I finally learned how to wax and tune my snowboard

[BailOut]

Thanks to this video from the wonderful folks at Sierra Snowboard and picking the brain of one of the guys at the Village Ski Loft in Incline Village (Northeast corner of Lake Tahoe) I decided that it is time to start waxing my own board.

I have many reasons for wanting to do this, such as:

- Since I am on the slopes 4-5 times per week I need a new wax job every week to every 3 weeks depending on the snow conditions and how much hidden stuff I hit in the back country and it is quite inconvenient to find a 48 hour window to leave my board at a shop. Even the local ski area's shop is at the main lodge while I spend most of my time on the other side of the mountain (which opens a half hour earlier each morning).

- Every one of my local shops use petroleum-based waxes, many of which contain toxic fluorocarbons that hurts local wildlife, flora and fauna and penetrates into local water tables, even though there are soy-based alternatives available.

- Waxing 10 or more times per season ($15 to $40 depending on the shop) and edge tuning 4 or 5 times per season ($15 to $35 depending on the shop) gets expensive when you have other people do the work.

- My friends are all doing the same thing and this gives us the ability to be self-contained. Between the 5 of us we can now handle anything that comes our way. Deburring, delamination, P-Tex fills, waxing, tuning, fitting, adjusting... we do it all. The only reason any of us needs to hit a shop now is for more supplies from time to time.


I gathered the gear between Village Ski Loft and my local REI. I was able to use my 20% off coupon on the iron at REI so that was nice. The whole setup cost $95 and includes:

- Waxing iron (it has no holes in the base and a shorter length than a clothing iron)
- Extension cord
- Phillips screwdriver (for loosening the bindings)
- 2 scrapers (one smaller and easier to dig with, one larger and more flexible with a notch for clearing wax off of the base edge)
- Horsehair brush
- Scotch-brite pad
- Edge file and guide (2 degrees)
- Gummy stone
- Oneballjay's soy-based Bio Green Hot Wax

Below are pictures of the equipment and a shot of my completed hot waxing and edge tuning. It is not a perfect job but I think I did well for my first time, and it is certainly better than some of the wax jobs I had done at the ski area.

I wish I had taken a "before" shot so that the improvement would be more noticeable. Conditions have been icy man-made snow so my two week old "professional" wax job was already stripped off and totally dry on the outside edges.

I made the mistake of going by the video's recommendation of waiting at least 30 minutes for the wax to set before scraping. Near the end of the 30 minutes I noticed that the instructions that came with the soy wax said to scrape after 5 minutes, and shortly after that I found some feedback in a review that points out how hard it is to scrape it if you don't do it while it is still warm. It was difficult and took almost 20 minutes to complete. I won't make the same mistake again.

[Malaya1221]

nice, might b doing this in about a month or 2...still not cold here in socal!

[padre1964]

awesome informative post, thanks!

[nemelek]

Great job! The right tools and some experience the job can be done by yourself. This principle applies to most things in life.