Joe Fischer: A Tinkerer Builds a Team

First published in SKI, November 1986

The farmland northeast of Salzburg is rich and rolling, like the kettle-moraine region of southern Wisconsin. The farmers here grow maize and raise dairy cattle. They don’t see much snow, and there’s not much skiing nearby.

Here, in the hamlet of Ried, Josef Fischer found his farm too small to support his wife and three kids, so in 1924 he opened a woodworking shop near the center of town. In the mornings he cultivated his farm, but afternoons found him building carts and sledges for his neighbors. He was also willing, occasionally, to carve a pair of skis for a friend, from the same tough ash that he used for his carts—the oak favored by furniture makers was too fragile for anything that was going to be dragged across the countryside. By 1939 the business had grown and specialized. Fischer had quit building wheels, and concentrated on sledges and skis—10,000 pairs of skis a year.

Fischer’s son and heir was his youngest child, born after two daughters. Joe Jr., destined to inherit the business, was sent off to Salzburg for technical training in industrial woodworking, then to Vienna for two years of business courses. In 1951, when he joined the family firm, it was carving 20,000 pairs of ash skis each year and would grow to 80,000 pairs by the time Josef Fischer Sr died, in 1959.

Jpe Jr. was a technician, more interested in tinkering with new ideas than continuing to market wood skis. He was never satisfied doing things the way Dad had done them. When Joe Jr. came up with the idea of following the Scandinavian example and making laminated skis, Joe Sr. thought the idea too revolutionary.

“My father objected to cutting the wood up and then sticking it together again,” says Fischer today. “So I collected all the waist wood from our production, stacked it, and since my father had forbidden me to experiment with laminated skis, I went to another carpenter in Ried, after working hours, and made the first glued skis. I then took part in local races with these skis, and slowly, very slowly, my father came around to the new idea.” The idea wasn’t to be Junior’s only first. He was also among the earliest ski makers to use a polyethylene base, adopting Kofix in 1955.

“By that time, of course, Howard Head had already introduced his successful aluminum ski, and I was very impressed with it,” Fischer says. “By 1958 we were trying to build a metal ski ourselves. My objective was to build a ski as good as the Head. There was no future left in wood skis.”

Build an aluminum ski in postwar Austria wasn’t easy. “It was very difficult to get the materials we needed,” Fischer recalls. “I found a good aluminum factory nearby, but the major problem was the glue needed to stick aluminum to wood. The only factory in Europe that had any experience gluing metals was the Fokker aircraft plant in Holland. So I went there to study aircraft technology.”

But even Fokker had no real answers. The aircraft designer were used to gluing aluminum to aluminum; Fischer needed to glue aluminum to the ski’s steel edge, and at high molding temperatures the process didn’t work—the steel and aluminum shrank at different rates as they cooled, rupturing the glue joint.

“I talked to Howard Head frequently,” Fischer recalls. “We exchanged a lot of information, but he never said anything about his glue—it was Howard Head’s big secret. Years later I found out he was using a contact adhesive that turned liquid at high temperature and set up solid when it cooled.”

Long before he figured out Head’s glue, Fischer found his own solution to the steel-to-aluminum joint: a thin layer of rubber between the two materials. The rubber would stretch as the steel and aluminum cooled and flexed, leaving the glue lines solid on either side of the layer. Eventually, all the successful European aluminum skis would depend on rubber layers to attach the steel edge to aluminum, but Fischer was the first to figure it out.

He introduced his Alu-Steel ski in 1961, to lukewarm response. But the following year Egon Zimmerman finished second on the ski in the Arlberg-Kandahar downhill, then won gold at the Innsbruck Olympics in 1964.

“That was the big break,” Fischer says. “At the time, only Head and Fischer were able to make race-quality metal skis with clued-in continuous edges. The other factories were still screwing their edges on. They didn’t have the glue. It was very difficult for the other factories to accept our success. After all, we were so far from the mountains.” So, for that matter, was Head, who was still building his skis in Timonium, Maryland.

