I’m Phil here at Ski Chalet in Arlington, Virginia and we’re going to wax the snowboard. But first, let’s talk about wax selection. If you know exactly when and where you are going to be skiing you can use a specified wax base on temperature. Right here we have a wax, three completely different waxes base on target temperature. If you know exactly where you're going and when that’s a good idea, if your like 98% and most my costumers and you have no idea when and where you going use a universal wax. When we do our work here we used consistently universal wax, unless the costumers specify a certain wax condition.
Now, let’s go ahead and wax the snowboard. We have our iron which is a wax specific iron, okay, don’t use your mother’s iron, and we have our universal wax. So, you can start by just rubbing a little bit of wax onto the base of the board just as a buffer from the hot wax its about to be dripped on to it. Then you just want to take and apply it to the iron, get it to running and start to drip it onto the board. Keep in mind the more you drip on here the more you are going to have to scrape off. And scraping is a pain and it’s a messy process, so you want to use the minimum amount of wax necessary to coat the entire base of the board and that ought to do it.
Now, the most important factor when it comes to waxing your board is keeping the iron moving. You never ever, ever want to let the iron set still on the board, if the base of the board gets too hot, it will separate from the core of the board and you have ruined your snowboard. So, constantly moving the board of the iron, we want to just get the wax liquefied and once you get it liquefied you can move it around with the iron kind a like buttering your toast and just make sure that you get the entire base of the board covered with liquid wax from edge to edge and tip to tip. Make sure you covered all of the base, the high spots and low spots in the base of any snowboard and you want to make sure especially underneath the binding there's going to be a low spot and make sure you cover that.
And one of things that you're doing as you iron the board is your heating up the base and by heating up the base it cause the pores in the base to open up or expand. And that allows the wax to enter into the base on the molecular level actually then as the board cools those pores close up capturing that wax and containing it into the base which gives you your sliding surface. So, once you get it all done you butter it out and smooth it out and make sure it's evenly heated. That’s it!
Now, you’re going to let the board cool back to room temperature and if you can let it cool overnight that’s best if you're in a hurry, go eat lunch, whatnot, take a half hour or to an hour let it cool down completely to room temperature, then you're ready to scrape the board which is the next thing we’ll go through.