Ally’s full house

Alasdair has done the sums and realised that paying someone to service a house full of skis only makes sense if you’re a Russian oligarch. So he called up looking for a lesson.

Sadly he came up against the new ManCave hard line on lessons – you have to have the skis tuned by me first before turning up for a lesson. There’s a good reason for this – if you’ve had skis machine serviced and the edges are all over the place & case hardened too then chances are the lesson involves watching me wrestling and swearing for thirty minutes before you get to do anything.

So in some ways it was a relief to find that Ally’s Atomics complied pretty well with the usual horror story. Regular readers will know that all Atomics leave the factory with 1 degree base bevels & 3 degree side bevels, sharp to the tips. Readers may also have spotted that production line servicing outlets tend not to change their angles between skis, so there’s a tendency for all the skis to come out the same. Ally reckoned that he’s had the skis seen to twice, in different resorts. One edge had a nice break of slope, indicating that the first “service” had taken the side edge down from 3 degrees to 2 degrees. At least that guy had finished the job – the following effort had tried to give the edge a one degree bevel, but gave up before the whole edge was finished. It was obvious before even starting as the rust looked different on the two faces and there was a clear line between the two.

So, that took a bit of sorting out. The other edge on the same ski had something very odd – the edge was more than 3 degrees. That means that the first pass with the file in a 3 degree guide only took metal off the part of the edge nearest the base. It’s so unusual that I spent 5 minutes checking that the file guide wasn’t bent or the file somehow sitting wrong. Definitely the edge and not me, so more wrestling and swearing to bring it back to three degrees. The other ski was similarly out of spec and the edges well hardened. I didn’t mention earlier that the skis also had the common Atomic issue of concave bases, so I spent some time flattening , filling & structuring the bases before getting onto the edges. So the single pair of skis consumed a lot of time before they were even ready to be waxed.

The rest of the family planks were less abused and didn’t take too long to get back to manufacturer’s specs, then two coats of wax for everyone and polish to a high shine. Here they are waiting to be picked up:

So the point I started to make at the top of the blog is that it’s better to learn ski servicing on sorted skis than it is to watch me beat them into submission for an hour. Ally just needs to ski the wax off these for a week or two then he can come back and be inducted into the dark arts of the ski tech in a sensible amount of time, then he can start saving a (small) fortune on tuning costs, with the added satisfaction of knowing he’ll have the same bevels on both edges of his skis…