You know those adverts for DIY stores, where a guy in spotless white overalls is standing painting the centre of a big, perfectly flat wall? It makes it look easy, and glosses over (see what I did there?) the hassle of stripping the old wallpaper, filling holes, skimming, letting it all dry, sanding, priming, letting it all dry, clearing up all the dust, then painting the fiddly corners, high parts of the wall, low parts of the…you know what I mean. I’ve seen a few YouTube vids of ski techs tackling base repair jobs without any meaningful discussion of what process they went through to decide exactly how to sort the repair. For instance, take a look at Ben’s Atomic Backlanders which have clearly suffered a wee ding:
So there are a few ways you can approach core shots like this. If it’s a big area it’s worth cutting a P-tex patch to fit, aralditing it to the base, giving it a day or two to get really strong then blending it in with repair P-tex and your base doc iron. However we have a long narrow gouge and it’s thin gauge P-tex (common on touring skis to keep the weight down) and I’m out of skinny P-tex so it needs to be filled with repair P-tex. P-tex doesn’t stick to fibreglass so you either glue a bit of cotton fabric into the hole, to give the P-tex something to grab, or you can line the fibreglass with Metalgrip – basically P-tex with added glue. This is handy as you can fill the remaining gap with P-tex the same day rather than waiting 24 hours for the glue to set. It doesn’t work on big holes as the heat to melt the P-tex tends to re-melt the Metalgrip and give depressions that just can’t be filled. However a narrow gouge like Ben’s is a good candidate.
So once that’s done we can take a look at the edges:
Although the edges looked horrible they were still the original 1 degree base and 3 degrees edge like all Atomics, and they had never been brutalised by a cack-handed service so they came up a treat.
Here are the Backlanders filled, structured, edged, with base & top wax and ready to go:
And here’s a quick snap of the unbranded foamy velcro-ey ski straps that you can add to your order for only £3 a pair if you want to keep your bases shiny on the way to the slopes:
