How Do Water Skis Work?

Video Transcript

I'm Jodi Fisher with Jodi's Ski School in Orlando, Florida, and for Expert Village I'm going to talk to you about the mechanics of water skis. Here we have high end advanced ski; this is a ski that is a specific shape okay to create a good turns, good speed, very good stability at the same time so that you could have control over these high speed and fast turns. It got a slightly concave bottom: this helps the ski to roll on to the edge and still maintain contact with the water. It has a rocker, which is the shape of the ski from tip to toe, which helps the ski to carve a smooth turn. We have a aluminum fin on the tail: this helps again to keep you stable in the water when it is up on the edge. Then we have the binding on the top. These particular bindings are constructed by using a neoprene and a rubber. They come in various different sizes. We also have a hard shell binding which is very much like a roller blade boot or a snow ski boot, which is obviously a stiffer component and that gives you more natural support. Generally used on more advance water skis. We have, let's say the trick skis, which have a wider surface shorter ski, and this helps you do your revolutions in the water spins and so on. No fins; you can see this helps the ski to slide 360 degrees on the water. The jump skis are completely flat on the surface. This allows the skis to be very stable when hitting the fiber glass ramp surface. The top guys in the world are hitting the water ski jumps at 70 miles a hour, so they need to be very stable. Much much longer. This gives you the tip in front of the binding, allowing the skier to press out over the tips as you get the tip pressure, and the tips want to rise like a airplane wing. You have to press out in the front to keep the skis level and that helps them to continue to climb. Wake boards are a slightly bigger board then the trick skis. It has more it has some fins involved and some grooves: this helps it to track a little better at a slightly higher speed for the biggest surface area, gives you a nice platform to land the big jumps that you may incur when wake boarding.

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