Category: Edge & wax

Tom dropped off his Blizzards for a service. Apparently he picked them up second hand in Norway. It certainly appears from this small sample that our Viking friends know how to look after their kit – the edges had been tuned previously but whoever did it retained the Blizzard standard base 1 degree/side 3 degrees, and the bases were as perfectly flat as any ski I’ve seen.

Sadly Tom’s many talents don’t stretch to towelling off his edges after a week in the Alps so our first challenge was getting the rust out of the way so we could spend some time filing the steel. You can just about see the worst rust patches on the “before” photo – about level with the ear defenders – but you can get a real feel from the photo of the file below, pictured after a single swipe on the base edge:

Anyway bright metal wasn’t too far away and the edges were soon back to their best. Two coats of wax, some scraping and brushing and they are ready to rock.

Richard dropped off his brand new, never been skied Head Icon TTs for a wax. There has been a lot of hot air exhaled online on the question of whether brand new skis are as good as they can be or do they benefit from a going over from a decent tech before use. The arguments boil down to:

The “Don’t touch ’em” side:

• Surely the manufacturer uses the best possible wax prior to shipping?
• Surely the manufacturer uses the best possible grinders for base & edge angles?
• Surely the manufacturer’s tight QA/QC wouldn’t allow convex or concave bases out of the factory gate?

The “Give them a once over” side:

• They just plonk whatever spray on wax will stop the edges from rusting in transit.
• They run the skis through the edging equipment as fast as possible and only change the stones/belts/grinders when they break.
• The skis are still cooling down as they leave the factory and you should anticipate a bit of warping in transit.

Now I have never had the pleasure of visiting a ski factory so I can’t comment directly, although I have seen some interesting QA/QC diversions come out of Chinese factories on other products – and let’s face it, the majority of skis in the shop today are made in China.

So I’m going to record a few photos and let you make your mind up about the big debate, for these skis at least.

Flatness – not bad, not as good as Emmett’s Heads a few months ago, slight concavity but not significant enough to be worth photographing.

Edges:

Base edges showing unevenness where the grinder has bounced along, most noticeable on the inside edge where the light reflects.

 

 

 

 

This side edge shows where the grinder has gone from one angle to another, probably relating to the side cut of the ski passing a certain angle, or possibly just from the ski bouncing as they throw it through the machine as fast as possible.

This is something similar but over a longer distance- you can see the edge reflecting the light getting thinner and thinner from the top of the picture to the bottom.

 

 

 

 

This photo shows a small ding on the edge – nothing serious but very hard to avoid this sort of thing in a container full of skis making their way from the far east to the UK. You can also see that they have ground the plastic above the edge with the grinder rather than planing it out of the way. Fair enough, why waste the time planing the plastic, but it does mean that their grinder wheel will fill up with plastic and won’t make a clean cut after a while.

My brief from Richard was to clean the bases and get base then top wax onto the skis so I didn’t touch the edges. He’s planning to come back for  a lesson in March so he can sort them out himself after that.

Nothing wrong with the bases, look at that lovely stone-ground linear discontinuous structure. No easy way to get that without the stone-grind machine, although cross-country skiers have little steel rollers that they can use to impress different structures on their narrow planks.

Waxing is easy on these fairly narrow skis – here
they are after the base wax has been scraped and brass brushed to force it all into the structure grooves. Even at this stage it’s looking a bit shiny (right).

Finally the second coat of Zoom Universal has had its hour soaking in and scrapes and brushes to a high shine (left).

So you’ve seen the photos and I’ll leave you to come to your own conclusions on whether the factory finish meets your own standards.

 

Nick dropped off three sets of skis for edge & wax prior to heading to the hills for a holiday. What seemed like a simple job got a bit more complicated.

First a quick shampoo to clean off any remaining wax and crud:

Then base flatness check, shave the tops of any gouges, scratch them up to help the P-tex stick and then they’re ready for a scrape & structure:

Once the bases are sorted the base edges were done – still no drama – all three skis are one degree and the base edges were anyway in good shape.

However, it all went a bit Pete Tong when the side edges presented themselves. The Salomons & K2s should be 2 degrees and the Atomics 3 degrees. Instead all three sets were somewhere between one and two degrees, and they all exhibited a bizarre wave down their length – think of thumb prints on a pie crust except along a steel edge:

I drew some red lines on the photo to try to highlight them but you might just have to trust me. The edges have the tell-tale longitudinal, continuous striations left from tuning so they didn’t leave the factory like that – someone has done it to them. I can only imagine someone has used a hand-held grinder or something. The file guides just don’t let you make the wavy thing.

Anyway the most appropriate course of action, following a few seconds of incredulous head-shaking, was to reset the edge angles to what they were when they left the factory. It’s a shame as whoever reduced the edge angles must have removed quite a bit of steel to do it and now here I am removing yet more steel to put them right.

So once the edges are sorted and the huge fuzz of swarf has been swept up it’s a relatively simple case of wax, scrape & brush to a high shine. Nick is already looking for a lesson when he returns and if you have a lot of skis to look after it certainly makes financial sense to do it yourself.

Kristin dropped off her Salomon skis for service. They seemed to be called Bamboo which I guess reflects their composition.

Good looking, nicely understated skis but unfortunately the true bar check indicated that the bases were seriously concave:

That strip of light wants to be thin & consistent width not big in the middle and small at the edges. However the bases and base edges were in excellent condition so it seemed a shame to batter half a millimetre off them both before they were bashed enough to really need it, so the bases were left alone. This time anyway!

If you are wondering why base flatness matters the primary concern is the base & edge angles are both referenced from the base, so a bulging convex base will give higher base edges than the edge guide reads and vice-versa for convex. In theory you should also find that convex bases seem to need extra angulation before the edges bite, and concave bases can seem a bit grabby, especially when you doing something that needs bases flat to the snow like being dragged up a Poma button lift. the exception to all of this is wide, all mountain tips which Atomic at any rate says should be slightly concave. They don’t say how to achieve this if they have lost the concavity mind and I don’t know any tools that could get it for you.

Usual edge & wax job and here they are all shiny and ready to go again. Just watch out for hungry pandas on the slopes.

 

Hazel is back from her Alpine holiday and amazingly has a further trip coming up so she dropped the LINEs off for a short back & sides.

You’ll remember last time the bases were scored white and looked a bit sad so we had pencilled in a restructure, edge & wax for this time.

Giving the skis the once over revealed that the lumpy dodgy bit that we were going to keep an eye on..

…was now right next to a nasty gouge and gap:

If anything the bases were even whiter than before:

So the skis got the usual flatness check, then the gappy base was given a splodge of metalgrip to try to keep it under control. The structure tool took off loads of multi-colour P-tex but the tired white lines just kept on glowering up with only a slight improvement. Eventually enough was enough (this seems to be a recurring theme with LINE skis) so on to the base & edge bevels. This time the skis still had their original machine grind bevels so we could check the factory settings and once again the Sharpie test revealed these ones were 1 degree. The edges were in good shape despite the icy conditions and came to nice sharp edges very quickly.

Once the new nicks in the top sheet were glued up for water protection it was a simple case of Zoom base & top wax and I have to say the skis have come up lovely with not a white line in sight:

Alice is off for a week soon and dropped off her Atomics for a quick once over.

I’ll admit that I like Atomic skis a lot. They are one of the few ski manufacturers that unashamedly ship skis with 1 degree base & 3 degree side bevels – the golden ratio according to many of the EpicSki forum gurus – they make nice sharp top sheet designs that don’t age too quickly and the tops tend to be made of resistant tough plastic that doesn’t look terrible once it’s been skied over a couple of times. On top of all that they tend to stick to nice, easy to service black bases too. And, finally, they claim to make their skis in Austria rather than China or Vietnam like a lot of the other manufacturers. None of which really matters to Alice who can now look forward to some effortless gliding on her two coats of Dominator wax for a week.

Hazel is the first ABDNSnow member to take advantage of the eye-watering 20% discount available for card-carrying members.  As Uberkommandant of the entire club she should help to spread the word to the rest of the crew.

Her LINE skis are needed for a trip to the Alps on Friday so she brought them round for some pre-trip TLC. They are a good looking ski, quite wide under the binding but not ironing-board wide like true powder skis. Pretty light too.

The bases are the most complicated I have ever seen with blocks of black, blocks of fancy graphics and LINE spelt out in big white letters. They must have looked great in the shop.

However Hazel has been hitting the dry slopes big time and the results are clear to see.

Serious white lines on the bases indicating not just “not much” wax left but frankly indicating “less than zero wax left”. To get this effect requires years of studious neglect. It’s not 100% percent certain that simply waxing them will bring them back to life once they have reached this state. When ski forum experts talk about “oxidized” bases this is what they mean. Any organic chemists out there care to comment on whether or not high molecular weight polyethylene gets “oxidized” rather than “scratched”?

Another giveaway that the skis are more used to pastoral use is the amount of grass & soil in the bindings.

Finally I’m not sure if this is related to dry slope use but the tops had a number of nips & dings where the wood was just showing:

These are easy enough to araldite up (sorry that should probably read “2-pack epoxy up” but that doesn’t feel like a verb) but one wee nick on the base isn’t so simple:

You can hardly make it out but the P-tex is coming away from the steel edge – you can just slip your thumbnail in the gap. Now you can either ignore it, leave it and keep an eye on it or you can repair it so it doesn’t get worse. Repairing it means making the wound bigger to get some metal-grip in there then P-texing, scraping & redoing the structure. We agreed on the “don’t fix but keep an eye on it” approach.

One good thing about the nylon nets on dry slopes is that they are very kind to edges so Hazel needs no intervention there, just a bit of glue to stop the water from swelling her wood cores then two coats of wax.

You’ve seen the before photo above, here’s the overnight shot…

…and here’s the after. A quick trim with a craft knife once the glue is properly dry and that will be hard to spot.

So the final question is of course “did we get rid of the white lines?”.

I hate to say it but even with the healing powers of Zoom Purple rehab base wax then Zoom Green Universal top wax the lines can still just about be made out:

Nothing like as bad as they were, and I would hope that the two coats will keep Hazel gliding for a whole week in the Alps, but not quite perfect. Nothing for it but another visit to the ManCave after the Alps to freshen up the structure, check out the various nicks and wax them back up again. Of course the huge discount means the more work she gets done the more savings she’ll have for Jägerbombs or whatever young people drink on ski trips these days. Bon voyage!