Ski Servicing & Maintenance
Ski Maintenance – Servicing Your Skis
Owning your own skis and boots isn’t essential to enjoying the sport, but for those that do own their own maintaining them is essential. If you don’t keep your skis well looked after you will find their performance suffering and skiing not as much fun as it ought to be.
Whilst you can pay others to maintain your skis for you, learning how to do it yourself is always handy and it teaches you a bit about your equipment too.
If you are skiing at Chill Factore and don’t have your own gear, don’t worry. We have a huge amount of high quality skis and boots for you to borrow included in the price and we also have an indoor street full of shops where you can buy your own if you are heading off to the mountains.
When looking after your skis the two most important things to do are keep the bases waxed and the edges sharp. The edges, the metal strip that runs around the outside of the your ski, are what help you carve by digging into the snow and the bottoms need to be kept smooth and waxed to allow them to turn and slide well.
Looking After The Base Of Your Skis
For the base of the skis you want to make sure that as well as being waxed any gouges, scrapes and nicks are evened out or repaired. Gouges are repaired using a repair strip that you melt and drip into the gouge and then scrape smooth with the scraper. Small scrapes are simply smoothed out and any plastic burring removed using a metal scraper.
Some gouges and scrapes are fine to be repaired at home but if it’s a deep gouge through to the core you need to take it to be serviced properly where they will apply a metal grip to reinforce the repairs made.
Looking After Your Edges
The metal edges of your skis can surer from rusting and nicks both of which can hinder your skis performance and make skiing harder and less fun than it should be. Your ski has two edges – the base edge and the side edge – both of which need to be checked for nicks, rust and burring. To remove rust you use a gummi stone gently along the metal edges and to smooth out nicks and burrs you use a file to get smooth them out.
Waxing Your Skis
Hot waxing your skis at home is actually pretty easy, and wax and waxing irons are easy to come by. You start by removing old wax with a scraper and then melting new wax onto the ski and ironing it out with the iron. After that you scrape off the wax again with a scraper. The only tricky thing about waxing your own skis is holding them still – ideally you need two ski vices to hold the ski tight and flat in an upside down position.
Storing Your Skis
Skis are a big investment and if you look after them properly they will serve you well over many years, but what a lot of people neglect to do is look after them whilst they are not being used and are in storage. Always store your skis somewhere away from heat and damp to avoid rusting and consider waxing them for storage with a thicker than normal coating of wax covering both the base and the edges
If in doubt and you need advice our technical team at Chill Factore are always happy to help and answer questions.
