It’s that time of year when it’s important to have your climbing skins sufficiently waxed to avoid the dreaded glopping up of new snow when skinning from the sun into the shade. Waxed climbing skins will not only reduce the amount of glopping, but they will also allow for better glide on the frozen crust in the early morning hours. Ever since I started rando racing, I always wondered if it was possible to hot wax your skins to provide better coverage, durability and performance. When I was in Switzerland racing this year, Nicholas Combe, one of the coaches of the Swiss team, was gracious enough to show us how it’s done. Any questions…drop them in the comments section. Ciao for now!
Nice Steve……..haven’t yet ironed wax into my skins. I’ll have a go at it.
Catchy tune, Steve…super-helpful how-to. Nice.
MG
Thanks MG! I always wanted to be a rock star.
FYI, it’s always available for your listening pleasure by clicking the Wyoming flag on the sidebar.
Great tip and video. I had always wondered about hot waxing skins but was afraid to try. Rubbing wax on skins makes a huge difference and I’ll bet hot waxing is even better. Thanks.
Quicky dirt-bag solution: spray on a coat of WD-40.
Yeah, it’s bad for the environment but so are most waxes.
Also useful for lighting the skin track on fire if your friends are slow.
Rando – You got the state of Wyoming to adapt the TetonAT jingle as the state song..??!! Nice job!
I’ve had better luck hot waxing mohair skins, but found waxing synthetics kind of fried them and have only done it once. Spray on stuff (Scotch Guard, WD-40, silicon, etc.,) works OK, but it is easy to over do and at times can last a lot longer than you want it to, so that the next time you go out and glomming isn’t an issue, your skins are like greased rockets. So, I just use rub on for my synthetics (which I use 95% of the time).
Tried it. It works.
Thanks for the quality beta.
WORD!
Cool vid… been thinking about doing that for years glad to be able to follow your example rather than bumbling along doing what I thought would work!!!
Can’t wait to try this out…. unfortunately that means waiting until next season.
Matt