After Innsbruck, Fischer’s sales took off, and the company laid plans for a new factory outside of  Ried. Fischer also began using fiberglass, introducing the Superglass ski in 1966. “By 1968 we were the largest ski factory in the world,” Fischer says proudly. In 1969 he bought the bankrupt Kastle plant, a wood ski holdout, and in 1971, with the acquisition of Humanic boot and shoe factory in Graz, Joe Jr. formed a holding company called Sport AG, to administer his commercial empire.

Fischer was still more interested in the technical end of the sport than in running the business. Sport AG became a meritocracy of bright young Austrian marketing executives, fresh out of business school, dedicated to running the commercial empire efficiently so the boss could tinker with new products and processes. One of the Fischer’s primary goals was to retain the dominance of downhill racing the firm had achieved with the metal ski.

“Downhill racers are national heroes in Austria, and victory in a World Cup downhill spells marketing success on the domestic market,” says Fischer. “The factory with the fastest skis sells best.” So a large part of the research budget throughout the Sixties and Seventies went toward improving glide speed in Fischer’s racing skis.

Fischer went about researching glide speed scientifically. “I hired six professional skiers whose only job was to glide-test skis every day, recording the speeds achieved with every combination of flex pattern, base material, snow conditions and wax. The first problem was to reduce the weight of the ski tip to change its vibration rate. That produced steadily thinner skis, and finally the ‘doughnut’ ski with the hole through the tip.”

But the most important development was structuring the gliding surface according to the snow conditions—grinding the base plastic to produce a fine pattern of grooves that, like the tread in a tire, channel meltwater out of the base as the ski glides over the snow. “That,” says Fischer, “turned out to be far more significant than the base material itself.”

One reason Fischer grew so large was its vertical integration. It’s one of very few plants to make skis from raw timber. Most factories today carve ski cores from plywood or foam purchased from outside suppliers. But visit the factory in Ried and you’ll see a huge pile of logs out back, being fed one at a time into a sawmill. The logs have to be X-rayed first, to keep World War II shrapnel from ruining the saw blades. Fischer cuts its own lumber and laminates its own cores. All skis bearing the Fischer label are made this way, under one roof. Rossignol and Atomic produce more skis, but each company owns at least three separate ski factories.

During the early Seventies, Fischer was among the first of the central European companies to build cross-country skis, using fiberglass Alpine-ski technology. The company grew to be the largest supplier of cross-country skis during a period when its worldwide sales of Alpine skis was eroding. At the same time, the company followed Head in another direction: by 1974 it was building tennis racquets using metal and fiberglass technology originally developed for skis—another project for the boss, who plays tennis daily. Further afield, the factory contracted to laminate structural parts for Airbus passenger planes.

High-tech projects outside the ski industry led to the current generation of Vacuum Technic Alpine skis.

“In 1980,” says Fischer, “I visited a factory where vacuum molding was being used to make smaller products, like fiberglass automobile wheels. When I saw how well the glue filled the mold, I immediately saw an application for making skis, and began experimenting in Ried.”

Engineers at Fischer regarded vacuum molding as an impractical idea forced on them by the boss, so Joe Jr. had to push the idea himself.

“The basic problem was to develop vacuum-tight molds,” he recalls. The seamless milled-aluminum molds he eventually developed cost about four times as much to make as the welded molds used on conventional laminated skis. “Because of the additional cost, we’re not in a position to vacuum-mold lower-price skis, but eventually it will become possible,” Fischer says. The process does produce a stronger, more consistent ski, and requires less hand labor because the glue is injected into the mold mechanically, jnstead of being applied to each layer by hand. The next step for vacuum lamination, says Fischer, is to adapt it for tennis racquets.

In the meantime, he is pushing for more diversification: The factory is now building parts for Airbus and DC-9 airplanes, lightweight automobile suspension parts, and motorcycle reed valves. “We’re expanding so quickly outside the ski industry, I don’t see any need to push hard for growth within it,” Fischer says.

Despite the Sport AG bureaucracy, Fischer clearly hopes that the future of the company lies within the family. Two of his four daughters are in school, studying business and finance, and he would like them to take over.

Also see Joe Fischer obituary.