Angela’s Salomons

The early season rush means that I haven’t been taking as many photos as normal, with the backlog of equipment looming over my shoulder every time I enter the Cave. However when Angela dropped off her recently acquired, second hand, ex-hire Salomons they had a few clues about their past that caught my eye.

The base photo manages to catch an old, failing scratch repair, transverse ridges (usually caused by dodgy scraping, either p-tex repair or wax) and longitudinal scratches that make it look as though someone has started to flat file the base, then given up.

Edges varied in their side bevel and degree of mechanical scarring, as though someone started a hand tune then, well, gave up:

As the bases were still very concave (you can see why someone tried to fix it) they needed to be planed, filled then structured. One of the below photos also helpfully show the SkiVisions base planer and structuring tools:

Base planed, gouges filled

 

Base structured – note SkiVisions tools

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Planing the base means resetting the base bevels from scratch, which was easy enough – the base planer removes any hardening left over from mechanical edging. The side edges were much harder, taking ages to get through the hardened steel. The fact that someone had reset the edges to 1 degree means that quite a lot of extra edge was lost getting them back to the Salomon standard 2 degrees. However eventually the edges were sorted and after some Zoom base renew then Universal top wax they were looking showroom cool again:

Done & Dusted

 

Festive Frenzy

The refreshing quantity of pre- and early-season snow has coincided with an uptick in the oil price so there has been a bit of a conflict between the two careers. The severe imbalance between oilfield and ski tech remuneration means that the Cave only really opened to business on Monday 11th Dec then promptly shut again on the 15th so I can hit the Alps. The upside of this is that I took the time to tune my own skis so I get take my own hard work into some actual snow rather than scraping them across the Scottish gravel fields of last season.

Another upside is that there was something of a queue forming when I did return from Australia, and it is quicker on a per-board basis to make a production line. Sadly the CaveCam was still stuck in a suitcase in LHR so there are no photos with this post.

As always there was some new stuff to learn. Bataleon make “3-D bases” which have a bit of a wing thing going on. Someone else had hashed the edges so badly it wasn’t possible to tell what the bevel should be so a few emails to Bataleon HQ in Amsterdam, deep in the Dutch Alps, revealed that they ship with zero base & 1 degree side. This sort of makes sense as the wings on the base keep the edges out of trouble (although you would have a disconcertingly long wait at the start of a turn before any edge actually bit) but from a practical perspective, how do you file a zero bevel? It is flat with the base so if you waft a file up & down with no file guide you are knackering the base. Anyway Bataleon have a relaxed attitude to tuning their boards – have a look at this movie on their website:

No mention of base & edge bevels because – hey! – your tech just bungs the board in a machine and it comes out at whatever settings the last guy left it at. If you look at around 1 minute you can see the sparks flying from the edges as the side edges get nicely case hardened, so that when you learn a bit of board sensitivity and try to tune the board yourself it is a nightmare to try to work through all the hardened patches. And that was certainly the case with Iain’s board, which put up plenty of resistance but which is now in better than new condition.

In contrast, Ross returned his Atomics for another tune & wax and they were done & dusted with no drama, because once your skis have been tuned properly once they are a doddle to tidy up next time.

Moz , Heather, Brett & Scott also put various skis & boards through the mill. Here’s hoping everyone gets some decent riding in over the festive period and I look forward to seeing everyone in the New Year.

Scott’s gluey Burton

Every service starts with a quick eyeball to see what’s what. Scott bought  a used board from a mate and it looked OK from a distance:

Nice subtle paint job of the sun going down, top in good condition. However the base was just odd:

It seemed to have about 3mm of something – wallpaper paste? dried up porridge? – on the base. It can’t have been wax as wax comes off when you go down the hill, and the board had clearly been used since the porridge application. Also wax is slippery and this stuff is sticky. You can see how deep it is – the horizontal gouge across the top of this photo disappeared completely once the board was de-porridged.

Anyway whatever it was there was a lot of it. I took the snap below after two minutes of just lightly scraping. Scraping turns the porridge into corn flakes.

