Bottom Mold.

My first step in making my press was to rip the MDF into 7 3" strips and 1 3.5" strip. I used a skill saw for that, and did a pretty poor job due to the way I set it up. These strips will form the bottom mold and give the ski it's camber.

The next step was to make the 3.5" strip into the template for all the other strips. To draw the curve I wanted I clamped a strip of MDF along the length of my template strip. I clamped it at 1.75" at the ends and 2.75" in the middle. Then I traced it to make the line.

I'm not sure yet if that's going to be too much or too little camber. 1" is about 25mm, which is quite a bit of camber, but my average ski will not be 8' long, so will (hopefully) have more like 20mm, and I expect the actual ski will relax some after it comes out of the press.

After tracing the line I wanted I made a rough cut using a jigsaw.

Then I mounted my beltsander on its side on a table, and used that to finish the template.

Next I traced the correct shape onto the remaining 3" strips using my template and rough cut them with a jigsaw.

Finally, I set up my router with a flush-cut bearing bit. I taped a rough cut strip to the template using double-sided fiberglass carpet tape and then used the router to bring the rough strips down to exactly the shape of the template. Taking it slow and easy was definitely the right way to go for this step.

In the end I was left with 8 identically rounded strips of 3/4" MDF.

Next step is to create the tip and tail pieces using basically the same method.