Thursday, May 17, 2012

Wax & Race Service

Stone Grinding & Waxing Services

Boulder Nordic Sport is a full-service ski shop offering premium stone grinding, ski and waxing services at our retail locations in Boulder, CO and Portland, Maine and now at events with our traveling race service shop, BNS Mobile. Top racers from across North America send their skis to us because we do the best quality work in the country. Have your skis prepared by the pros and see how much better they go!

BNS Mobile

The BNS wax crew hits the road in our new rig, BNS Mobile, pushing our goal of providing World Cup Service for Everyone at events across the country. BNS Mobile travels to races offering professional race waxing services and a mini-BNS store. It serves as a base for our testing and waxing operations and is a great resource wherever you are headed. Visit the BNS Mobile page for more information, including event schedules and the latest test results and wax recommendations.

Stone Grinding

Stone grinding flattens the ski base, removes burnt and damaged base material and provides important micro-structure. Bottom line, it makes your skis faster and easier to wax. We have advanced Tazzari stone grinding machines set up in our Boulder shop. Skis can be dropped off at our Boulder, CO or Portland, Maine stores. If you are shipping skis to us, please ship directly to our Boulder store. Click this link to see our Stone Grinding Menu and Service Schedule/Lead Time.

Hot Box Wax Treatments

Saturate your base with wax for durability and glide.

Basic Saturation $19: Basic Saturation involves applying a very soft paraffin wax to the ski and placing it in the heat box for 90-120 minutes at a temperature of about 55 degrees Celsius (131F). This ensures excellent saturation of the base. The skis will need to be hardened with colder wax for the appropriate conditions. This hardening can be done with 2-3 layers of ironed-in wax or hot box treatment.

Extreme Saturation $29 (Recommended): This is a two-step process with the first step being application of a very soft paraffin which is placed in the heat box at low temperature (50-55C) for a long time (6-12 hours). The skis are scraped and a harder paraffin wax is applied followed by the heat box at 60C for approximately one hour. This second step is still very safe for the skis, but the temperature but may hasten any inevitable movement of the base away from dead flat. We notice that some skis, especially older models, tend to get concave tips and tails after heat boxing, even after grinding. The same thing will happen over time and with ironing, but the heat box may accelerate the process.

This treatment will saturate the base and then harden it to a level where it can be race-waxed with high-temperature fluoros and cold waxes.

Race Ready $49: Extreme Saturation plus finish with the specified Swix race wax (LF, HF or HFBD). The skis are saturated, hardened and then two layers of LF/HF are applied, scraped and brushed, leaving the skis ready to race or for application of Swix Cera F pure fluoro. Cera F treatment can be added for $20.

Race Wax Services

BNS wax techs offer race waxing services out of the shop and on-site at several events each winter. We can prepare your skis for any race, just bring them in and we'll get them ready to go. $39 for High-Fluoro (LF & HF Layers) and $85 for pure fluoro (LF, HF + Pure Fluoro).

Weekly Nighthawks race special: $15 for a race prep LF wax. Drop your skis off any day by 3PM and pick them up the next day after 2.

Wax Recommendations

Boulder Mountain Tour Wax Report

Categories: Wax Reports | Author: Nathan Schultz | Posted: 2/3/2011 | Views: 1609

Early Paraffin Recommendation

Nathan tested glide wax this morning at Prairie Creek. Test results and recommendations inside.

Boulder Mountain Tour
Feb 5, 2011

10AM start with waves following

Forecast

Click here for the latest weather forecast from NOAA

Thursday Afternoon: Mostly sunny, with a high near 33. North northeast wind around 6 mph.
Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 20. North northwest wind between 5 and 9 mph.
Friday: A 20 percent chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 37. North northwest wind between 7 and 10 mph.
Friday Night: A 20 percent chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 21. Light wind becoming northwest between 10 and 13 mph. Winds could gust as high as 21 mph.
Saturday: A 40 percent chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 33. Northwest wind around 8 mph. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible.

Today we tested at Prairie Creek at about the 10km mark. There was a huge inversion with temps at just above 0F in town, but 16F at Prairie Creek. Snow temp was -10C when we started testing at 10:15 and -4C when we packed up at 12:30.

Test Results

Rank	Base1	Time	% back	Confidence
1	SkiGo LF Graphite/Matrix Blue	11.31	0.00%	61.13%
2	SkiGo HF Violet	0.03	0.27%	54.29%
3	Swix HF7	0.04	0.33%	70.48%
4	Matrix Blue	0.09	0.83%	13.13%
5	SkiGo HF Blue	0.10	0.88%	24.97%
6	Matrix Black/Blue	0.10	0.91%	20.63%
7	Swix LF6	0.13	1.14%	6.21%
8	Matrix Red	0.46	4.03%	83.30%

Test Fleet 2

Rank	Base1	Time	% back	Confidence
1	Start HF80	11.17	0.00%	99.98%
2	Swix HF4	0.06	0.54%	94.13%
3	Swix HFBW6	0.16	1.43%	51.47%
4	Innovax Beta Cold	0.20	1.77%	8.76%
5	Swix LF6	0.51	4.55%	85.93%

Discussion

The conditions were amazing today and if things hold up as forecast, it will be fantastic on course. The course is very hard, old transformed snow. There was a big inversion today with temps cold in town but much warmer as we went up toward Galena. The snow seems consistent all along the course with the shady sections having snow that is a little more aggressive, sunny sections were a bit wetter and warmer.

We ran a test fleet of eight and I worked with the guys from Aceco Finite Finish ski tools on their fleet of 5 skis. The results were a bit weird, but we found two distinct conclusions:

A hard underlayer is very important.
High Fluoro top coats are important.

We ran a test with one pair with Holmenkol Matrix Blue and another pair with the same on top of SkiGo LF Graphite. The LF Graphite underneath sped up by about 1%, which is a huge difference on skis. We can usually feel a difference of about 0.25% and a 1% difference is very noticeable. So, given that hard underlayers were improving things, we heartily recommend the LF Graphite as the base layer.

For the other results, it seems that SkiGo HF Violet won the paraffin test with Start HF80, Swix HF7, Holmenkol Matrix Blue and Swix HF4 all reasonably close as well.

Recommendation

SkiGo LF Graphite and Holmenkol waxes are available for sale in Ketchum and Hailey at Sturtevants. They will have SkiGo HF Violet Friday afternoon. Nathan Schultz is doing wax clinics as Sturtevants in Hailey Thursday from 4:30-6:30 and in the Ketchum store at 2PM Friday.

Prepare skis by brushing and cleaning with a fluoro cleaner (glide wax cleaner, not kick wax solvent) or hot scrape with a warm wax.

Base Layer: SkiGo LF Graphite ironed in at 145-150C, cool, scrape brush well with steel brush.

Base Paraffin: SkiGo HF Violet, Swix HF7 or Holmenkol Matrix Blue

We will test fluoro top coats Friday morning and publish results Friday mid-day.

note: BNS imports Holmenkol and SkiGo waxes, and also sells waxes from Swix, Toko, Rode, Solda, Rex, Guru, Innovax, Magnar and others. We search for the fastest waxes for our customers and our testing is professional, objective and transparent. We make our best effort to test what we think is the best from each brand. However, given that we are testing more options from Holmenkol and SkiGo, there is a bias toward those brands. With this full disclosure, you can assess the legitimacy of our testing yourself. Visit Swix and Toko for their official recommendations. If you have any questions please contact us.

Return

Privacy Statement