Once the base was scraped & cleaned with degreaser it failed the true bar test:

As always the base flatness is not easy to photograph convincingly but there was nearly a 2mm gap in the middle along half the length of the board. Concave bases are grabby bases as you are always riding the edges rather then the base even when you are trying to ride completely flat. However the P-tex is only 2mm thick so you can’t expect to cure this particular case completely. So out with the Base Planer to bring as much off the edges as I could without destroying the base altogether. One good thing about a base grind like this is that lots of superficial scratches just disappear and only the humdingers remain.

Gouges carefully filled with clear & colourless P-tex then scraped flat:

You can still see the shadow of the P-tex after it’s been scraped as the P-tex fills the structure where it has been applied. So we need to structure the base after scraping all the repairs. Here’s the board following structuring:

Base edges need to be reset completely after a base grind so about 10 passes with the file & guide before it’s even worth colouring the edge. Once the edge is inked up it took five more passes to remove the Sharpie ink completely, then smooth the edges up with the diamond files.

Side edges were rusty at first but it didn’t take much to batter them into shape:

One feature of resetting the base edges is a strong tendency to build a burr on the edge. You can feel this easier than see it – nicely sharpened edges feel equally sharp whether you stroke your fingers up or down the edge (looking from above, remember to always check for sharpness of any edge by stroking perpendicular to the length of the edge/blade) but a burr makes the edge feel much sharper in one direction. We use this effect to make our steel scrapers sharper, but on a ski or board we want rid of it and the easiest way to do this is to redo the base edges – just a couple of strokes – then a pass or two on the side edges again and all should be well.

The base lapped up the base renew wax like a man who had arrived at a free bar after two days wandering in the Sahara. Top wax, scrape & polish and the board is looking good, fully cleansed of sticky cereal and ready for action:

Scott’s Blades

Scott showed some initiative in getting his ancient Salomon blades into the cave for a short back & sides before the tidal wave of gear starts later in the year (here’s hoping…).

Tops were in good nick, considering they must be 14 years old. Bases scored top marks for flatness, but they were a bit more used-looking, completely lacking wax and with a few wee scratches.

However the scratches were mostly superficial, and as the dead white bases needed a good seeing-to with the structure stone to try to bring them back to life I had another look after the treatment. Each base had five or six minor scratches that deserved attention:

So these tiddlers were quickly filled and scraped flat, then structured again to blend them in.

The edges had never been sharpened, as they still had the usual factory inflicted grinder 45 degree striations and the sidewalls were virgo intacto. However Salomon had managed to make an intriguing pattern on the side edges; presumably they ran the blades past the grinder once, turned them around, let them get halfway through the grinder again then changed their minds.

 

I had a hunt around the internet to see if the blades were given a different tune from the standard Salomon base 1/edge 2, and sure enough the tech manual suggested base 1.5 and edge 1 – unusual as most people normally maintain an edge angle of 90 degrees or less. Anyway 5 mins with the Sharpie revealed that these blades had left the factory with a 1/2 tune so that is what they got.

Regular readers (I use the plural here optimistically) will know that I tend to sharpen skis to the tips then leave it to the owner to detune the tips if they wish. For the blades I saw a couple of stern warnings of certain death if the tips aren’t detuned so I buckled under the pressure and brought them down a little.

Following some tidying up of the nicks on the tops, time for some Zoom pink base renew and green universal top wax:

After a bit of elbow grease the bases came up nicely, ready for the next 14 years…

More Martin

You might remember Martin’s Burton Uninc (Burton A in the post). He liked that board so much after it was properly tuned that he… bought a Capita DOA. Here it is pictured with one of the Martinette’s baby Burton which was also brought in for a short back & sides:

As you can probably see Martin’s still completely blind to board top aesthetics. Still the DOA board has a good reputation although I find the naming (apparently “Defenders of Awesome” rather than the other more medical term) slightly tasteless.

