Emily’s boards

Emily is a stalwart member of Scotland’s largest cycling club, Deeside Thistle, and is therefore a Friend of the ManCave. In the current language of online marketing this “unlocks” outstanding discounts to the already very reasonable rates.

Emily dropped off two boards, a used Rome and a brand new Salomon Highpath Splitboard.

Regular readers of the blog will know that I’m a fan of proper 100% black bases. They’re made of the proper P-Tex, lovely long chain polyethylene strands all squeezed together to make a nice firm base but with plenty of space between the PE strands to suck up hot liquidy wax. I’ve never seen it confirmed but I’m certain that black P-Tex has carbon black in there to protect the chains against UV light, just like black ty-wraps – that’s why you should only ever use black ty-wraps for outdoor applications – today’s free life hack from the Cave.

If you want to make the ski tech’s life a bit more tricky you can select a board with a few blocks of colour. The scratches don’t really care about your bold patches of colour and zoom through them all, making for blotchy repairs where the black base and colours meet. Not the end of the world though.

Emily’s Rome took things to a whole new level with a screen printed design on the base:

Now generally I like a challenge but this is taking things a bit far. Fortunately there was very little damage to the base, just some weird half-moon dings…

…and very light scratches that didn’t actually scratch the edges, so really superficial (note lightly rusted base edge as well):

Following the very light base repairs and hardly any swearing at the black/white transitions, it was time to sort the edges. Rome is a fancy label of Burton, rather like Lexus is to Toyota, so I figured they’d be running base 1 degree/edge 1 degree. The website looked like it was going to help but came up with a not very helpful “edges are 90 degrees”, meaning they could be 7 and 7 degrees if they wanted. The usual way to find out is to colour up the edges with a sharpie and run the file over the edge in your suspected angle. which revealed not only that they’re approximately 1/1 but also that they’d never been sharpened before, as the sidewall was flush with the side edge:

You need to cut away a mm or so of the sidewall to fettle the side edges so carefully avoiding the thought provoking latin:

Edging the Rome presented no problems and it took a couple of coats of wax very nicely. Photos at the bottom of this post.

The Salomon Highpath Split Board was an interesting one, brand new and Emily was only after a few coats of wax to get the base started. I like the split concept of tramping up to an inaccessible pinnacle somewhere then trying to get back to safety in one piece. I’m not so convinced that two little latches will give the board the structural integrity you might be hoping for when you’re having a battle against the mountain but then I’ll never be the person in that position.

It was noticeable as soon as you started to handle the board that the edges were supersharp with a burr in one direction that was like a knife blade. “No worries” I cavalierly stated, “I’ll just knock the burr back as part of the wax job”.

So even though I wasn’t supposed to be investing time in the edges I couldn’t help but notice that the base edges didn’t seem to have any bevel at all. They’re just flush wth the base. This seems unlikely as the whole point of base bevel is to stop the edges grabbing when you’re going in the straight line with a flat board. The orthodoxy, for skis at least, is that you might run 0.5-0.7 degrees if you’re a racer looking for fastest possible turn response; 1 degree for most mortals and 1.5-2 degrees for freestyle and park types who really just want to keep the edges out of the way. But no-one would specify 0 degrees base bevel (except Bataleon, who put wings on their boards to keep the edges way off the ground). So, luckily, the brief on this job wasn’t to fettle the edges beyond using 200 grit file to take the worst of the burr. However I’m assuming that the board might well reappear in the Cave in the future so I had a peep at the side edges as well. Salomon charge a lot for this board and have quite a lot of info on their website as well as various YouTube videos explaining all their tech. They state that the board has 2 degrees side bevel in the middle and one degree at the tips, and sure enough I was able to photograph the transition:

Again I wasn’t charging to look at the edges but couldn’t help inking them up and giving them a swipe, only to find I couldn’t replicate either angle with my file guides of 1, 2 & 3 degrees. So who knows. The side angle is relative to the base of the board, not the base edge so it didn’t matter that the base edge was still under suspicion. Just another snowsports mystery I guess.

So going back to the actual task in hand, waxing the base, there were a couple more anomalies compared to normal practice. Usually skis and boards will ship with transit wax to protect the base & edges. It’s cheap as chips (I have a couple of blocks of it in the cave, still waiting for the first client to ask for an oversummer protective wax) with no clever additives and tends to be quite brittle when you come to scrape it off so it’s worth gently warming the base first before scraping. The Highpath just didn’t appear to have a gram of wax on it. Nada de nada. Also, the base had a weird sort of speckled effect, like the cheapest worktop you can find. Is it made from recycled P-Tex or something? Why yes! According to Salomon it’s made from “100% recycled base and bio-resin”. Anyway the base proved to be a right faff to work with, as it’s not really flat in any orientation, making ironing in the wax fiddly. Obviously bases that are hard to iron are horrible to scrape as the scraper is expecting to find flat surfaces. Finally the two coats were scraped and the topcoat polished but throughout the base seemed to be very reluctant to absorb any wax. Very odd and I’ll be interested to see what it looks like after a week’s use.

Here are the final pics of both boards ready to be picked up: