Ski Tuning Article: Burlington Free Press

[thetrailboss]

Interesting read. Any comments?

 

[riverc0il]

Cone says a tune should be performed after 10-15 hours on the snow.

so let me get this straight: a guy that works at a ski shop is recommending folks bring their skis in for a tune up every second day they ski? :blink:

"That's about three to six skiing days, depending on conditions," Cone said.

if you spend half the day in the lodge or in line perhaps :lol:

that article reads like an ad for ski shops. okay, as many folks know i certainly don't tune up as often as most skiers prefering about 8-10 ski days or substantial damage before a tune. but 10-15 hours? c'mon....

 

[NYDrew]

Holy crap, ive been tuning my skis wrong the whole time!!!! I didn't know that you should bring it to a shop at the base of a mountain to get it tuned.

I wonder how much he had to pay BFT for that full page ad.

 

[thetrailboss]

Yeah, I thought 10-15 hours seemed low. Biased POV that's for sure.

 

[Charlie Schuessler]

When you think about the actual skiing hours most recreational skiers spend on the mountain, the 10-15 seems to calculate to 2-3 skier days... most times I ski no more than 2-days between tunings that add's up to about 10-12 hours...so for me the 10-15 hours appears to be reasonable...

 

[thetrailboss]

I usually do 2-3 days in between waxings. Lately it has been more due to lack of time.

 

[kbroderick]

Actually, the article does mention that you can do it yourself, and I'd have to say that 10-15 hours is reasonable...ideally, you should do a quick tune after every 4-6 hours of skiing, not hit any rocks, and then you'll only need the occasional grind to re-flatten the skis as the bases and edges wear at different rates. In the Real World, only World Cup racers have skis tuned that frequently (and that's because someone else gets paid to tune them); when I was actually racing, I'd try to get to my skis after no more than 3 ski days, which would be between 9 and 15 hours of use. Any longer than that, and the degradation in performance becomes quite noticeable. These days, I try to make sure I get them tuned before Thursday-night beer league races (even if it's not a real race, 100+ racers makes for race-like snow conditions) or any other times when I expect sharp edges to be significantly helpful (I did them before going out MLK day on the expectation that things would have flash-frozen).

My gripe: the article implies that waxed skis are somehow less likely to be damaged by rocks and stumps. Riiiight. I won't argue that having wax on your skis makes them handle better, (it certainly does), but waxing skis does little to nothing to prevent base damage.

 

[NYDrew]

hear that K. if you have enough wax on your skiis to protect them , then you got some serious problems.

 

[riverc0il]

My gripe: the article implies that waxed skis are somehow less likely to be damaged by rocks and stumps. Riiiight. I won't argue that having wax on your skis makes them handle better, (it certainly does), but waxing skis does little to nothing to prevent base damage.

my impression was waxing will fill in small scrapes. it won't prevent base damage if you hit a rock, but will maintain a base that has been scraped up a bit.

 

[kbroderick]

my impression was waxing will fill in small scrapes. it won't prevent base damage if you hit a rock, but will maintain a base that has been scraped up a bit.

In general, "filling in" scrapes with wax isn't particularly helpful. The most likely outcome is that the excess wax in the scrape will just peel off once you find some hard snow, and may create excess friction until it comes out.

If you can see the wax on a set of bases, then they're not as fast as they could be; the wax that actually helps is embedded into the microstructure of the base. That's why unscraped skis are quite slow and why race techs will go to extensive lengths (i.e. scrape, brush with nylon, brush with horsehair) to get excess wax out before the start of a race run. If you're not racing, it makes little sense to attack your bases with a nylon or horsehair brush, but scraping is still a good idea.

(I've actually heard that not scraping, particularly with hard (colder temperature) wax, is bad for the bases, as the wax gets pulled out rather than getting scraped off cleanly; as a result, the microstructure of the base gets damaged because the wax was still bound to it as it was getting pulled out. I'm not convinced, nor have I heard that from a definitive source, but it seems somewhat plausible.)

Now, if they started talking about wax protecting skis in storage or against microstructure damage due to harsh snow, I'd agree. I just didn't get that impression from the article.

(Granted, tuning skis is a gearhead-type activity by definition, and a ski tuning article by a gearhead would probably not be of much interest to the general public.)

 

[NYDrew]

I don't race in any real way and I nylon brush my skiis.

As far as summerizing, i get real sloppy with the wax, just let it drip all over the place, especially covering the edges. Right before the season starts I scrape it off and their as shiny and sharp as the day i stored them.