_Endre Hals: The man whose made to measure skis have a two year waiting list
In winter sports, the ultimate performance luxury is a pair of tailor-made skis. Custom ski-makers are up there with the great mystical craftsmen of the ages and one such ski-maker is Endre Hals, who founded Prog Skis in 2007 before launching Evi Skis in 2013.
He works from a barn in Norway, a country central to the lore of skiing. The word 'ski' comes from the Old Norse 'skið', meaning a stick of wood and in 2014, a pair of 1,300-year-old wooden skis with leather bindings emerged intact from a glacier in the Reinheimen Mountains near Hals' home.
Naturally, he made a working replica with modern bindings to see how the shape performed – it's actually remarkably similar to today's big mountain powder skis.
Above: Endre Hals begins work on another pair of his skis
With a commitment to the human relationship with the wilderness, ski-touring is at the heart of what Hals does but he also makes skis for all disciplines, including freestyle park riding and piste skiing. Geometry is also important to Hals: 'Our product is not the skis themselves,' he insists, 'but the maths behind them.'
Hals has created a huge database of ski shapes with a focus on how different combinations work for an individual's dimensions and skiing style. From the moment Hals founded Prog, he had a two-year waiting list. As a result, he launched Evi – a made-to-measure service – using the database to recommend a shape after customers provide their details.
Prog and Evi skis are created from a natural laminated wood core of ash and poplar, machine-cut then pressed into the designated profile and hand finished Hals makes his own resin-impregnated carbon
It's a time-consuming and painstaking process, but it produces skis in which function rules, and form
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