My mate had been saying to me you need to wax your skis, I had been using an old pair he had donated and had serviced them before giving them to me. I then found a video by Scott at The Skiers Lounge about ski servicing and promoting a ski servicing starter kit for £130. It looked easy enough for me to give it a go. In the meantime I had decided to purchase my own skis a pair of Völkl Peragrine MT again from the skiers lounge, luckily they come serviced and set up for you. I became cautious about servicing them what if I wrecked them that over £400 pound gone to waist. So I decided to check the Ski Technician Course run by Scott and the dates and was in luck, so booked myself onto it.
Course Overview
The course is split into two parts; 1. Technical an overview of ski construction, and equipment needed to service skis and what they are used for. 2. Hands on experience of servicing a training ski, which includes base repair, edges and waxing.
The Course
The first half of the day mainly covers the technical elements with a demonstration at the end. We cover in-depth all the elements which make up a ski and how to tell a good ski from a bad ski by the products used to construct therm. We then covered the equipment needed for servicing skis this included everything from scrapers to wax irons as well as base repair options from fillers and the tools available. If found this really useful as I do like to understand how things work, particularly why your base edge is importantly not set at zero, and the setting of your edge angle is also so important. You can tell Scott had been in this industry for a while by his vast amount of knowledge. Just before lunch we head to the Ski Servicing room for a demonstration on how to prep the base and complete base repairs with three different methods we had discussed along with edge servicing and waxing..
After a thirty minute break for lunch, we head back to the Servicing room for our hands on practical experience going through what we had just learned. Scott then looks through our skis to assess them. He looks at mine and asks how often I had used them, I say 10 hours indoor, I learn that most waxes aren’t suitable for manufactured snow as it is quiet abrasive and recommends I use a Ceramic wax normally used for Ski Jump skis and that I will need to wax after every session as it will only last about an hour or two at most. After assessing everyone’s skis we are given a demonstration of machine that can do everything we have done by hand, but a lot quicker, Scott says nothing beats doing it by hand, but the machine can do things which we can’t do easily by hand. My skis are run through the machine, I de-burr and de-tune my edges. All I need to do when I get home is complete the waxing. I also purchase my ceramic wax as well as a horse hair brush as I will need it for this type of wax.
Conclusion
I wasn’t disappointed with lesson, I have liked the Skiers Lounge since going for my first ever boot fitting. For me it was well worth the investment. I feel confident that I have the skills to use my Starter Kit and I am looking forward to waxing my skis on Tuesday and every other week from now on.
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