Category: Snowboard

As promised Angus tore himself away from the snow at Glenshee to drop off his dry slope bashing board for a bit of base restoration. I’ve never actually had a session at Garthdee but it seems to involve a lot of attacking each others’ boards with hand held grinders:

The board was also fairly concave so it took a fair base of base planing to get it flat. This takes off some of the more superficial gouges…

…but still leaves the big ones to deal with. Experience has shown that it takes two or even three passes of P-texing & scraping to get a really mashed base clean and there really isn’t any way to short cut the fill & scrape process.

Here is the board smothered in clear & colourless P-tex the first time:

And the second pass, which included all the metal-grip down along the rather gappy edges:

However eventually it is ready for structuring with the trusty SkiVisions tools, tidying up the edges (which is easy as they were last done a few weeks ago by Angus himself) then some Zoom Universal wax to keep it looking nice and shiny until the next robot wars session at the dry slope.

The tidal wave of Burton boards continues with Alex’s snazzy Custom:

He was quoted a one week turnaround at one of the other providers in Aberdeen but is leaving on Friday so he took advantage of the fast ManCave turnaround to get his gear sorted in good time – 18 hours from drop off to ready for pick up in this case. We can do it faster if you need it – call to see what we can do for you.

The tops looked fine at first…

…then you spot the split:

Holy smoke! Not much we can do here as the tip flexes so much no amount of glue will help. However it’s Alex’s choice if he wants to use it like this and we’re here to sort the base.

Once the many, many gouges are filled:

They need to be structured:

As always the clear & colourless P-tex means you can still see the gouges even though they have been filled. However I’m waiting for some coloured P-tex strips to come so maybe some coloured base repairs will look a bit better. Or, more likely, will have a slightly mismatching colour repair. Anyway the edges looked liked they have never been serviced, still showing a light crisscrossing grain from mechanical edging. The edges, like the rest of the board, have lived life to the full (and beyond) and show some signs, like the missing curve of steel below:

Bases and sides are both 1 degree and both need plenty of work to recover a good edge but once there sorted they are very nice. As always I like to treat a freshly structured base to some purple Zoom base renew wax first and the base soaked it up like a first pint on a Friday night. It’s a big board and scraping and brushing takes a while but finally the top wax is shined up and the base (let’s not dwell on the split top) looks like new: