How To: Waxing with a Natural Hot Box
With the days starting to get shorter, and while it’s still hot out here is a fun project to get you going and your ski’s ready for the first day this winter. Anyone who has waxed their own ski’s before know what’s going on here, but might not have added these couple steps. With the point of waxing to get the wax deep in the pores of the ski base, hot boxing gets you that much further. A Hot Box is an expensive piece of equipment that is a staple of any high end wax house. Its purpose is after you finish ironing on your wax, you put the ski’s in the hotbox which heats the entire ski, opening up the pores even more so more wax penetrates.
Enough technical stuff, heres how to do it at your house without the expensive equipment; you just need a sunny day:
1. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to head to a summer camp, or the souther hemisphere this summer your ski’s have probably been sitting around since your final day out last winter. If you got it, the best thing to do first is to get a few passes with a Nylon Brush. This will clear out the grooves of any debris or old wax that is still in there. Next if you have a Bronze Brush that will clean them up even more.
2. Now take a paper towel and wipe off any of the stuff that you just cleaned out of the bases.
3. What we like to do before we take the iron to the base is to grab the bar of wax and crayon it onto the base. You won’t get a lot on, but you will be able to see when you get the whole surface covered.
4. Here’s the pretty standard steps for waxing after this: 4.1: Heat the iron up. 4.2: Drip the wax onto the base. 4.3: Iron the wax into the base.
5. Now heres the fun part. Instead of letting the wax cool and going straight to scraping the excess wax off take your skis outside and lay them down in the sun. The heat from the sun, and the atmospheric pressure is enough to emulate the same thing that happens inside a hotbox. It will take a little longer, but leave them out for an hour or so and they will be all set. You’ll even be able to see it happening, a little like watching paint dry, but after 15 or 20 minutes the wax will become liquid once again on the base and will begin seeping deeper into the base of the ski.
6. After an hour your ski’s should be good. However I noticed that a lighter base will take a bit longer as they reflect light rather than absorb it. Now if we were going skiing in the next day or so we would let the wax cool off and now scrape. But since instead of a couple days, we have a couple months to wait; we’ll just leave the excess wax on the base of the ski and scrape the wax off before we go out for the first time this season.
Hope everyone likes this, and has the time to try it out.
Tags: How To
