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Mitten Made - Michigan Proud
We are a family operation based out of northern michigan that handcrafts premium skis. We source the highest quality materials as locally as possible. 72 processes | 24 sizes | 9 models | endless options We are American made, pure michigan, and your local ski company!
Our Mission
Our goal is a simple one: make you happier on the snow than you've ever been. We are on the never ending quest to build the absolute best product possible. Our skis are built by the skilled hands of the Thompson family along with the help of some great friends. You won't find the gimmicky "tech" stuff that some other brands put out purely for marketing, we simply use engineering and real world testing (on the snow, we are located in Northern Michigan) to refine and improve our skis.
Wood Cores
Select cut Northern Michigan hardwood, that's what we use! We bring in Ash, Beech, and Poplar rough cut from the Matelski Lumber, the mill a few miles down from our factory. We finish our own lumber, rip it into 5/8" x 3/4" strips, flex index each strip, and relaminated the flex indexed strips into a core blank. Our blanks are then run on our state of the art CNT Motion CNC mill to hold the tightest tolerances.
Photo: Marc Moline, Antix Creative
Carbon Fiber and Fiberglass
Our hardwood cores are wrapped with composite materials optimized to enhance your skiing experience. We use triaxial fiberglass in our skis, that means that there the fibers are oriented in three directions, one down the length of the ski and two at ±45°. We use several types of Carbon Fiber in our skis, one is a uni-directional strip that adds pop and stiffness to our skis without adding any noticeable weight. Another type of Carbon we use is an ultra light ±45° Biaxial Carbon Fiber that wraps the core of our touring and certain custom skis.
Mission
Our goal is a simple one: make you happier on the snow than you've ever been. We are on the never ending quest to build the absolute best product possible. Our skis are built by the skilled hands of the Thompson family along with the help of some great friends. You won't find the gimmicky "tech" stuff that some other brands put out purely for marketing, we simply use engineering and real world testing (on the snow, we are located in Northern Michigan) to refine and improve our skis.
Base Material
We only use race grade sintered 4001 Durasurf UHMW-PE from Crown Plastics in Ohio, USA. UHMW-PE stands for Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, it is a material that is tremendously tough and abrasion resistant. The material is "sintered" which means that millions of tiny pellets of the raw material are heated and pressed together without liquefying the plastic. This process creates a final product that has a high porosity and allows wax to penetrate deeply into your base for a fast, long lasting ride. Some products use a much cheaper extruded UHMW-PE, which is liquefied and pushed through an extrusion head. Extruded material doesn't accept wax well and is slow, we only use top of the line sintered UHMW-PE. All of our base graphics are die cut by our own CNC Knife and hand inlaid. Our ski bases are belt ground by hand and stone ground for a superior glide right from our factory.
Photo: Marc Moline, Antix Creative
