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.
