Powder Gal

I am an avid skier and lover of the outdoors. As a skier, I am tired of seeing aluminum and carbon poles snapping at the midst of a single plant in the wrong spot on the mountain. Poles are upwards to $200 these days with a guarantee that they will be sturdy while giving a skier minimal weight added weight while skiing. However, these poles have their trade offs. One: a carbon fiber pole can cost up to $200 dollars retail giving you a light weight option for those backcountry days but are more easily to broken in half. I want to create an affordable custom ski pole made for the individual skier, an individual soul.

Above:

Are the initial designs for the handle. The handle itself was created through a sculpting process while there is a converter so the handle can fit in different diameters of bamboo rods. However after printing the first prototype, I quickly found that the handle would not need an converter part. The design above would compromise the sturdiness of the pole and would make the connection between the handle and the bamboo rod easily breakable.

For version two of the handle, I decided to extrude into the handle with the diameter of the bamboo rod in mind. The only downside of bamboo is that each rod slightly vary in diameter and no two rods will be exactly the same. Thus, I had to create two different molds that had two different diameters within it.