Category: Snowboard

As well as lowering the tone of the Cave with his Scallywag (2nd right here) Eddie handed over a wee challenge in the shape of his Yes Basic.

 

Move along folks, nothing to see here – apart from a serious delamination and an edge bent in two dimensions. Not very pretty inside the gaping hole either – hard to say exactly what’s going on.

Let’s peel back the P-tex to have a better look:

So it’s not pretty but it’s probably saveable with a bit of TLC and the healing powers of Araldite.

First we scrub the wound with a wire brush to clean it up, then careful application of torque through pliers to straighten up the bent edge. Then undercut the edges of the P-tex base so that the patch is held in place.

Normally on the flat of the base you use a neat template to cut a perfect semicircle out of the base P-tex then use the same template to cut the new patch. However, life is obviously never as simple as the advert so we need to be a bit more creative here as the damage is on the scoop so it’s in 2 dimensions. So let’s do a bit of brass rubbing:

Once you have the shape on the paper you simply clamp the paper template to the P-tex sheet and use scissors to cut the patch to size. The patch here is held in place by itself, just rather satisfyingly clicked in place:

Once the patch is the right size, it’s a simple matter to mix up some Araldite, heat it up with a hairdryer and apply it to the base & patch. I would love to show some pictures of this process but if you’ve ever chased a pint of hyper-fluid glue around your living room, trying to avoid spilling it on the furniture and carpets, you’ll know that taking photos is the last thing on your mind. Here it is with the usual arrangement of plastic sheet to prevent sticking, thin wooden sheets to spread the force and a few clamps done up nice & tight:

 

 

 

 

 

Just leave it like this, perched over your hottest radiator, for 48 hours and hey presto – relaminated. Here it is restructured and with the base renew wax on but not yet scraped –

 

 

 

 

 

– and here is the board with top wax scraped & brushed, ready to go. All in all a nice wee repair and could only have been improved with some lime-green P-tex instead of boring old black.

The early season rush included a number of boards, each with their own tale to tell.

The Burton Custom on the left had been tuned by someone in the past who had changed the bevels from the Burton standard 1 degree base/1 edge to 1.5 degrees base & edge. In itself that’s not the end of the world, and indeed Capita and some other boards come from the factory like that, but it’s a drag to try to copy as no-one makes 1 .5 degree file guides for side edges. So now it is 1.5/2 instead. Jonathan had asked for a base grind but we like to preserve client kit if we can so it got substantial P-tex repairs and a restructure instead. By all means get a base grind if your base edges are really knackered, or you want to reset them to some new angle, but remember that P-tex varies from 1.2mm down to 0.6mm thick when new so there just isn’t much to play with. Techs are always happy to grind as it reduces the amount of filling they have to do but remember that you’re shaving life off your pride & joy.

Les’s RIDE looked innocent enough but someone had fitted tungsten carbide edges at some point. Seriously, I need my files to last for more than one board. Once the base edges were in some sort of order the side edges had another joker to play – not only were they brutally hard to file but they were set at zero degrees. That makes the edge profile 91 degrees – I’ve never seen a profile greater than 90 degrees. It’s easy enough to do if the factory simply forgets to bevel the side edges before firing the boards out of the door, but really? Anyway the edges are now set at 1/1 and I have ordered more files from the shop.

Eddie’s Scallywag exhibits the worst excess of snowboard design – the dreaded white base. It really is the mullet of snowboard bases – never acceptable in any social situation. They get dirty, go orange if your edges rust, never look good when scratches are repaired and you can’t see what you’re doing when you try to wax them. However I soldiered on and got the base into some sort of shape after a base plane, fill, structure, edge & wax.

Finally Ben’s Burton Custom – just a few gouges to fill, 1/1 edges as Burton intended and no machine hardening – a pleasure to work on. Which makes me feel even more guilty for finishing it well after the date I had promised – sorry Ben.

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.

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:

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.