Ski rack version 1.2 in the new shop studio office. Joe Risi and I built this in a few hours. Super basic. Upper rail is a 10 foot 2×4 mounted to the wall on shelf brackets. Dividers are lag screws inserted at 45 degree angle. Floor stand is another 10-0 2×4 topped with a chunk of vinyl house gutter as a ski tail holder and water catcher.
If you count the number of walls I’ve propped skis against, I’ve probably had half a million ski racks. But our own, real, built and designed racks? Amazingly, over 28 years in the old WildSnow workshop we never had a ski rack!
Goal here is a simple do-it-yourself rack. Requirements:
1. Holds lots of touring skis.
2. Accommodates various sizes and widths.
3. Keeps ski tails off floor.
4. Provision for water draining off wet skis.
5. Topskin branding visible from office area.
6. Minimal fiddle, skis only need to be strapped together.
7. Provision for ski poles and small accessories.
The usual ski rack involves some variety of hanging the planks, usually dowel slots you dangle the skis from by the tips. I’ve never liked the hanging racks. It’s hard to space the dowels in a configuration that accommodates various ski thicknesses, and sometimes the skis hang in a way that bends and distorts the tips (perhaps damaging the skis during long-term storage). More, in the course of my daily blogmesiter duties I might handle skis dozens of times. Even the small amount of fiddling with a hanging rack gets annoying; instead, I prefer to quickly lean the skis back in their nest after measuring, weighing, and perhaps even skiing on them.
Bear in mind this is somewhat of a beta version. It could be all we need, but perhaps version 1.3 will eventually occur.
This iteration is mounted to the wall with 5×6 inch shelf brackets so it stands off the wall enough that the tips of the leaning skis don’t touch the wall. Nonetheless, some of the bigger skis do scratch against the wall, so I can see adding a chunk of something like Sequentia to protect the wall. Length is 10 feet, with the separators being 8″ x 1/4″ self drilling black coated lag screws. (Links are from Lowes, but please don’t get the idea I’m a Lowes fanboy, quite the opposite.) Tricky part is inserting all the lags at a 45 degree angle, so they’re visually correct. Drilling a series of shallow pilot holes then lining lags up with the 45 on a speed square did the trick. As a final tune, the lags can be slightly bent by hand.
Lags support and separate the angled and leaning skis. Six inch spacing of the lags is somewhat arbitrary but seems to work. Challenge is to allow room for bindings while storing skis as compactly as possible.
Floor stand is super basic, just gutter on a 2×4 with legs. Idea here is to catch water, and allow sweeping of the floor. Unintended benefit is the vinyl gutter actually grabs and holds the tails of wider backcountry skis. Most of the planks end up with the tails just above the bottom of the gutter, thus keeping them out of any standing water. The stand is not attached to the floor, allowing removal of skis and preparing this area of the shop for automotive work. I did fantasize about making a rack on casters that could be moved anywhere in the room, but priorities intruded on dreams. Perhaps that’s version 1.3?
You can hang stuff from this type of rack including ski poles (if they have straps).
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
