the parking lot, and up the side of a small, verdant mountain. When he got to the top he let out a deep, primal, guttural scream.
In perhaps the understatement of the year, Drake says, “The rest of the night was pretty awesome.” What he won’t say is exactly how he tweaked the ski sandwich —that information is proprietary—except that it had to do with how they stacked the carbon-fiber layers between the other materials. Now he was able to produce skis that were 30 percent lighter than conventional skis, 30 percent stronger, and much longer lasting. And they rode beautifully, rising above the powder like a surfboard, allowing users to enjoy a new style of turn that slid and carved at the same time— in ski speak, the slarve. Since DPS began selling their cutting-edge powder skis to retailers about three years ago, they have won about every possible accolade from the ski press. John Stifter, editor of Powder magazine, calls Stephan Drake “a leading innovator in ski design who has evolved ski technology as much as anyone in the industry.” With their cutting-edge components and radical, rockered shapes, DPS skis attract a rabid, almost religious following; one writer went so far as to refer to “the Church of DPS,” and added that he’s joined the choir. Secularly speaking, Drake attributes much of his success to slarve. “We did bend and accept the challenges we faced,” he says. “But we also had the carve, the determination, Nathaniel Reade is a to get to our end goal. frequent contributor to And you need them both Deerfield Magazine. to be complete.”••
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