Hot boxing: What it will do. What it won't do.

Many skiers like to have their skis saturated with glide wax using the “hot box” method. This has led to a lot of misunderstanding about what it does for the skis and the skier.

Hot boxing began as a way to speed up the saturation process on new skis, and increase the absorption of glide wax after a routine waxing. Early experimenters believed that keeping the skis warm for a while after regular iron-in waxing made more wax go into the base material. Extended, gentle warming does seem to help saturate new bases more quickly than applying dozens of coats of ironed-in wax. That's the beginning and end of it right there. You might also like to do it at the beginning or end of a season to refresh wax in the base, but the procedure is most useful to put a quick charge into new bases that have not been waxed at all.

Hot boxing is not a wax job to last you all season. You will need to iron on some glide wax after skiing a few times. Because your skis have been initially saturated, they will absorb and retain wax better than skis that have only had meager coats of wax at long intervals, but you still need to renew the surface. Cold, hard conditions are abrasive. Warmer, moist conditions often bring debris to the surface, which is also abrasive.

Hot boxing is only worth it on a high performance base. Performance skis have sintered bases. Sintered bases are made by pressing particles of base material into a layer in a sort of dry process, compared to extruding the plastic in a liquid or semi-liquid form. Extruded bases do not have the porous structure that sintered bases do. The pores are what hold the wax. Ski wax is more than just a polish. This isn't your kitchen floor, or your car.

Not all sintered bases are created equal. Cheaper racing skis, and many touring skis, use high-density sintered bases. These will not retain wax as well as lower-density base, but their microporous structure appears to interact better with the adhesives used in ski construction, making them somewhat more resistant to delamination than skis using extruded bases. Some of you may have experienced the tragic loss of a good old Trak or Karhu ski because the base material peeled off. Those companies used extruded bases because that technique was the best for producing the beloved Omnitrak waxless pattern. But plastic is notoriously hard to glue. Smooth plastic presents the greatest challenge to long-term adhesion. While high-density sintered bases are not immune to delamination, the material appears to give the glues a better grip. This is purely a field observation, unsupported by any kind of formal experimental proof.

If you do decide to iron a glide wax on a high-density sintered base, understand that you will have to re-wax at least as frequently as someone lovingly caring for a higher-end racing ski. The harder base material is more resistant to abuse, but also to hot wax.

Cheap skate skis will have higher density bases than more expensive skis will have.

Smear-on wax is not your friend. Almost no one likes to wax. If someone invented a magic wand that you could wave over the ski base to leave it perfectly waxed, skiers would say, “Awwww! Do we actually have to WAVE it?” Many skiers seem willing to believe that the smear-on potions made for extruded and high-density bases are good enough to get by with on their performance skis. Not only are smear-ons inadequate for more than a minute or two, they will actually leave residues that inhibit the absorption of ironed-in wax. Interestingly, super-expensive fluoro racing waxes in all forms will also leave residues in the base material that need to be cleaned out with expensive special fluoro remover so that you, the performance addict, can properly iron in some wax to nourish the inner structure of the base material.

Damaged bases will not absorb wax. Bases are most commonly damaged by using too hot an iron. A hot enough iron will fuse the sintered material, sealing the surface so that melted wax cannot soak in. If the damage isn't too deep, it can be scraped away using various methods, from razor scrapers, wire brushes, and abrasive pads like Fibertex, all the way up to a stone grind. Portions of the base can also be sort of mashed flat if you have skied them dry, or with too soft a wax, over very hard conditions. This damage can also be opened up again with brushes, scrapers, or Fibertex. This is more likely on a high-end ski with a low-density base. Low density bases are designed not only with plenty of porosity to absorb wax, but with the idea that a performance skier will want to imprint temporary structure into the base to deal with warmer, wetter conditions. The base material in its naked state is noticeably softer than on a ski designed to withstand neglect and abuse. And, as mentioned above, smear-ons and fluoros in general will fill the base pores with sludge. Expensive sludge, but sludge, nonetheless.

