Ski wall mount · Jacob Fjørstad Hansson

I ski, and last winter I wanted the skis in my room rather than in a cupboard — on the wall, as something to look at, not gear to be stowed and dug out again.

The obvious answer is a 3D-printed mount. I did not want one. They look cheap and they feel cheap, and a printed bracket next to a pair of skis is the part your eye goes to first.

The parametric model in Fusion 360 — four brackets, one per ski, two pairs' worth, laid out to be machined together from one piece of stock.

CAM for the brackets: surfacing, contouring, the pocket, drilling and a chamfer pass, nested to waste as little oak as possible.

One bracket, empty. The pocket across the middle is where the ski sits; the two screws are the only fixings in the whole design.

From the side, the chamfer that wraps every edge — cosmetic, but mostly there so a ski slides into the pocket instead of catching on it. The crosshatch is the surfacing pass.

The first pair up, the evening they came off the machine. This is before the tilt stop — the tails still rest against the wall.

CAM for the tilt stop, the second part: it holds the tail off the wall so the ski hangs with an even gap down its whole length.

Held by nothing but the fit

The mount is one bar of oak with a pocket milled across the middle. The ski's waist drops into the pocket, and the two raised ends stand proud on either side of it. Nothing clamps to the ski, nothing straps over it, nothing screws into it. Two screws hold the bracket to the wall, and that is every fastener in the design.

What holds the ski up is its own shape. A ski is narrowest at the waist and widens towards the tail, so a pocket cut to the waist width will only accept the ski at one point along its length — push it down and the widening tail wedges against the oak. The ski hangs on the taper.

That is what makes the mount almost disappear. It is also what makes it unforgiving: the pocket has to match a specific pair of skis, or it either will not take the ski or will not hold it.

One model, any ski

So I built it parametric. The Fusion 360 model takes the ski's waist width as an input, and the whole bracket regenerates around it — pocket width, the position of the raised ends, the outer profile.

That turned a one-off into something repeatable. I have since made sets for friends with completely different skis, and it costs nothing but typing a new number and re-running the toolpaths. Designing it once properly was less work than measuring and redrawing it three times.

Machining it

Both parts were CNC milled from solid oak on my Ooznest WorkBee — the machine I built myself — with CAM done in Fusion 360.

It is a small part, but it uses most of a real CAM workflow:

Surfacing	Large flat end mill to bring the top of the stock true
Contour	Smaller bit, so less material is cut to waste and parts can be nested close together on one piece of stock
Pocket	The recess the ski's waist drops into
Drilling	Screw holes for the wall fixings
Chamfer	Chamfer bit around every edge

The chamfer is the one that matters most in use. It softens the look, but the real reason is the lead-in: dropping a ski into an interference fit is much easier when the edges guide it in instead of catching on it.

The part I got wrong

The first version worked — the skis hung, and held. But they were not quite right: the tails leaned in and rested against the wall, so each ski sat at a slight angle instead of parallel to it. Not a failure, but visible, and the whole point was how it looked.

So I designed a second part, a tilt stop, machined from the same oak. It holds the tail off the wall at the correct distance, and the ski now hangs with an even gap down its full length — close to floating.