Last year, my girlfriend and I were talking about the Summer and Winter Olympics while watching the Tokyo Games and my girlfriend had a flash.
''Hey, imagine if you made knives out of Mikael Kingsbury's skis!''
Well at the time it sounded a bit far-fetched, although nothing is impossible.
You should know that she is friends with her sister Audrey and therefore knows him well. We talked about it at the time and at first sight I really wondered if it was a usable material to make a knife handle. I said to myself that yes, it is possible but would it look good? No idea.
But again, I thought it was a bit exaggerated to expect to ask for and receive skis to cut into pieces.
She suggested asking him and a few weeks later, after Mikael came back from another championship, we went to meet him at his parents' house in Deux-Montagnes and he was waiting for us with two pairs of skis and a pair of poles.
We talked about knives and we talked about medals, just to get a sense of what these skis represented.
One of the two pairs had never been used. The skis, red, had not been drilled in the right spot for the bindings. It was still very much his skis with his design and his signature.
The other pair, gold, is a whole different story. One of the two skis had 5 round spots of dried glue on top. He explained to us that while celebrating his victory of his 6th World Championship in a row, they made a ''ski shot'' with this ski. That is to say stick 5 shots on the ski and drink with 5 people simultaneously with the ski in hand.
Already, things were getting exciting!
I left with these skis wondering how I was going to do them justice.
It's not just any skis!
In the year that followed I was overwhelmed with orders. I didn't really have time to work on this project but it was still simmering in my head. I knew I wanted to make three ranges of knives. I had this image of three ranges because I imagined a Bronze range, a Silver range, and a Gold range.
The Bronze range would be our machined model; precise, stainless with handles made of the red skis. Unfortunately, this range could not be completed in time, due to delays in the supply of our stainless steel.
The Silver range would be our forged blades; rustic, handmade and with handles from the winning skis.
The Gold range would be our San Mai style laminated blades with pure nickel; high-end steel, also forged but involving more work and the handles made of the finest pieces of the winning pair of skis.
So I started exploring the red skis to see how the material was made.
Well, I studied in Transformation of Composite Materials and I was a technician at Sports Experts enough to know how a ski is built so I was not blindly going ahead, but I had obviously never put a ski in a band saw.
I knew I wanted to keep the look and texture of the top of the ski. And that, I've already done with the Pinard & Filles knives. The trick is to sand the handle pieces to the precise final thickness so you don't have to sand after gluing them. In this way, we preserve the outer layer of the handle, and we only round off the edges.
The texture of the ski remains, the design of the vinyl remains and we can still recognize, with a photo, which handle was which part of the ski.
The blades are hand forged from 1095 high carbon steel. A durable and incredibly effective cutting edge that has proven itself since my debut and this time, with a matte black finish, perfectly combined with the pale side of the skis for maximum contrast.
A wonderful way to not only immortalize a piece of Canadian sports history, but also to own a unique essential tool in the kitchen.
The sale will take place on friday February 4th at 7:00 PM through our newsletter
