Brian Rosenberger has worked for years at an aircraft manufacturing company with, coincidentally, lineage back to the Glenn L. Martin Company. On long drives in 2010 from his home in Texas to the snow of Colorado, Rosenberger, with his son and friends, would cover a lot of topics, but the one that Rosenberger kept coming back to was to make a snowboard (his plank of choice at the time) in the way of some airplane parts—out of a single piece of aluminum.
One friend in particular, Ron Chambers, finally got tired of all the talk and said he’d finance the effort to get things started. In 2013, Rosenberger connected with Leif Sunde, founder of Denver Sports Lab, an olympic-level ski tuning shop, to start testing flex qualities of various composite snowboards on the market. By 2014 Rosenberger had some all-aluminum prototypes ready to test. Apparently, the on-snow results were very encouraging.
Over the years more prototypes were made, and the switch was made from snowboards to skis. In July of 2023, Metal1 Skis Corporation (M1 Skis) was formed: Rosenberger as CEO, Chambers as COO, Sana Fathima heading up fundraising and strategy, and Sunde as director of product.
Why Aluminum?
The first question that comes to mind for many is whether the metal associated with soda cans or cooking foil is strong enough to tolerate the rigors of the mountain—especially along the edges, traditionally made of steel.
“Aluminum is harder by an order of magnitude than the ice a ski will encounter,” says Rosenberger. The trade-off in many materials, including metals, is the harder they are, the more brittle they become. Aluminum, according to M1, is hard enough to handle the ice but is ductile enough so it won’t easily chip or shatter when it encounters rocks, even in cold winter conditions. Indeed, some ski manufacturers opt for a softer steel edge when making park-oriented skis because the harder steel is more likely to chip or crack from sliding on the rails in the ski park.
Core shots—when the ski’s core is exposed to moisture and leads to warping or rotting—will never happen, because there is no core, and the aluminum base will deflect rocks way better than any extruded polyethylene base. And, for that reason, no rock will ever rip the edges out.