My daughter has a Capita Birds of a Feather and when I tried to tidy it up before first use I was a bit stumped by both base & side edges. They didn’t seem to be any one angle and they are heavily striated by the factory grind. I called the Capita importer and was assured that base & side are both 1.5 degrees and anyway why on earth would I want to mess with edges on a board? You could argue that the real question is why set side angles at 1.5 degrees when no-one makes 1.5 degree side file guides?

So here are the base edges before:

 

 

 

 

You can see that they are both rusty and striated. Fortunately bottom edge 1.5 degree guides are widely available so the rust was zoomed off quite quickly and the ridges taken down a little – not too much as it’s brand new and I try to conserve steel where I can.

Side edges – *sigh*.

Brand new board. Heavily ridged edges. 1.5 degrees. Not even 1.5 degrees! Look at this snap:

If you look closely you can see there is a line parallel to the base which marks the point where the angle breaks from less than 1.5 degrees to more than 1.5. What are they playing at? The temptation here is to work the edge to a single, whole number angle and just get rid of whatever the factory tried to put on. However, again, rather than file away the life of the board I decided to leave it as is and sort it out when Martin comes back from his first break. So a couple of coats of Zoom wax and it was good to go.

I’ve added this photo just because I appreciate a bit of marketing hyperbole:

The baby Burton was much less hassle in that it (1) looks cool:

and (2) has nice straightforward 1 & 1 degree angles. As is so often the case kids don’t seem to mash their snowboard edges too much so once the board’s base was flattened slightly and the gouges redressed it was a simple job to get edges just right. Again, kids’ boards always seem to have completely dried out bases so after it had swallowed half a pint of Zoom renew it was ready for a top coat and a polish. Hopefully Martinus Minimus appreciates the effort and finds it glides that bit better.

 

A few photos

A few people have asked for fast turnarounds over the last week or so which precludes proper photo tracking. So if you were hoping to see your planks or board featured and it never made it, I’m sorry. Here are a couple of orphan photos that never quite formed a story by themselves.

Robbie’s furry board:

Hard to see from the picture but if you are worried that your board has a non-flat base either send it to Blues in Edinburgh for a stone grind or give it to me for SkiVisions flattening, but please don’t reach for the wet & dry and give it a seeing to. Sandpaper simply doesn’t cut P-tex but makes it into a big furry ball. Once you’ve made all that fur it’s the devil’s own job to try to get rid of it to actually cut the P-tex & flatten the board. Anyway we persevered and got to a better place, and Robbie did introduce me to the concept of Extreme Carving, which looks quite a lot like having a wee snooze on each turn but in fact must be quite demanding. Robbie’s board was a really good looking Burton “race board” from about 2000, when they were manufacturing in Austria. Nice & slim and purposeful looking.

Lara’s skis:

Lara dropped off a couple of sets of skis for wax & edge. As a complete pushover I filled a couple of gouges for free.

Following a bit of a photo drought I finally remembered to snap the finished skis. The Rossis (white tops) are remarkably lightweight and, combined with their sensible black bases, were a pleasure to work on. As a wee bonus Alasdair dropped off his brand new Atomics for a once over when he picked up Lara’s skis.

Other clients though the Cave in the last few days have included Tom’s Blizzards take 2; Darren’s girls’ dry slope boards; Neil’s K2s, Moz’s skis and a couple of others. Most of these were turned round in less than 24 hours or some on a while you wait basis.

Please feel free to add positive comments if you’re happy with the work.

Matt’s Lesson

Matt brought round his Nordicas for some TLC. Here they are after a dewax:

They showed up a little bit concave with the truebar but well within acceptable limits. There were a few lumps & bumps & base gouges so these were filled and Matt got to scrape the repairs flat. Remember kids – steel scraper & brush for base repairs; any other times keep the steel away from the bases – you’re allowed brass brushes and perspex scrapers for waxing but no steel.

