Month: November 2023

Martin’s Brood of Boards

Martin has been a stalwart for the last few years, bringing in more boards every year. This year he delivered four boards with the help of a Martinette. There were a couple of minor dings to be sorted on top of the usual edge & wax – the Burton had a wee lift on its top sheet and the Rossi looked like someone had accidentally left a testy piranha fish in the bag:

The bases all needed a little bit of tweaking to get out the worst of the gouges and bite marks but nothing too onerous.

Edges were in good shape – 3 of the boards had been sorted by me in the past (see the Capita/Apos post here: https://mancaveservices.co.uk/2022/10/one-and-a-half-boards/ to read the story of the weird edge angles) so they were a breeze. Fortunately the Rossi still retained its original base 1/side 1 angles so a bit of sidewall planing and rust removal got everything back in shape.

Once everyone was prettied up I remembered that the Burton needed some epoxy to stick its top sheet down again so it spent a couple of evenings warming up above the front room radiator:

Always remember to use a bit of plastic tray between the C clamp and the board – epoxy doesn’t stick to it and you can see what the glue is getting up to through the clear plastic.

Here they are in the inevitable line up:

Repair is in the top left of the board, roughly where the rafters are. Someone has conscientiously cut down another couple of dings right on the tip of the board to stop them from catching in future. It’s worth carrying a sharp knife up the hill along with your 200 grit diamond file to keep on top of ad-hoc board surgery.

Richard’s midsummer service

Richard has brought his own skis in for service before and this time he excelled himself by bringing two pairs in the height of summer – no chilblains for me this time. Both sets were direct from China specials and as such were probably at an attractive price point. A bit of Google stalking for Hasiky led to this Alibaba sub site for Hasiky, which features an interesting wee video of the hard-working employees layering up a board, adding epoxy and sticking it in a mould for shaping/curing. If you delve deeper they drop into the text that they either still do or have in the past made K2 skis there.

Anyway what had Richard done to his skis since their last service? They didn’t look too bad on first glance but as is often the case they needed more base work done than I expected:

However there were no terminal gouges and the edges were still in pretty good shape, so as they’d already been fettled by me previously they needed very little elbow grease to get them singing again.

The distaff side of the relationship presented a set of Nico skis, also direct from the People’s Republic. The bases were in OK shape but goodness me the edges were all over the place. Richard reckoned that they’d never been serviced so the edges must be what they left the factory with plus some wear and tear.

The closest I could find to the existing edges was side 1/base 1 so that’s what they got but it was a real struggle to get them there with the wildly varying angles.

As always I feel better disposed to skis once they’ve been waxed & polished up so I’m actually looking forward to seeing these one back again – they’re made to a decent standard, nothing delaminating, bases flat so better than some of the European-branded planks that come to the Cave.