John brought round a range of skis. As well as the Whitedots, he apologetically handed over a set of LINE Sir Francis Bacons. For a pair of skis that had lain in a moist roofbox for six months they didn’t seem too bad – a bit of rust here and there, but the groovy graphics hid a nasty little secret.
During the routine check a small bulge on the base turned out to be a bit
more significant – you can barely see it with the naked eye, or in the photo on the right, but a particularly evil stone had not just gouged the base but had managed to split the side edge altogether.
With luck the photo below makes it clearer once the bulging blue P-tex has been cleaned away. Sadly the picture doesn’t get any happier as the rail is showing significant rust inside the ski:
It’s hard to see on this photo but the P-tex is very slightly coming away from the edge for an inch in each direction and a thin strip of rust is peeping out.
Anyway before we do anything else we need to decide how to handle the split rail. Choices are
1) Glue, fix up & smooth down then ensure this stays an outer edge for ever after;
2) Cut out 2″ of dodgy rail, insert & screw in carefully measured replacement rail, glue up & edge;
3) Chuck ’em in the bin and get something else.
A quick call to Jon Coster at the Piste Office revealed that the pragmatic skier’s solution is 1) so we’ll go with him and see what other delights the skis have to offer.
The edges are horrible but John has been careful to keep a left & right ski so the less-used edges can be saved, to an extent anyway. Obviously there are other gouges, one of which seems to have a bit of quartz wedged in it – a wee memento from a past trip.
The bases are neither convex nor concave but have an M profile with two longitudinal ridges and a central valley. Whatever, it needs to be sorted if only to make it easier to wax the damn things.
So let’s start by gluing up the edge:
Following a good night’s sleep the skis sadly hadn’t tuned themselves so it was time to dig out the base planing file and grind away to try to achieve a flat base profile. They are big skis and the workshop was knee deep in P-tex & filings by the time the bases were acceptable.
The hole I made around the break has a fair bit of Araldite lining it but there is plenty of steel exposed so out with the metal-grip and the gas-fired base mender soldering iron. Metal-grip is basically P-tex with added kryptonite so it sticks properly to steel. Once the Metal-grip is smoothed and the other remaining gouges are filled & scraped it is time to veeeeery carefully file down the highs around the repair.
This photo makes the edge look proud of the base but in fact it isn’t – the edge sinks away slightly so I took a further photo to try to show the repair in a better light.
Edging the skis was a thankless task as the base & side edges were so tatty. Even taking into consideration the fact the base angles had to be reset from scratch after the base grind they still had some serious grooves which show up as nicks in the side edges. Still, the edges were eventually functional if not pretty and it was time for some Zoom purple rehab wax followed by Green Universal wax on top. Ultimately they have come up well enough to ski for maybe one more week in the Alps if John is careful to keep them on the correct feet but I wouldn’t expect a very long life from them.
Finished photo at the end of the following blog, because John had left yet another set of skis for attention.