Once the base is cool it’s time to sort the base edges. It’s becoming clear that people aren’t always 100% clear on what bevels are for, which is understandable given the ease of distribution of misinformation in the current era. So, you need edges to cut into hard snow & ice when you want to make a turn. When not turning, you want the steel out of the way as it is more draggy than waxed P-tex and you don’t want your skis to start turning by themselves. So we put a small angle on the face of the edge that faces the snow, typically 1 degree, max range probably 0.5 to 2 degrees. Smaller base angles (according to ski tuning orthodoxy) are for slalom guys who want their skis to initiate turns very quickly; bigger angles are for park dudes who don’t want their edges digging into the rails or for anyone who fears their tails digging in on mogully slopes. Naturally some forum experts advocate blended base angles (eg 1 degree underfoot, 2 degrees at the tails – make up your own variations) but this could be a case of keyboard cowboy differentiation signalling.

Side bevel discussions are particularly incendiary and make the Brexiteer/Remoaner arguments look demure and even handed. You do need to put an angle on the side edge, but should it be 1, 2, 3, even 4 or 5 degrees? Who knows. I run base 1 and side 3 on my Atomics because that’s how they leave the factory. Lots of other brands run 1,1 or 1,2 and people seem to be able to turn perfectly well on them. But don’t let that stop a heated argument in the bar! Here’s Matt giving his Nordicas 2 degrees.

Once the edges are sorted, and Matt’s edges had a weird ultra-sharp burr that had to be eased out before gummi stoning them to perfection, it’s out with the £6 Tesco iron to wind up the purist wax dudes. Seriously, the thermostats all come from the same supplier in China whether you spend £6 or £300. Plus the steam holes don’t fill up with wax and burn down the garage, regardless of what you might read. Just fiddle with the heat setting until your chosen wax melts slightly reluctantly and there isn’t much smoke and you’re away. And wear a proper half face respirator with A1 or A2 filters. Matt is planning to head to Braehead with his Nordicas so it was a quick rummage in the wax bucket and out popped the Datawax graphite & fluoro “indoor snow” special wax.

Once the wax is scraped a quick & careful waxy brass brushing to push it into the structure…

…then some serious elbow grease with the nylon brush and hey presto – another delighted customer who knows how to maintain his own kit.

 

 

Neil’s K2s – down to the metal

Neil’s clearly been enjoying his backcountry skiing. His K2s were full of gouges but this one caught my eye – through the P-tex, through the fibreglass and down to the metal:

You can also see an existing repair along the edge. Anyway the gouge had to be opened up, metal-grip applied in the bottom of the gouge then topped off with P-tex to get it slick. The bases needed a complete re-structure with the SkiVisions tools to blend all the repairs in and give the wax something to grip on.

Edges are (I suspect) stainless as they were rust-free but battered to hell. They took ages to get sharp again but they finally capitulated.

Here they are awaiting waxing with the rest of that day’s batch:

And there they are awaiting collection once they’re finished. Not many photos this time, too many skis to process.

Robyn’s lesson

Robyn came round for a lesson on board tuning after her dad told her what a great idea it is.

Her K2 board looked nice but had a crazy concavity that was as bad as any I’ve seen – you could have slipped your pinky under the true bar at the worst bit. However flattening board bases takes much too long for a lesson so we patched and scraped a couple of gouges, edged & waxed the board and hey presto – ready to set a new speed record on the nearest hill.

The Lazarus Custom

A doctor friend of mine worked in Papua New Guinea for a couple of years, learning about tropical diseases. He said it was very liberating in that the expectations of the local population were very low. They would take the patient to the tribal witch doctor, and if that didn’t work they would let Andy try his white man’s magic. If he cured the patient that was great; if not then that was only to be expected and no-one complained – a shrug of the shoulders and off they went.

Marc had a similar fatalistic view when he dropped off his venerable Burton Custom for a review. The board was really only fit for the mortuary slab but he figured that letting me try the ManCave magic wouldn’t hurt. He might get a “Scottish Board” out of it and if not then it would make a nice garden bench.

If you are of a sensitive disposition you might want to look away now.

