Building a cabinet to hold 24 pairs of skinny skis.

[bark-eater]

I got the old ski bug and have a considerable pile of skinny skis in my garage. I'm going to build a free standing cabinet to store them safely in one place. I don't have 24 pairs yet but the speed at which there multiplying is startling.

I've cleared out floorspace for a 16"x 4'`x 8' freestanding plywood cabinet. My initial thought was to hang them all from their tips between sets of 2 dowels with straps and camber blocks for the wood skis. It was suggested that hanging them like this might deform the tips. I was figuring the skies would be 3 or 4 deep with the hoarder stash farther back in the cabinet.

If I let them sit on their tails I will need some way to hold them vertically as I don't have room to angle the rack. I guess I can use dowels as dividers about 4' up and bungies between the layers. This seems less elegant but form should follow function and all that jazz.

It seems like a "few" folks here have faced similar crisis's. Just wondering if there were any good solutions..

[Chisana]

I have no helpful ideas other than the fact that I have been hanging all my nordic skis (wood and plastic) by the tips for over 40 years( at least some of them),with no discernable change, tip or otherwise.

[lowangle al]

I haven't had a problem either with hanging them from the tips. If you hang them, you can put them away with snow on them and the tails won't sit in a puddle.

[fgd135]

I also hang skis in the garage on a metal rack, very similar to this one on Amazool:

The rack suspends skis by their tips; with alpine skis the brakes hold the skis together, but with nordic skis I use cheap straps or even rubber bands around the tails to do the same thing.
The rack I have holds about 18 pair of xc and tele skis, and like Al mentioned, it keeps them from sitting in a puddle, lets the edges dry out, etc.

[bark-eater]

I think I have enough height in the cabinet to keep the peg board above the tops of any ski's I would want to store on their tails. I'm mostly concerned about the old wood skies and less so about laminated skis. I'd also like fit some sort of waxing form/bench and a tool box in the cabinet but that's bonus round cleverness.

[riel]

Some people say I have a ski problem.

I'd like to think I have a ski solution.

[Wintaar]

I caught the ski bug a few years back too—started with one pair, now there’s a whole corner of the garage dedicated to them. I built a vertical rack with dowels halfway up to keep them spaced, and bungees across the back for the “deep stash.” Not the prettiest, but it works great. I actually got the idea while browsing for outdoor benches—go to site to see Garden Furniture in the UK, they had some cool storage setups that sparked the whole thing.

[JohnSKepler]

You can't use 24 pairs of skis all the time. Realistically, probably 4-6 pairs. I'm not saying you don't need 24 pairs for all foreseeable conditions but on any given winter month, due to conditions, you'll only be using four or five. And, if they are skinny skis, you'll be mounting with 3-Pin or maybe Xplore or NNNNBC.

If you mount them with inserts you can remove the bindings from most of them drastically reducing the amount of space and complexity of that cabinet. I would guess that only having five of them mounted and the other 20, not mounted, could be hung in 1/4 or less the amount of space. While moving a Meidjo from one set of skis to another takes about 30 minutes I can move a set of Xplore bindings in about 10 minutes or less or, if in a hurry, 12 to 15 minutes.

You might consider peg board as a way to hang them. It gives you a lot of options as you switch them out from year to year and month to month. There are skis I use a lot one year and barely touch the next... I also spent a lot of time considering how to hang skis and decided I didn't want to put pressure on any surface with an engineered curve, or rather, minimize pressure on any surface with an engineered curve, and I don't compress camber. Instead I've found ways to hang them vertically from their bindings. When I get these photos showing how I'm doing it resized later today, I'll upload them!