Doug’s Superguides

I don’t get many Scott skis through the Cave and the ones that have been in have tended to be stiff & weighty piste skis. So it was interesting to see Doug’s Superguide tourers:

The skis are very lightweight and boast wood, carbon fibre & aramid (presumably kevlar) in their construction. Like a lot of touring skis they have skinny P-tex on the base – somewhere between 0.8 & 1.0 mm, instead of the 1.2 or even 1.8 mm on sturdier equipment. They also have thin edges, which might be stainless – the Scott website has dumbed everything down so no help there. Stainless edges are the very devil to sharpen, they are much more prone to breaking than normal carbon steel and they can get quite discoloured even if they don’t actually rust. I’m not a fan.

Anyway the skis had a few little issues with rather a lot of stone damage.

There was a baby core shot:

An edge break:

A fracture in the lacquer on the topside:

And finally a bent upwards edge. The base was also a bit warped from all the rockhopping. This is one of the weak points of these very light skis.

So the starting point here was to sort the edges first. The bent edge pictured above was bent back straight as far as possible with a hammer & chisel without delaminating the entire ski. This is not work for the faint-hearted. You get to the point where it’s definitely better but you don’t want to push your luck by trying for completely straight. The broken edge was relatively simple but there was no real gap between either the two broken pieces or between the edge and the rest of the base/sidewall. That’s a problem as the glue needs somewhere to go if it is to bond the various bits together. So out with a mounted needle to dig out some space around the break, heat up the Araldite and apply to both damaged areas (different sides of the same ski). 48 hours later it’s time to repair the gouges and see if we can do something about the ripple that the big impact has left behind:

I’ve forced the exposure to highlight the black P-tex against the black base.  The gouges ranged from narrow & deep, easy to fill & scrape, through broad & shallow, hard to sort, to a long slow wave which proved very hard to do anything constructive with. If these were piste skis we could possibly have flattened the entire ski to take out the wave but there’s so little base and edge anyway that we don’t have anything to play with. Here’s the base with the wave half-filled after the first phase of filling:

The broken edge seemed to have taken pretty well to the glue and it filed down to a nice smooth line:

Once the bases were scraped and structured and edges were sorted – and we’re not talking a five minute job with stainless edges as they seem to delight in developing nasty burrs which are extremely hard to file out – it was time to sploosh on the pink Zoom base renew wax, scrape and then get the green universal wax on top. The bent edge and associated wave were never going to be perfect but I’m not unhappy with the result. Good enough to ski on and cheaper than a new set of Superguides.