Hazel’s White Lines

Hazel is the first ABDNSnow member to take advantage of the eye-watering 20% discount available for card-carrying members.  As Uberkommandant of the entire club she should help to spread the word to the rest of the crew.

Her LINE skis are needed for a trip to the Alps on Friday so she brought them round for some pre-trip TLC. They are a good looking ski, quite wide under the binding but not ironing-board wide like true powder skis. Pretty light too.

The bases are the most complicated I have ever seen with blocks of black, blocks of fancy graphics and LINE spelt out in big white letters. They must have looked great in the shop.

However Hazel has been hitting the dry slopes big time and the results are clear to see.

Serious white lines on the bases indicating not just “not much” wax left but frankly indicating “less than zero wax left”. To get this effect requires years of studious neglect. It’s not 100% percent certain that simply waxing them will bring them back to life once they have reached this state. When ski forum experts talk about “oxidized” bases this is what they mean. Any organic chemists out there care to comment on whether or not high molecular weight polyethylene gets “oxidized” rather than “scratched”?

Another giveaway that the skis are more used to pastoral use is the amount of grass & soil in the bindings.

Finally I’m not sure if this is related to dry slope use but the tops had a number of nips & dings where the wood was just showing:

These are easy enough to araldite up (sorry that should probably read “2-pack epoxy up” but that doesn’t feel like a verb) but one wee nick on the base isn’t so simple:

You can hardly make it out but the P-tex is coming away from the steel edge – you can just slip your thumbnail in the gap. Now you can either ignore it, leave it and keep an eye on it or you can repair it so it doesn’t get worse. Repairing it means making the wound bigger to get some metal-grip in there then P-texing, scraping & redoing the structure. We agreed on the “don’t fix but keep an eye on it” approach.

One good thing about the nylon nets on dry slopes is that they are very kind to edges so Hazel needs no intervention there, just a bit of glue to stop the water from swelling her wood cores then two coats of wax.

You’ve seen the before photo above, here’s the overnight shot…

…and here’s the after. A quick trim with a craft knife once the glue is properly dry and that will be hard to spot.

So the final question is of course “did we get rid of the white lines?”.

I hate to say it but even with the healing powers of Zoom Purple rehab base wax then Zoom Green Universal top wax the lines can still just about be made out:

Nothing like as bad as they were, and I would hope that the two coats will keep Hazel gliding for a whole week in the Alps, but not quite perfect. Nothing for it but another visit to the ManCave after the Alps to freshen up the structure, check out the various nicks and wax them back up again. Of course the huge discount means the more work she gets done the more savings she’ll have for Jägerbombs or whatever young people drink on ski trips these days. Bon voyage!