Head Standard

The Head Standard was Howard Head's first successful ski design, and arguably the first modern downhill ski. The Standard used composite construction, with a plywood core sandwiched between aluminum outer skins, steel edges tapering into the core, and a hard plastic base, sidewalls and topsheet. The only major change in ski design since the Standard is the use of a fibreglass torsion box in place of the aluminum layers.

The Standard was flexible in length and stiff in torsion, which allowed it to be easily turned while still holding a good edge. This combination was so impressive that it became known as "The Cheater" for the way it allowed beginners to turn like pros. The Standard, and models that followed it, were so successful that half the downhill skis in the US in the 1960s were Heads.

A number of metal skis were introduced over the years, among them the 1942 All Magnesium, a post-war run of 1,000 Metalite aluminum skis from Chance Vought, the stainless steel Chris Ski, the aluminum Alu-60 (later known as the TEY True-Flex), the Dow Metal Air Ski, and the Gomme from the UK.

All of these designs had numerous problems. In cold snow, ice would freeze to the bottom metal layer and made them very difficult to move. The same was true for wood skis, but these could hold wax that solved the problem. When applied to metal skis, the wax quickly rubbed off. Additionally, metal designs tended to be very springy, and were notorious for vibrating when running on ice. And a strong flex or collision could leave them permanently bent and unskiable. Skiers soon came to dismiss them as "tin cans."

In 1939,Howard Head took a job as a riveter at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore. Head worked his way up through the company during the war, eventually becoming a draftsman. Martin was a pioneer in the use of a plastic honeycomb material sandwiched between two thin sheets of aluminum to build the monocoque fuselage of the B-26 Marauder.

In 1947, Head skied at Mount Mansfield, better known today as part of Stowe Mountain Resort. He was immediately frustrated by the weight of his rented hickory skis, which he felt were archaic in an era of modern lightweight materials. On the train back to Baltimore, he was thinking of building a ski using Martin's aluminum/plastic sandwich. He was so excited about the prospect that he sketched the concept and showed it to his carriage mate. When he returned to work, he spent some time comparing the strength of Martin's laminates to the strength of hickory that he found in an engineering textbook. The answer was encouraging, "It looked like I could build a ski with the strength of wood, but with half the weight."

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Wikipedia