That white stuff isn't necessarily oxidation. Whiteness on a black ski base is commonly identified as “oxidation.” This is true often enough, as skiers neglect proper waxing, but even a careful and diligent waxer will see some whitened areas at times. Abrasive conditions can roughen an area, and cold conditions can cause wax to squeeze out of the base pores as the material contracts. Waxing guides mention that the skis should be cooled to air temperature and brushed out a few times as excess wax comes to the surface. Before hitting the panic button and insisting that your skis have been inadequately waxed, hit them with the horsehair brush for about ten strokes and see if the color improves. After a while you will develop the ability to look at the base after brushing to determine whether the whiteness was really oxidation. And of course you can never go wrong by waxing your skis one more time. But a good brushing may save you the trouble.

A note about skin skis: In the past couple of years, skin grip inserts – formerly known as mohair – have made a comeback. They first reappeared on classical racing skis to cover a temperature range and snow conditions in which kick waxing was basically impossible. “Zero” skis address the narrow heart of that range, but mohair offers a wider effective range. Now most companies offer mohair bases on multiple touring models as well.

Mohair was fairly common in the 1970s. It's the same material as climbing skins. As a grip base, it is held in with temperature-sensitive glue, similar to what is used to hold grips and baskets on poles. It is purposely intended to come off with the application of heat, so that worn out inserts can be easily replaced. This is generally not much warmer than the hot box temperature, so hot boxing of skin-base skis is not recommended. You need to be careful enough just ironing around a hair insert because you don't want melted wax to flow into the hair.

Ski Repair

Delamination is a common problem. Skiers are always coming in with one end or the other of their ski bases flapping loose.

Today's victim needed a six-inch section of the tip re-fastened. How to clamp the radius of the repaired tip?

Use the other tip. I waxed the surface of the ski so the glue would not adhere to it. Then with light but firm pressure I clamped the sandwich together. We'll see how that goes.

Last year we had a repair on which we tried to see how many clamps we could use.

It was another tip repair, but we either did not think to use the other ski as a mold or we couldn't. In that case we used a lot of small blocks to secure sections of the curve.

For adhesive we use Gorilla Glue. It's easier to work with than epoxy and has a shorter curing time. Instead of mixing a batch that might be too big or too small we just squeeze out what we need. Not much adheres well to plastic, even epoxy, so we might as well work with something that's fairly easy to get along with.

Hotbox Backlash

Last week the SkiPost e-newsletter had this item about the practice of saturating ski bases with wax by the slow-bake method known as hot boxing or heat boxing. The term heat boxing has emerged recently to differentiate the ski prep technique from the pot smoking technique also called hot boxing, in which smoker or smokers indulge their habit in a purposely confined space.

How to Hot Box?

[A reader wrote]"You referred to proper & improper hot boxing. I have a hot box of my own construction but I have never seen any real guidelines for how to best use it. I keep the temperature at 120 - 130 degrees (Fahrenheit) for about 6 hours. It has a fan that continually circulates the air. How does this sound?"

[Ski Post answered]First of all most ski manufacturers do not suggest skier hot box their skis. [emphasis mine]

While an iron exerts heat to the base, the hot box exerts heat to the entire ski. It can do nothing to improve a ski, over normal waxing done properly and with patience, but can weaken the epoxy and alter a ski camber if the heat gets out of control.

That being said many people and ski shops hot box.

To do it with the least risk
1) The base needs to be open and not sealed so it can accept the wax easily. (Stone grinding to achieve a fresh open base is another issue)
2) The max temp at any point in the box should not exceed 55C (130F). Some boxes have great fluctuations in their temps throughout the box.
3) A wax with a melting point at 55C needs to be used. Not many waxes are actually molten at this low temp. They may be soft but they are not molten. Start suggests Service Wax LF for its unique double molten points one just below 57 and one at and one at 120C.
4) Melt wax onto base.
5) Leave in hot box for as short a period as possible. Less than 2 hours should be sufficient. The base is only a couple of mm thick and will absorb wax quickly or not at all.
6) Realize this is speaking from the standpoint of the ski manufactures.
7) This is not speaking on behalf of the Hot box and Hot bag manufactures who would argue differently.

I hope this helps.

Andy

We try to respond to new information to improve the service we offer at our shop. So far, our research has not turned up any service providers who have cut their heat box times significantly. Many recommend warming the skis for as much as 12 hours. Most agree on the temperature range, averaging 50-55C and never exceeding 60C. According to SkiPost, one should never heat skis as high as 60C, let alone leave them there for 50 minutes to an hour, as some service centers advertise.

Many heat box providers do acknowledge that extended heating can affect some skis.

I was initially skeptical of the heat box compared to ironing. Even when I accepted the idea of heat boxing, it was more as a time-saver and basically harmless rather than outright superior to ironing as some proponents were saying. I still feel that way about prepping new skis. Much of the time spent prepping new skis would have been spent ironing in and scraping off numerous applications of wax just to achieve maximum saturation of the base material.

As with most technical arguments in skiing, there's a lot of opinion and very little real science. Experts apply some general principles based on one or two variables rather than all possible variables and then issue blanket statements. For instance, SkiPost cites the fact that the base material is only a couple of millimeters thick to support the statement that less than two hours of heating should be enough for complete wax absorption. There's no consideration of base density, which can vary with the quality level of the ski, and no supporting experimentation to test whether the wax penetration really is complete. Toko did provide data on wax absorption based on actually shaving down the base material to see how far the wax had gone at different times and temperatures. Another tester claimed to have weighed the skis to determine how much wax had been added by a box versus an iron.

In the end, the statement that ski manufacturers do not recommend hot boxing may come from the legal department rather than anyone in the company who actually skis or develops equipment. If the manufacturer gets behind a procedure that might damage some skis they could face possible aggressive warranty claims. I don't see how it would turn into a very expensive problem for the ski company, since the cases would never involve a big enough damage award to interest much of a lawyer, but why not nip it in the bud? It only takes a short verbal statement to protect the ski company from ANY such claims. So there it is.

All this fog leaves the individual skier and the small shop to decide for themselves about the relative risks and merits of letting your skis get baked. I still lean toward the "mostly harmless" theory.

Another great XIMS product

The new apron from XIMS is made of stiff, coated fabric that would make a sturdy expedition pack or bomb-proof tent floor. Since most of us who have worked too long as shop drones have only homelessness to look forward to once we're too old to be of the slightest use in outdoor retail, the introduction of this product is quite timely. Baby Boomers are aging rapidly and many of us failed to score good pension benefits. Since Social Security and Medicare are unnecessary burdens on the taxpayers and it's too late for us to make huge gains in private investment, population reduction will at last be accomplished through hypothermia, malnutrition, violence and disease.

I suppose those of us with fond memories of camping trips and perhaps some leftover equipment might fare a little better in the fiscally conservative, Live and Let Die future. If we can poach some small game or arrange to scavenge in the trash cans of our financial superiors the life could provide a certain gritty comfort.

Along with the health insurance companies we wish ourselves a quick and relatively painless final illness when the time comes.

Forget everything you knew about brushing

According to the latest issue of The Master Skier, all those groovy metal brushes we've been accumulating are mostly useless. Just keep the copper and one medium steel and use the rest to strip loose hair off of the cat. Take the nylon brush you tossed in a drawer back out and return it to a place of honor.

The article assumes you will be using fluoro waxes, powders and liquids. The powders and liquids do not penetrate the base material, so metal brushes will merely strip away your excessive investment in speed. Nylon will stroke those tender substances gently into the surface of the ski, reducing (but not eliminating) the costly sloughing of fabulously expensive magic pixie dust.

For those of us on Planet Budget, skiing almost entirely on hydrocarbon waxes (yawn), metal brushes are still great. If you want to spend all afternoon trying to get a nicely cleaned base structure with a nylon brush attacking Swix CH6, be my guest. In fact, the block fluoros, like Swix HF, also penetrate the base and will benefit from the kind of soft, super-fine steel brush you can't buy anymore.

The blue nylon brush is still the brush of choice for final polishing in any wax regime. The fluoro-addicts approve. We shop grunts have never abandoned the blue nylon for a nice streak-free shine.

I've picked up some good tips from the Master Skier over the years. I also invariably come away deeply grateful that I never succumbed to the deep neurosis necessary to take up Nordic racing. You most emphatically do NOT have to turn yourself and your skis into a set of science experiments to have a rockin' good time going fast enough. Conversely, if you want to do really well at Nordic racing you WILL have to take on the science experiments.

You will need several sets of skis. Skis are disposable items to the real racer. The real racer will get base material milled away by the stone grinder to renew the structure and strip away the layer clogged with fluoro residue and heat-sealed from hot ironing after inadequate shaving of micro-hairs. The real racer will have several sets of skis in both classic and skate, to be ready for all conditions. Your race skis need to have the right flex, which is built in, as well as the right structure and wax, which are applied, but not always easy to change.

I haven't noticed anyone talking about the need for several sets of poles of slightly different length for different snow conditions, but maybe that's this year's secret weapon, to be revealed next fall in time to stimulate pole sales for the manufacturers.

"If you don't understand what I'm saying, I'm not talking to you," the saying goes. The articles about arcane training methods, nutritional supplements and massive investments in equipment and chemicals are aimed at the skier who is that obsessed. On the plus side, the magazine is free, so a recreational skier can peruse it for useful tidbits. Who knows? You might develop an obsession and become another good customer for the high end ski market.

Because recreational Nordic touring has lost most of its participants to snowshoeing, the cross-country ski industry needs to make more and more money off fewer and fewer people. Some in the bike industry feel the same way: develop the high end, get people in a higher income bracket hooked on buying continuously-obsolete, ultra-sophisticated equipment, and let the dirty-footed masses go somewhere else. Even though such an approach invariably leads to diminishing returns, it keeps getting tried.

I suggest a different approach to racing: Make everyone wax identically. Y'all can argue about it for as long as you want beforehand, but in the end you have to settle on a wax and use it. If one skier missed the wax, relax: everyone missed the wax. The winner will be whoever did the best they could with the conditions that day.

That'll never happen. But maybe we can introduce it as a novelty race and see if anyone else enjoys the logic of it.

Customer Methodology 101

1: Call first thing in the morning to extract a promise that a certain job can be done by closing time.
2: Don't bring in the object in question until lunch time or later.

Advanced play:

3: Don't pick up the item for a week or more.

4: Bitch about the price.

The Knights of Old had Squires

In days of yore, the chivalrous heroes who dashed around on quests and crusades, rescued suitably wealthy damsels and duked it out for the local earl had little sidekicks who took care of the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of arms and armor. These breastplate-polishers and horse-waterers dealt with the mundane details of the chivalry business. I can only imagine what they said to the knights while performing these vital but unheralded tasks.

"What do you do with this f#%^%$%^ing sword?! Chop f$%^&^%$ing rocks with it? Do you lie in the salty surf in this armor? It wouldn't hurt you to OIL something once in a while!"

In the present day, the knight has been replaced by the athlete. Take cross-country skiers, for instance. Most of the racers pay lip service to the concept of thorough, frequent and meticulous waxing, but the majority of them have used a lot more quickie smear-on crap than they might admit.

These knights need squires. Racers on a well-supported team might get products and services for periods of time, but every one of them has to fall back on their own resources eventually.

Big bike races rely on squads of mechanics who keep the machinery running. Cross-country ski teams rely on wax technicians. Freelance racers have to polish their own bases or live with the consequences. A lucky few manage to get someone else to bring the love.

A couple of days ago my associate in Nordic technical matters undertook the full prep on our own noble knight's two sets of skating skis. Sir Smears-a-lot had been resorting to the wishful-thinking paste a bit frequently of late. He IS a busy man. So squire G put the racing sticks in the lovin' oven for a rebirth of speed. A few hours in the sauna with the base prep wax was followed by an overnight rest. After that Big G laid in a coat of moly-fluoro base wax followed by some XIMS HF6.

Our skating champion paced and fretted for hours as he waited for Big G to finish the meticulous process. It did involve a lot of ironing and scraping. It was worth it, though. The knight came back bursting with enthusiasm. Now squire G has a permanent assignment as Minister of Speed.

A Freebie that's Actually Worth It

I have hated the "free hot wax with purchase of new skis" for many years. In its original form I still do. One quickie ironed-in layer is a waste of everyone's time.

We've entered a new era. At Nordic Skier we now offer school ski team racers who purchase new skis a free hotbox treatment.

Hotboxing takes the place of the time-consuming multi-layer prep jobs we used to sell. A hotbox more effectively heats the ski over a period of hours to soak the prep wax deeper into the base. The procedure actually takes MORE of my time than a singler ironed-on layer, but I feel like it doesn't WASTE my time, so it doesn't bother me at all.

The issue with me was never the time. It was the illusion that we had actually done something and the impression we created that glide waxing was some trivial thing that could be thrown in. Too often, that token splash of wax was all that ski ever saw for the rest of its life.

Even if the recipient of a free hotbox treatment never does any more to the bases, at least we know that a respectable amount of wax went in on that first day. Anyone who does not develop good waxing habits is being wantonly wasteful of their investment in gear. To encourage skiers to take up better waxing habits, the hotboxed ski will reward them with better glide. You absolutely cannot say the same for the one that got the token rub with an iron and a block of whatever was handy.

School team members who already purchased their skis somewhere else can still bring them to Nordic Skier for a $5 discount on any of the hotbox treatments the shop offers.

Binding Placement

For a few years, Salomon and other authorities have been recommending mounting their bindings on high performance skis a centimeter behind the balance line regardless of whether it's on a skating or classical ski.

Folk wisdom had held that skate skis should be mounted neutral or tip light. Classical skis should be mounted neutral or with a slight tip drop.

As usual, it turns out to be more folked-up than you thought.

If you look around for advice on placement you get a range from dead on the balance to 1.5 centimeters back. You'd think that 1.5 cm back would make the tips thud to the snow, but that placement still makes them light at the tip.

It turns out that the weight of the binding plate has always overcome the inherent balance of the ski. The only way to make any ski tip heavy would be to mount the binding far enough back to overbalance the weight distribution of the binding itself. This generally shows up around two centimeters. We've been skiing tip light all along.

Experts advise moving the binding back to improve gliding performance. The amount is negligible, but supposedly quite noticeable. At the most, it probably won't do any harm to fudge a half or a whole centimeter back.

The only advantage to the NNN NIS plate is that neurotic or phenomenally sensitive skiers can tweak the binding forward or back to suit snow conditions and their mood. The overwhelming disadvantage, of course, is that the plate requires an NNN binding.

How about a universal plate to return binding choice to the marketplace? That way we can return to the freedom to mix and match brands instead of getting trapped in yet another monopolistic product line.

Speaking of Yellow Klister

After two days of great skating I needed a change of pace. George was just coming slowly back from his bout with the Jack Plague. That meant both of us went out on klistered classic skis on Sunday.

George launched earlier in the day, as the temperature crossed from the upper 20s to the mid 30s. He used Swix Silver Universal and some KR40 Violet klister to meet the granular early snow changing to the first moist patches where the strong sun worked on it.

By the time I went out, the temperature in the open was leaping past 40. Out on the Ellis, shaded areas might easily remain dry and firm. To meet that possibility I mixed some of the Silver Uni with KR70 Swamp klister. They don't call it swamp klister, they call it "Aqua."

George returned all smiles. His wax had worked well for his convalescent outing.

I had an excellent time on the Swamp 'n' Silver. In the growing slushy areas, nothing would glide extremely well. Other than that, though, the kick was bomb-proof, so I could propel a strong glide. Untrustworthy kick actually makes you slower. As usually happens, I steadily overtook everyone on the trail in front of me just with careful technique. No one's going to make a video of me, but I get around. It's fun to build the trip one stride at a time.

With good kick you have a solid launching pad for each glide.

Back at the shop, I didn't want to de-klister my skis when the forecast indicates I might want exactly that wax job again. To keep the skis safely away from anything that might get snared by the klister, I put some grid-wall hooks all the way up on grids on either side of one of the backshop windows. George and I laid our skis on this rack, safely above any clutter or traffic.

Hotbox or Hot Air?

Reading the explanation on one ski shop's website advocating hotboxing of skis to enhance wax penetration, I can't help wondering if this is yet another lucky rabbit's foot to help people feel faster.

According to a Peltonen tech rep at a ski tech seminar several years ago at Great Glen Trails in New Hampshire, under the best of circumstances wax only penetrates about two THOUSANDTHS of an inch into sintered base material. Maybe three, but what's an extra thousandth of an inch among friends?

The hotbox promo goes like this: heat your ski to 55C (131F) for 6-8 hours with a warm wax on there, then do a coat or two of something rated for a skiing temperature of 10-21F and it's equivalent to 25 waxings! The unit cost for this service is much less than if you had the friendly wax grunt actually do 25 waxings. It is slightly less than we charge for a new ski prep using iron, scraper and brushes.

Why not just blow some Swix CH10 or BP99 on your own skis and then lean them up by your furnace for a couple of days?

Racing is such a neurotic activity. How many of the processes related to it have sprung up just because someone with a pack a day habit and a shop apron figured out how to exploit that? A confident racer is a happy racer. A happy racer is a fast racer. At least you want any anger and aggression to be directed up and away from the racer's equipment and support staff. Assure them they're on The Good Stuff and then tell them what that other racer just said about them. Arrgh! I'm a stone ground, hotboxed killin' machine!

Hard waxes for cold conditions melt at higher temperatures than soft waxes for warmer ones. Thus they do not penetrate as easily into the base. But their job is to condition the running surface of the ski to withstand the drag and abrasion of icy conditions in wicked low temperatures. As such they're more of a surface treatment than the softer waxes, which need to saturate the base material more to assure that free water is excluded. Those soft ones melt readily under a moderate iron temperature. You may realize some gain by stuffing your skis in a hot crevice for a few hours, but is it worth what the tech wizards need to charge you to pay for their time and the loan they took out to pay for the box?

Don't let your skis get nasty

A woman just brought me her skis. She claims to love them. You wouldn't know it by the bases. She feared damaging them with a wax iron, so she didn't wax them at all.

They'd been waxed at some point. Whoever had done it had left the usual slob's gobs at the tip. One subtle touch by meticulous waxers is to wax that area for protection and a nicer look, but that includes scraping and brushing it.

The running surfaces of the skis were scraped and oxidized. Oxidized bases look white. Those areas need to be smoothed with a product like Swix Fibertex, a mild abrasive pad that cuts the rough surface away. Otherwise, those areas will lose wax more quickly. In abrasive snow conditions, you lose wax too quickly as it is.

This skier plans to get a quick waxing lesson when the season really starts. For now, I'm doing a restoration wax job with multiple saturating coats to get her started.

Wax early and often, people. It's easy and it protects your investment. If you plan to pay a lackey to do it, prepare to pay what it costs to keep a servant. You'll do better to learn and equip yourself so you can do it at your convenience. It's simple and fun...when it's your own skis.

New Ski Prep

Experienced skiers and ski technicians have always known that new skis need their bases prepared before they will perform well on the snow. Ask ten of them what they suggest and you'll probably get ten variations, but they all come back to the same principle: put on a lot of wax.

We're talking about glide wax. With the rise of skating, glide waxing has become a more complex science than it was when the pursuit of reliable kick eclipsed most other concerns. Then, once the technological genie was out on skate skis, all that glide wizardry has come back to land on the glide zones of classic skis as well.

Using only the basic hydrocarbon glide waxes in any wax company's range, a skier can charge up a new ski base with an initial fund of wax to provide a good foundation for the routine waxing that will follow it.

The glide wax for the warmest temperature, for instance Swix CH 10, melts at the lowest iron temperature, making it the best choice for cleaning glide zones. Never use solvent to clean glide zones. Scraping and wiping hot CH 10 (or equivalent) while still melted to liquid will remove dirt from glide zones without drying the bases. On a new ski, a couple of cleanings with CH 10 will start your base prep procedure.

Do NOT hot-wax clean the kick zone of a classic ski. Sand that with 100 grit and brush away the loose lint afterwards. Once you complete your glide zone prep you can iron in a thin layer of base binder to prepare the kick zone to receive grip waxes, or you can leave it sanded and ready in case you need to use klister binder instead. If this makes your eyes begin to glaze, you know one powerful reason why skate skiing became so popular.

Several years ago, Swix had an exhaustive ski prep procedure involving multiple grades of wax. The warm waxes saturate the bases well, while the cold ones help refine the surface, as microscopic hairs of base material are encapsulated and scraped away. That's the theory, anyway, and the scraper seems to prove it. Scraping away an application of cold wax, even while it is still warm from the iron, you can see black base residue in the shavings. Then they introduced Base Prep waxes, which supposedly combine soft, saturating components with hard, surface conditioning components. I do see base residue coming of when I scrape these waxes, so it helps me believe what I want to believe. I want to believe that a single formulation takes care of the bulk of the waxing, so I don't have to remember how many times I've applied each specific wax, as I did before. I can just lather on many coats of BP and then top it off with a couple of layers of whatever wax will be skied on. If I feel ambitious I might throw on a coat of CH4 late in the procedure, but it isn't supposed to be necessary.

All this just reinforces the notion that lots and lots of wax makes skis fast. A Peltonen tech rep a few years ago gave a clinic in which he described (among other things) the exhaustive waxing the factory team did to skis before glide testing to select for the racers. Dozens of coats went onto the skis to be tested. Dozens more went onto the survivors of the first culling. At each reduction i the fleet, more wax was applied to the skis carried forward.

"Recreational skiers wanted to buy the skis we rejected, because they'd been waxed so much they were faster than most people's skis already," he said.

Once the skis are prepped, keep up the good work by rewaxing them at least after every two or three outings. Change waxes as the temperature changes, to get the most out of your skis and your own effort.

Wax, You Idiots!

In comes another customer with sporty clothes, a decent physique and a middling expensive skate ski with a base as smooth and polished as the rough side of exterior plywood.

"I just haven't had time," she said. "They've never had anything done to them, but I only went out a couple of times on them last year."

So she's been out there trying to push a moldy sponge over a rough sidewalk and calling it skate skiing.

I decided quite awhile ago that, as long as I don't have to push it around, I don't care how crappy someone lets their ski get. And if they ask me to clean up after their neglect, especially urgently (we want to go skiing NOW!), they'll find out how expensive it is to have servants.

None of this applies to the average wide, waxless touring ski. I do get a chuckle out of it when someone brings in their scabrous planks, which have obviously been worn while crossing roads and stone walls, and asks for a hot wax. But the idea of seriously waxing a wide touring ski, even one lovingly coddled, is about like fitting a spoiler to a tugboat.

The longer I do this high-performance Nordic thing, the more I believe that a ski is just a device for delivering wax to the snow. Light weight is important, so you devote less of your energy picking them up and setting them down, and more of it to moving forward, but a well-waxed mid-grade ski will almost always out-glide a neglected high-end ski. The only time a neglected ski will glide well is when things are so screechingly icy that rocks would glide.

People get confused by the term "wax", because it applies to a couple of different substances. In classical skiing, there's grip wax and glide wax. Grip wax is often called kick wax. If, long ago, the kick potion had been called Grip Sauce, or Traction Gunk, and the term wax had only been applied to slippery things to make gliding easier, Nordic skiing would probably be thriving wherever the ground turns faintly white for even a short portion of the year.

That opportunity passed before we knew it would be missed.

If you have a high performance ski, even if it's just a sporty touring ski, it will work better if you saturate the glide zones with wax. And skating is a completely different activity if the skis don't glide because the bases are dry and scratchy. You're not just working harder, you're working differently. Your balance changes when the skis grind to a halt instead of gliding forward. You work the core muscles and pole across a wider range of angle as you twist to apply more force. You even increase the risk of overuse injuries as you continually try to re-accelerate a draggy ski.

