In an old gas station in Placerville, Wagner Custom is ready to build your dream ski.

The garage with the red star on the front has been converted into a high-tech ski factory, with Wagner’s staff crafting skis and snowboards of virtually any shape.

Pete Wagner founded the company, and it started operation in January ’06. The idea was to give every snow rider whatever he wanted.

“We focus on fitting people into the right product, building something that’s completely perfect for you,” says Wagner. Many custom ski companies have a few molds to choose from, a few different materials. Wagner says his company designs your skis for you, almost completely from the ground up.

When was the last time you were analyzed? Really put on a couch and had someone stare at you and say: “Who are you, really? What do you want to do?”

Wagner does that, at least in regard to skiing. Customers go through an extensive questionnaire that seems to ask skiers everything but the identity of their favorite pet. Wagner calls it your “Skier DNA.”

From that info, and with the help of the customer, Wagner puts together a “ski recipe” with your exact specs. Then the shop guys go to work. Each ski takes about 30 man-hours to build.

The buyers we talked to couldn’t be happier.

Sven Brunso, director of sales and marketing for Purgatory Ski Area, couldn’t find the right ski. So he went to Wagner and came away with personalized skis that are so gigantic you could serve Thanksgiving dinner on them. He emblazoned his nickname on them: Svenergizer.

“They’re awesome, they’re exactly what I wanted,” the Svenergizer says. “Took everything I like about skis and put ‘em into one ski.”

The skis start at $1,595.

“They’re not cheap, but it’s worth every penny,” Brunso says. “You can spend $1,000 for something that’s built for the masses, or for 50 percent more you can get a unique ski.”

How unique are they? Well, you know what they say about snowflakes? Same goes for Wagner Custom skis. The guys in the shop give nicknames to every pair: “Bubinga.” “Lacewood.” “Core Window.” “Bluegrass.”

The skis are available on the Web or through Bootdoctors or the Franz Klammer branch of Telluride Sports.

Computer kiosks linked up to wagnerskis.com are now in ski shops in Boulder, Steamboat, Vail, and Aspen.

The national press loves Wagner, too. Freeskier and Skiing magazines gave them ink.
Founder Pete Wagner has a mechanical engineering degree and, after college, went to work designing golf clubs. He likes golf, but he grew up in the skier’s Mecca of Dayton, Ohio, where a real nice way to spend the day was to righteously shred the several dozen vertical feet of a hill called Sugarcreek (actual official motto of the town of Sugarcreek: “The Switzerland of Ohio”).

And one of the things that struck him was how many light years and decades the golf industry was ahead of the ski industry in terms of technology and customization. And he saw how big a difference the right equipment, well-fitted to each golfer, makes. It’s the difference between the Geico cavemen swinging at rocks and Tiger swinging titanium at balata.

“I mean, we’re not re-inventing the wheel here,” Wagner says. “We don’t have mambo sidewalls or a little button that dampens vibration or a switch that changes the flex.”
It’s more like custom-fitting boots, Wagner says. Every foot is different.

Rob Whiting, a park skier who dominates kickers and rails, offered to test the skis.
“I break a lot of skis,” he says he told Wagner. In exchange for a pair, he put pairs of Wagner skis through absolute Spanish Inquisition-style torture. Banging them on rails, stomping huge 540s, scraping them on s-curves. And, no matter what he did to them, he couldn’t hardly get the skis to break. A little de-lam here or there.

“Those skis are tough as nails,” he says. “They build ‘em right.”

In exchange for his “work,” Whiting got Wagner to build him a pair, the skis he’s been building in his head for years, laying out the blueprints every time he rides a factory-produced pair of skis that aren’t exactly right. For decoration, he put blueprints on them.

One of the keys to the whole operation is the technology, including a big, computer controlled three-dimensional milling machine, a machine that looks like it’s from John Connor’s time and which can saw a block of wood into a ski core and is accurate to four-thousandths of an inch.

It’s a precision enterprise. But that doesn’t mean it’s not creative.

Wagner Custom’s Marty Bonacci designed the ski-making system. Recently, even designed a machine to bend the edge to the customer’s exact specifications.

“They’re like mad scientists down there,” Whiting says. “They got the coolest toys.”