Keeping your toys in playroom condition
Look at these beauties – long, thin and pointy:
Trevor’s skis were a delight to work on – a couple of little scratches to fill & scrape, edges that had been hand tuned before – to the correct 1,1 bevels – so no machine hardening, and so narrow they take a few seconds to wax, scrape & brush. I even had to detune the tips, unlike almost every other ski that passes through. Spot on.
The early season rush means that I haven’t been taking as many photos as normal, with the backlog of equipment looming over my shoulder every time I enter the Cave. However when Angela dropped off her recently acquired, second hand, ex-hire Salomons they had a few clues about their past that caught my eye.
The base photo manages to catch an old, failing scratch repair, transverse ridges (usually caused by dodgy scraping, either p-tex repair or wax) and longitudinal scratches that make it look as though someone has started to flat file the base, then given up.
Edges varied in their side bevel and degree of mechanical scarring, as though someone started a hand tune then, well, gave up:
As the bases were still very concave (you can see why someone tried to fix it) they needed to be planed, filled then structured. One of the below photos also helpfully show the SkiVisions base planer and structuring tools:
Planing the base means resetting the base bevels from scratch, which was easy enough – the base planer removes any hardening left over from mechanical edging. The side edges were much harder, taking ages to get through the hardened steel. The fact that someone had reset the edges to 1 degree means that quite a lot of extra edge was lost getting them back to the Salomon standard 2 degrees. However eventually the edges were sorted and after some Zoom base renew then Universal top wax they were looking showroom cool again:
