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Base prep new skis with wax and just use liquid for rest of season?

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Rich_Ease_3051

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The goal is to spread wax down the ski and warm the p-tex enough to open up to accept it. Once you actually start doing this regularly, you will realize that many "rules" are just other people's habits.

Man I really drank the swix seminar kool aid and do remember a point about p-tex and heat that's opposite to your perspective.

In mark 35:45, the presenter explains that the base is normally a hard sintered material with micro nooks and crannies where the wax gets deposited. If one heats the base too much during ironing, those nooks and crannies will singe and close up (not open up as per your point of view) and there won't be micro spaces for the wax to get into and be deposited when the ski cools down.


My personal opinion on this heat debate is that ski ironing is similar to leidenfrost effect in cooking where water doesn't evaporate, but forms beads on a pan surface when the cooking pan is hot enough. Once you get the pan temp to this leidenfrost threshold, eggs and steaks and other meats won't stick to the pan.

In ski ironing, if you get to some type of similar leidenfrost treshold with the iron temp, it just distributes the wax, but not singe the base, as long as you pass the iron at the recommended 10 second pass.

In my opinion.
 
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Sibhusky

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I guess Jacques and I are in the lower temps, longer waxing school of thought. Presumably none of the recommended wax temps are going to burn your base and if the wax isn't smoking and we're setting the iron lower we should be fine. Neither of us races. We both do extremely well on the flats, as anyone who skis with us knows. And really that's all I care about.

There's pretty much a YouTube video for any school of waxing theology you want. I just cringed watching the Glenn Plake tuning video. There's a bunch of folks here who worship at the DPS Phantom altar. There's people who believe in Universal wax. There's people who don't scrape. There's folks who only crayon on the wax. There's people who use metal brushes to remove wax and those of us who only use metal brushes before waxing to clean out the structure. You'll develop your own theories over time.
 
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Rich_Ease_3051

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You aren't hot waxing? Why are we spending all this time taking about it then? Are you corking? Build up those arm muscles!
Sorry lol I meant I won't be hot scraping. Corrected original post.
 

Marker

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Yes I have heard of this in the Q&A portion of the seminar on 1:13:00 mark. I won't be doing it nor will I be hot waxing scraping. I puchased the fiberlene just for general wiping in between scrapes and brushes.

I started out as a scraper, but after a few seasons of dealing with the mess and extra time, I tried the fiberlene method after seeing it discussed by more experienced folks here. About the same time I added a fine steel brush to aid in clean up of the base before waxing. I just use a nylon brush on the cooled wax. The brass brush no longer gets much use unless the base is very dirty.
 

jt10000

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Presumably none of the recommended wax temps are going to burn your base
Not true. If you bring the base itself up to some of the higher temperatures (particularly those needed for harder waxes) your base will get worse at absorbing wax. The energy from the iron going into melting wax is fine. If you hold the iron in one place long enough more of that heat will raise the temp of the base itself, damaging the ptex. The total temp will be low enough that the wax won't smoke but the base can be damaged.
There's pretty much a YouTube video for any school of waxing theology you want. I just cringed watching the Glenn Plake tuning video. There's a bunch of folks here who worship at the DPS Phantom altar. There's people who believe in Universal wax. There's people who don't scrape. There's folks who only crayon on the wax. There's people who use metal brushes to remove wax and those of us who only use metal brushes before waxing to clean out the structure. You'll develop your own theories over time.
I come from nordic skiing, where at a recreational level and low-level racing waxing is far more important than in alpine skiing at a similar level. There's also all sorts of nonsense there too. But I've learned from reading/watching what wax experts in that field do/say (Primoz here is one) and try to follow that. And try to be efficient. You can maybe get away with stuff in recreational lift-served skiing that would make skiing a complete chore on nordic skis.

Yes there are many approaches. More than one approach works. A few are actually destructive. Some waste time or product. Sometimes using more product is "safer" but more wasteful, so if using expensive product there's a tradeoff. I used to crayon on high-fluoro waxes to save money. Now I'm just putting it all in the trash :geek: :geek: :geek:. If using cheap wax you can not worry about that.

Watch a good wax tech (who has to create many good skis in a hurry w/o harming them for paying customers) put wax on the skis - if you do it that way your skis will be good, your bases will be safe, and you won't waste time with nonsense.

Sure, there are other approaches to waxing that work fine, so do what you like (within reason) and don't overstress the details. For example, I think I'm going to try this fiberlene approach to reduce scraping because of the mess. Maybe more paste/liquid waxes too.

But if you're new, you can't go wrong by following what KingGrump wrote on Thursday. Or, for some of the "easy" waxes (like recreational liquids), just follow the manufacturers' recommendations.
 
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KingGrump

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Man I really drank the swix seminar kool aid and do remember a point about p-tex and heat that's opposite to your perspective.

In mark 35:45, the presenter explains that the base is normally a hard sintered material with micro nooks and crannies where the wax gets deposited. If one heats the base too much during ironing, those nooks and crannies will singe and close up (not open up as per your point of view) and there won't be micro spaces for the wax to get into and be deposited when the ski cools down.


My personal opinion on this heat debate is that ski ironing is similar to leidenfrost effect in cooking where water doesn't evaporate, but forms beads on a pan surface when the cooking pan is hot enough. Once you get the pan temp to this leidenfrost threshold, eggs and steaks and other meats won't stick to the pan.

In ski ironing, if you get to some type of similar leidenfrost treshold with the iron temp, it just distributes the wax, but not singe the base, as long as you pass the iron at the recommended 10 second pass.

In my opinion.

Less research and more common sense. Nothing beat hands on with a little fore thought and knowledge. Emphasis on the little.
Sure try thinking it through first. Just be aware, the mind is a tricky thing.

Sure, I am sure we are still on track. Which track is the question.

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Rich_Ease_3051

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Lol I really muddied the discussion in the thread by calling hotscraping hotwaxing. I did it here:

Decided that I will use base cleaner to remove factory wax, instead of hotwaxing,

and here:

References to ptex temps were related to hotwaxing, not ironing in general. I'm not convinced of hotwaxing.

Hotwaxing was brought up in another thread as an initial base prep factory wax removal option to virgin skis. Going with stripping the factory wax with base cleaner instead of hotwaxing.
 

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