Waxing your Skis

Ted Walsh: Alright. So, lets begin waxing our skis, hot waxing I should say.

First thing, I want to do is put on my brake retainer to get these brakes out of my way.

Next thing you want to do is clean the base of the ski, its going to take any excess wax or dirt or anything that might get on there off the ski, and really allow the wax to permeate through that base the way that it should, you dont want things getting in between the wax in the centered base, which this Nordic kit happens to have.

The thing you want to do is make sure that that base dries out completely before you put wax on. So, again that base cleaner is meant to take wax and dirt and everything off the base, so if you are trying wax and its still wet, you dont get a very good result.

Here we go. So, Ive heated up my iron here, you can use any iron to do this, you do not need any special waxing ski iron that they want to charge you $50 for.

As you can see, we are here in Ski Center, worldwide Ski shop and I am using a Philips DIVA 130 and Ive got it set to Wool. So, it doesnt really matter what you use.

The big thing is that it doesnt have holes in it and then you are prepared to ruin whatever iron you are using, youre never going to use it on your clothes again. So, Ive selected some nice Universal Wax for these, and I am just going to drip that right on there. You want to just spread it all around, you really cant use too much wax although you will find the more you use, the more youre going to make a mess, so you can sort of find a happy medium.

Just want to spread it all the way edge-to-edge all the way down the ski.

Alright. You really want to let the iron do the work here. As I mentioned before, the iron heats up to base of the ski and allows the wax really to seep in there, you dont want to just spread it around on top, you really want it to spread itself into the base of the ski.

Just take your time, you want to keep the iron moving, dont leave it at one spot, ski is liable to delam if you do that.

You also dont want the iron to be hot, if it gets too hot it will immediately start smoking and you will know that you need to turn it down a little bit.

You just want to finesse in there sort of, and then you give it one good when its over.

Weve got a wax on the ski; were half-way done.