Rachel’s Lesson

Rachel dropped off two sets of skis, bravely volunteering her own K2s for a lesson while her other half’s Heads joined the queue with the others. Both sets had a few gouges on the base so we extended the lesson to cover prepping, filling & scraping the gouges.

First though the bases weren’t perfectly flat so they got a quick once over with the base planer. Once the bases were flat, gouges filled and scraped level and the bases restructured it was finally time to set the base bevels. The edges were pretty rusty and dinged (“I’ve had a lot of fun making that big a mess of my edges”) but they were happy to succumb to a few passes with the file guide. The side edges, on the other hand, put up plenty of resistance with the first edge refusing to play ball. Although the sidewall was conscientiously planed away the panzar file zinged away making that distinctive, high pitched riding on plastic noise regardless of what we tried. Eventually it was beaten by inhuman amounts of filing with a 200 grit diamond file. Naturally the next three edges all behaved themselves impeccably. Despite the beaten look of the steel they took a nice edge – here’s Rachel just putting the icing on the cake with the gummi.

The extra time used on base planing, gouge filling & filing the cussed edge meant that we were keen to get the waxing sorted quickly. Fortunately Rachel proved to be a world-class wax scraper, and despite protestations that she never irons she was a dab hand at that too. It could be argued that we didn’t spend the prescribed amount of time waiting on wax for either base or top coat but by now the combined stomach rumbling sounded like the Harley Owner’s Club firing up for a quick blat to Flora’s café so we pressed on.

The final result was worth the suffering and the K2s were at least as gorgeous as the Heads. Here’s to a great holiday in Morzine.