Wax your Skis

Ted Walsh: Hi! My name is Ted Walsh, I am coming to you from Washington DC zone Ski Center. The oldest Ski shop in Washington DC, we have been here since 1959, helping people to get out on the slopes. We have got a full service department; we sell skis and snowboards, and do a lot of boot work as well.

So, first let's talk about why you want to wax your skis, what wax actually does, and how to do it. So, to understand that, we need to understand the base of a ski, and how it works on snow.

Now, ski actually glides on a thin layer of water, not on snow directly, which separates the ski from the snow. Wax, as I am sure you know, repels water, and so, its beneficial to have wax on your ski repelling water down the mountain in order to make you go faster.

Now, there are two types of bases in ski, centered bases and extruded bases. Now, this simply refers to the pores of the base and how much they are going to open up for you when you wax the ski. A hot iron is going to allow wax to absorb into the base of a ski, and its going to hold in that ski, because as soon as you take the iron off from the ski, it cools down, the pores tighten back up again, and you get a hard surface.

Now on snow, the embedded wax helps repel water, and its actually impregnated into the ski itself once you use a hot wax. This is the difference between a hot wax and a rub on wax, where you are simply putting wax on top of the ski and after a few runs, it will rub off.

Now, the other thing you want to know is that wax is used for a couple of different things, its used, as I just described to move on snow, its used to move on cold snow, warm snow, and in the middle snow, universal wax, hot wax, and cold wax.

The other thing wax is used for is storage, as well as it can absorb into the ski, you can also use it to protect the ski from any other moisture in the off season. So, when you store your skis, you always want to leave a layer of wax on them. We will discuss that in further layer.