Tis the ski and snowboard season once again, and inside TJ Sneva's workshop on Spokane's North Side, he's working long hours as orders for his custom-built, handmade wooden skis come rolling in.

Sneva is the owner and sole employee of Sneva Manufacturing, a 17-year-old venture that he founded at age 18, when he made his first pair of wooden twin-tip skis.

Twin-tip skis have a curve on each end of the ski, he says, and are designed to allow the skier to move both forward and backward. The popularity of that type of alpine ski has grown in the last several decades, and he claims his company was one of the first to manufacture and sell skis of that style.

Traditionally, alpine skis are flat on the back end and only the front end of the ski is curved upward.

Sneva says that using wood for his skis' core in lieu of rubber, foam, or metal, makes the apparatus lightweight and more flexible. The outside surfaces of the ski are made of wood, plastic, or fiberglass.

"We do all wood cores, and we don't add the rubber and metal into the skis, which keeps them lighter and more responsive," he says. "They have more energy."

For increasingly popular backcountry skiing, a wooden-cored ski also makes toting gear up a mountain easier on a user without sacrificing the equipment's performance, he asserts.

The avid skier says he's had a love for the sport for as long as he can remember, and that he first hit the slopes at 49 Degrees North Mountain Resort, in Chewelah, when he was 2 years old.

Since founding his manufacturing venture, Sneva estimates that he's made more than 5,000 pairs of skis, as well as snowboards, wakeboards, and a few other types of recreational implements for snow and water sports.

During the last several years, he's built between 250 and 300 skis and snowboards each year, although he says he probably could make more than that. His goal is to get to the range of around 1,000 skis or boards a year to keep the business manageable and so he can continue making all of the equipment himself from start to finish.

"I don't want it to get huge," he says.

The self-taught ski maker's business was born while he worked as a ski-slope groomer at Mt. Hood Skibowl and the Timberline Lodge and Ski Area, both located on Mount Hood in Oregon, he says.

"I just started from scratch," Sneva says. "When I first got into building skis, my friends and I heard that another company was going to make twin-tip skis, and we had all these ideas of how they should be, so my friends said I should just make them myself."

"I built a lot of stuff that didn't work," Sneva says of his early ski-making days.

A Spokane native, Sneva moved the company's operations back here three years ago after nearly a decade-long stint in Indianapolis, during which he professionally drove race cars and also operated the ski manufacturing business.

Sneva is the nephew of the now retired Indy race-car driver Tom Sneva, of Spokane, who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1983. Sneva's father, Jerry Sneva, also raced Indy cars.

Since moving his ski-making business back to the Inland Northwest three years ago, Sneva says he's seen his sales substantally grow each year, and he expects that trend to continue.

He credits some of his business's more recent growth to a partnership with 49 Degrees North, where some of his skis are available to rent.

"49 helps us out a lot," Sneva says. "They have a fleet of skis as a demo so customers can try the skis and get a feel for them before they purchase. They don't have all of them—just about 10 or 12 models—so the cool thing is that you can take five runs on one model and can switch it out and try another model."

He says if a customer tries a pair of his skis at the mountain resort and wants to order a pair, he'll offer the skis at retail price minus what the customer paid to demo them on the mountain.

None of his skis are for sale at any retail outlets here, Sneva says. They only can be ordered through his business's website, www.snevamfg.com, or by contacting him.

Sneva Manufacturing's ski lineup includes 30 different models that vary in length and width to accommodate different customers' specific styles of skiing, he says.

"I talk to customers about where they ski and what types of skiing they do to generally get the model right, and then I can change the stiffness and the core to fit the skier and their style," he says.

"The bigger companies mass produce models that are supposed to work for everyone, but I can fine-tune the ski to make it work with someone who weighs 150 pounds to someone who weighs 250, so it's custom to their ski profile," he adds.

Sneva Manufacturing's skis are made in a sandwich-style construction process, with the outside material layers surrounding the solid wooden core, which usually is made from strips of poplar and maple.

All of the wood that goes into his products, Sneva says, is sourced from the Pacific Northwest, and he says he tries to use locally produced materials whenever possible, and doesn't use any foreign imported materials in assembling his products.

The base price for a pair of Sneva Manufacturing's handmade wooden-core skis is $650. Sneva asserts that his company's skis are priced competitively with those made by comparable custom-ski manufacturers, which he says might sell their skis for $900 to $1,200 a pair.

Sneva says he'll also allow customers to select the graphics they'd like printed on the top and bottom of the skis for no extra charge. The company has several variations of its own designs and logo that can be printed on outside surfaces of the ski.

"Right now, we don't have an upcharge for custom graphics because pretty much every ski is custom made," he says.

While he's the business's owner and only employee, Sneva says his friends occasionally contribute to the ski-building process, and that his wife, Lauren, also oversees some of the business's operations.

The process to make a pair of his wooden skis starts out with a heat transfer of the graphic design that's to be visible on the top and bottom of the skis, Sneva says.

The bottom layer of each ski is cut out into the exact shape and size of the finished product, which later serves as a template to trim away the excess material from the other layers, he says.

Sneva makes each wooden core by gluing one-inch-wide strips of raw lumber together, which he then sands down to a tapered shape with the thickest point to be aligned with the middle of the ski.

Sneva then puts a layer of epoxy between each layer of a ski and places the pieces into a hydraulic press that he says his grandfather, Ed Sneva, helped him build. The pressing process takes between 20 and 25 minutes, and the materials are heated as they're pressed together to ensure that the epoxy dries quickly.

During the pressing process, a ski also takes its undulating wave-like shape that aside from the upward-curving tips on each end includes a slight rise in the middle called the camber, he says.

Once a ski comes out of the press, Sneva trims any excess material from the edges and then sands the fiberglass bottom of the ski to rough it up and allow for hot wax to adhere to the surface.

Besides making skis sold under his company's name, Sneva is contracted with Montana Ski Co., of Whitefish, Mont., to make its line of custom wooden powder skis.

That company is owned by Washington-born former NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe and two other business partners, Zak Anderson and Chad Wold, Sneva says.

Sneva manufactures four models of skis for Montana Ski Co., and he says that the venture offers levels of customization ranging from just a few tweaks to the original design to a full custom-ski order. Its prices range from about $700 for the base model ski to upwards of $1,500 for a fully-customized pair of skis, designed and made by Sneva.

Aside from Sneva Manufacturing's wide range of ski offerings, the company also makes two newer snow- and water-sport implements that are just starting to take off among enthusiasts.

One of those products is called a wake ski, which Sneva says are somewhat similar to water skis, but are wider and have curved tips on both ends, like twin-tip snow skis, so that a rider can do more tricks, such as skiing and landing jumps backwards on the water.