John brought round a pair of Factions because he knows how infuriating it is to work on white bases 🙂
All seemed well until we got busy with the true bar. Take a look at these bases:
I have never seen such wavy bases before. They are like a ploughed field. So what looked like a simple edge & wax turned into a massive battle with the base planer to try to at least reduce the waves to a state where they can be waxed easily.
The received wisdom on base waves is to attack them at 45 degrees so you don’t just follow them up & down. The base planer holds the file at 45 degrees for just this reason:
So after many, many passes with the file I was hoping for perfectly flat – what I got was instead was flatter:
The peaks have been smeared out into ovals rather than lines so better but still not perfect. However John had never complained about the waves before so let’s not kill ourselves 3 days before Xmas.
Another concern was the huge hole shot that had been repaired some time ago with a big swoosh of black P-tex. Although it has held on for quite some time it is about half a millimetre shy of the base so it will act as a little anchor. After much furious base planing it was still keeping its head down so I roughened up the surface with a stiff brush and added more black P-tex to bring it up flush with the base. Once that was done and the other gouges repaired with clear & colourless P-tex (rather disconcertingly you can still see the original gouge even after a perfect repair) it was time to edge the skis. Faction ask for 1 degree base and 1.5 degree side, just to be awkward, but someone else had tuned the sides to 1 degree so I followed their lead. The edges came up very nicely which was a pleasant change from the Bacons.
Once waxed they looked OK and here they are with the infamous Bacons and Ross’s Atomics, awaiting collection from the Cave:
