Kevin and Andrew combine the typical cottager's two most favourite activities — water sports and relaxing on deck chairs — to come up with The Chair-Ski.
Time Required: A Weekend
Difficulty: Pretty risky and certainly not recommended
Kevin and Andrew combine the typical cottager’s two most favourite activities — water sports and relaxing on deck chairs — to come up with The Chair-Ski.
Water skiing is awesome, but what’s even better is being able to do it while relaxing on an Adirondack Chair, maybe while reading and enjoying a drink. Chair on water skis, a water ski chair: a Chair Ski. Since the typical store-bought chair probably won’t cut it being mounted on skis, Kevin and Andrew have found a way to build a chair by making a simple wooden structure with dowels and pool noodles acting as a padded seat…
Homemade skis would look gorgeous but would be a challenge to make. The key is figuring out a way to bend the wood for the tips of the skis – which is where a steam bender comes in. A homemade steam bender starts with something large enough to hold the wood, something that’ll make the steam and tubing to connect the two. Make sure there’s enough tubing though.
Bring the water to a boil and place the wood into the steam bender. Be sure to have plenty of water on hand as it may take several hours before the wood is ready to bend, depending on the thickness of the lumber. Also, make sure it’s “green” lumber that has not been pressure treated or kiln dried, because it won’t bend otherwise.
A good backup plan is another must in any cottage building project: if the steam bending didn’t work, the brothers always had a pair of old-fashioned water-skis to fall back on.
Once their Chair Ski was built, it was ready for a test on the water to answer Kevin’s question: When you fall off, does the Chair Ski break you in half?
Did we mention that Andrew and Kevin are not professional builders and that this guide was purely intended for entertainment purposes? The stunts depicted in the program and on this website were performed under controlled conditions and with the appropriate safeguards, professional supervision, and safety standards in place. Please do not try this at your own cottage.
