As well as dropping off his K2s Colin handed over his wife’s beautiful new Rossignol Savory7 skis for attention. I’m a fan of understated tops that aren’t drowning in busy design and definitely a fan of black bases both aesthetically and to work on. The tips and tails of these skis have a hex mesh construction to save weight and this is covered with translucent blue film. You don’t really notice it until the sun shines through the tip like a techie stained glass window. Lovely job by the Rossi stylists.
However they are meant for skiing not hanging on the wall so the Chamonix trip had taken their toll with its less than perfect snow cover.
Bases were a bit scored and the base edges
were showing a lot of scratching. Reached the end of ski no. 1 inspection without too many concerns, but ski no. 2 had a nasty little surprise in store. Something had managed to rip the base right down to the fibreglass core.
There’s no alternative in these cases to cutting out the damage to leave a clean wound with undercut edges – meaning the edges of the hole are cut wider towards the fibreglass core to help the repair material stay in. What you do next depends on who you listen to – some people glue in cotton or 
wood to give the P-tex something to grip; Toko used to do repair powder that was supposed to be ironed in. I am firmly in the “clean it and coat the bottom in metal-grip” camp as the metal-grip will happily grip the glass and make a good substrate for the P-tex. I wasn’t able to take a compelling photo of the undercut edges so you’ll have to make do with what I did get. You can just about see on this photo that the Savory7 bases are only 1mm compared to others which are typically 1.7mm. This is to save weight and is part of the touring ski equation – light, strong cheap – pick any two.
Once the P-tex is melted in it looks like any other repair splodge and just needs to be scraped & structured:
Once the edges are honed and the bases get their two coats of wax the repair is just about visible but certainly not noticeable. Lovely skis returned to lovely condition and ready to find some snow.