It's a bit like those cyclists who grind a 30 rpm cadence in a huge gear and call it "a better workout." Yeah, until their kneecaps explode off the front of their legs. So, non-waxers, enjoy your rotator cuff injuries and tendinitis of the elbow. Ironing, scraping and brushing is a lot less strain. So is skiing afterwards.

Secrets of the Backshop

Using the XIMS permanent marker, technicians can leave messages for other technicians who may work on a ski later.

Step one:

Step two: binding in place.

Frankenski

This season has turned a lot of skis into rock skis.

Most of us have rock skis. These skis have seen their best years, but still allow us to get out on really substandard surfaces and go through the motions while we wait for better conditions to arrive. In a normal year, we only have to put up with these decrepit relics for a few outings before the snow gets deep enough to entice us out on the better gear. The fact that we are usually premature in this insures a steady supply of rock skis as the years go by.

Here it is, February twelfth and we have just been threatened with our first good winter snowstorm. We aren't getting it, either. While Boston and Cape Cod burrow out from under more than a foot, close to two feet in isolated places, we're still waiting to collect our second inch out of this much ado about nothing. It's a slow mover. Some forecasts still dangle the notion of four to eight inches. I'll believe it when I'm shoveling it. Meanwhile, it was a good day to conduct unsanctioned medical experiments in the backshop.

I hoped to reanimate the mutilated demo skis I've been using because my rock skis were just too nasty to use for weeks and weeks. I justified using the demos because they'd taken a few hard landings during their service, and they no longer had the latest sidecut profile. Heck, they were practically kindling. And they fit me better than my real rock skis.

Strictly from a survival standpoint I didn't like to use my rock skis on anything steep. The edges are completely rounded. The skis are too soft for me, so they're squirrelly on a fast descent. Their only virtue is that they're shaped like skis and I can trudge around on them a few times on the flat fields we usually groom when the first flakes fall.

Excuses aside, I began to feel really sorry for those demo skis. In the last couple of days we'd been skiing some very tan snow. Earlier I'd managed to skip nimbly around the snags, even completing one whole run on a wretched day without picking up any new gouges at all. But eventually conditions got so bad that no amount of agility could save my skis. The granular snow was extremely fast where it was there at all, which meant that I would rocket into minefields of pea-sized gravel or rocky water crossings on blind drops or curves. Whether I sailed into the hazard or jammed on the brakes in the gravelly approach, the skis took the hit. It was a little sickening.

With a captive subject I could try a base repair technique I was developing, using the riller to push base material back into something like its intended shape. Many of the dings had not gouged material away, they had simply pressed a mark into the base, the way the riller does. The gouges are random and chaotic. The riller pattern is regular and carefully sized. I guessed that by imposing the riller's discipline on the randomly scored base material I could eventually push it straight again.

It's a scary procedure. A Swix 3 millimeter riller looks like it will leave trenches like a ploughed field in that shiny black expensive ski base. It's drastic. And once I'd made a couple of passes I had to continue, to see if the theory would hold up.

All I was doing was accelerating and reversing the natural progression someone might follow when structuring a base during a season of variable wetness. We generally use very fine structures on cold, fine-grained snow and very coarse, deep ones when the snow is very wet. Deep grooves channel free water away from the base. Sloppy snow usually happens in springtime.

Ideally I would have gone methodically from 3 mil to 2 mil to one mil, and so on down to .25 mil, but someone sold the 2 mil, so I went from 3 to 1. It was all right. By the time I got to .5 I could see it was going to work.

For good measure I went over it again with my Toko roller riller, using the coarse and fine inserts. A quick buff with Fibertex and a light pass with a new plexi scraper and I'm ready to start waxing. The cycles of scraping and brushing should smooth the bases further. The ghosts of the gouges are still there, but the base looks much better. And it was way cheaper than a stone grind. We'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, our day-long snow storm has left us still waiting for that second inch. Thanks again, Winter. I'll have time next week to do all that waxing.