You’ll see some of the gouges have exposed the tabs on the edges. If you look closely you’ll see that there are a number of cracks in the edges:

This one has been repaired:

You can see the principle for replacing short lengths of edge – clamp a template to the board, cut out a regular shape of P-tex, pull out the knackered edge, glue new edge in, then use the same template to cut out a P-tex cover for the hole. This repair folded over soon after it was done (it was an overnight in-resort repair so maybe failure was to be expected) so Marc just cut the fold off. Unfortunately for us, the damaged part of the edge was around 80cm long so no templates that size exist, leaving us to cut the P-tex freehand then chisel it out. Like I said, look away now if you are easily shocked:

Once the edge is fully exposed it needs to be cut at 45 degrees so the repair won’t be plucked out by stones. Time for the baby diamond disc:

Once the edge has been cut it is simply a case of pulling it off the board. That really exposes the number of breaks in the edge and raises an interesting point. Burton have used narrow edges made of stainless steel for the board. Narrow to save weight presumably, although narrow profile edges are sometimes sold as “racing profile” as the edges drag more than the bases so you might want to reduce the area on the snow. They have also used thin grade P-tex so I think weight loss was the objective. You might think stainless edges are a good idea, especially if you store your gear in a wet roof box between seasons. However they have never really caught on, and a bit of web searching reveals that they are a bit more expensive than carbon steel, slightly harder to form when you’re making your skis/board, definitely harder to sharpen/file/tune and finally somewhat prone to cracking. Well I can verify that last bit – the first photo is the edge pulling away then the photo below is just some of the pieces the edge came away in:

Needless to say stainless edges have receded in popularity in the last decade or so. So it’s boring old carbon steel that’s going in as a replacement.

Here is the new edge with a couple of baby screws already in. The screws are there to resist anything that tries to pull the edge out and are really an admission that we can’t form & glue the repair as well as we can a brand new board. For this repair I added a screw every three or four tabs. At 6mm long they are a barrel of laughs as you drop two screws on the floor for each one that actually goes in the hole.

Once the holes are all made it’s time to apply araldite, fit all the screws and clamp the edge up good & tight. The board gets to sleep next to a radiator for a night to help the glue to set:

Once the epoxy is set it’s time to cut the new P-tex to size. Start with a rectangle of P-tex, clamp it to the board above the repair area, very carefully mark the shape using your daughter’s compasses, swear a bit, cut out the new shape, swear a bit more, trim to size, pop it in the hole. At this point I realised that my repair sheet (of fancy-dancy A4000 P-tex) was a good bit thicker than the slimline soft stuff that Burton had chosen. And a good bit harder too.

 

Next job has to be the most satisfying – time to chop the heads of the screws. Remember the baby diamond disc? It fairly whistles through the baby screws and leaves the shaft in the board, anchoring the edge but with no protruding head to get in the way:

Then it is a simple matter of fitting the P-tex patch, gluing, clamping, leaving overnight:

The join between the new edge (left) and old edge. Note the new edge is wider and the 45 degree join to prevent the join catching.

OK it doesn’t look pretty so we fill the tiny gaps around the edges and would normally just scrape to get everything even. However my thick P-tex is standing well proud of the rest of the base so it needs a good seeing to with the SkiVisions cutter to get anywhere near level. Once it is good and the rest of the gouges are filled, scraped and the base is structured it’s time to blend in the repaired edge which was very easy as the existing stainless edge is harder than the replacement edge. Then base & side edges are applied as per the recommendation printed on the board – base 1 degree side 1 degree. The hardest part was definitely trying to get a meaningful edge on the side that wasn’t repaired – it took 5 or 6 times longer to get the stainless to take an edge than the brand new carbon steel.

Here’s the board ready for waxing:

The board won’t be mistaken for new but Marc is hoping to get it up a hill asap to see how it performs. If it’s worth keeping we’ll tidy up some of the cosmetics and double check the blending of the new P-tex to make sure it doesn’t go the way of the previous repair.

And if it doesn’t perform on the hill it will still make a great bench for telling tall tales over a beer in the garden.