Bill Jennings: Bored by rain, so time to tune the boards
Our wet, warmish weather has postponed the epic ski experience I hoped for.
The wait for winter to make up its mind leaves plenty of time for a thorough ski tune. I like to do it myself. But after getting personal service from a bona fide expert, my tuning approach seems as sloppy as the current conditions.
My friend and neighbor, Brian Conn, is a 40-year veteran in the ski industry. He’s become known as a master technician, working at several local ski and bike shops during his career. Today he’s “semiretired” and can be found at Mountain Gear, doing just about everything.
Saturday night I showed up at his door with a pair of skis and a pizza for a master class in ski tuning. After catching up over the pie, we descended into his basement shop. It’s a gear-collector’s sanctum filled with bikes, skis, kayaks and other toys. He scrutinized my boards.
“You can actually run your fingernail over the edge and if it’s not leaving any residue, you need a tune,” Conn said.
After just a few days on snow he said the edges were “medium sharp.” I flicked my thumbnail over the edge of a ski and nothing was there.
“I’m going to use a diamond stone,” he said. “It’s not as aggressive as a file and they should sharpen right up. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to give you a 1-degree bevel off.”
Conn likes to tune 1 degree off to keep the edge from hooking on hard snow. My skis were made with 90-degree edge angles. He said taking 1 degree off the bottom edge and 1 degree off the side edge keeps that right angle, but allows for a better grip on firm snow.
“You always need to hit your edges with a stone first,” he said. “If you have rough edges you’re banging your skis together, metal against metal, or hitting rocks. That kind of case hardens the metal. If you run a file down the edge and hit one of those nicks, the file skips over them.”
Conn tunes different skis for different conditions. For packed slopes, he tunes his inside edge sharper for a more directional bite. His powder ski edges are equal for the equal weighting of powder turns. I like to rotate my all-mountain skis to prolong a good tune, so my edges are equal.
Conn meticulously ran the stone in long, continuous strokes. Compared with my experience, it seemed like an inordinate amount of time. Eventually, he flicked a nail and saw the white, powdery keratin residue he was looking for. Then he glanced a file across the tip and tail edges, right where the base meets the snow.
“Because your edges are tuned equal, we’ll detune them to about 4 centimeters back from the tips and tails so the ski won’t be catchy,” he said. “Racers may like that, but for us humans, we don’t need them that sharp.”
Conn finished my edges with a gummy stone, a little brick of eraser-like material embedded with bits of metal. It polishes the edges like ultrafine sandpaper. With edges razor-sharp and gleaming, it was time to heat the iron.
“If you’re skiing powder, you may be able to go three or four days without a wax,” Conn said. “If you’re skiing hard, wet snow that’s been packed down and frozen, you might do a couple of runs and see the wax wear down. If you look at your ski and see the base start looking white along the edges, your wax is going away.”
Conn removed remnants of old wax with a solvent. He melted a thin layer of all-around Swix C4 hydrocarbon on the bases with an iron. The wax dried and cured in about 20 minutes – enough time for a beverage.
Conn scraped off the excess and ran a stiff brush along the fresh coat to add texture. By this time, I would call it a tune. But he kept going. After smoothing off nicks in the topsheet with a file, he brought out a bottle of “303” UV protective cleaner and made the graphics sparkle.
Conn likened tuning skis to changing the oil in your car. Most people take care of their cars, but don’t think of skis in that way. A well-tuned ski is also a safe ski. Slow, dull skis are hard to turn. Turning is how you stay in control. If you ski at all, you will need a tune soon.