Hi! I’m Phil Donovan, I’m here at the Ski Chalet in Arlington Virginia. And today we’re going to go through the tools required in the processes of waxing your own snowboard. When you start up to wax your board, the first thing you're going to do is clean the base of the board to make sure that all foreign deposits are off of it, so it will accepts the wax well. Then once you’ve clean the board you will melt the wax onto the board using your iron, once that cools and dry which is recommended to be about an hour process, you’ll come back and scrape it off then you will brush it out to impart some structure onto the base which will talking about later and your done.
Basic tools you are going to need to wax your own board at home are going to be one, base cleaner to clean the base of the board before you get started so that will receive the wax. You're going to need a waxing iron which is a different in your mother’s clothes iron and don’t use that. You're going to need scrapers; they come in various different shapes and sizes. And you're going to need a structure brush and ultimately, you're going to need your wax which we’ll talk about how to select your wax in more detail later.
Obviously, you're going to need the snowboard and it also helps to have a waxing bench because unless you're going to pull the bindings off of the board it helps to have a bench that support the board while you do the job that allows you to keep bindings on. So, there are a few safety concerns you need to think about it if you are going to wax your own board. Key ventilation, you want to work in a well-ventilated area because the fumes from the wax as well is the cleaners can be toxic. So that is something you want to think about. Another reason you might not want to do this in your living room. The iron is hot, you will have a way better chance of destroying your board with the iron than doing damage to yourself but you will do to have it realize you’re working with the heated element here.
Before we get started let me tell you a little bit about myself, I’ve been working in this shop for 10 years now here at Ski Chalet in Arlington, Virginia where we literally tune and wax thousands of boards a year. This is something that is our stock and trade here. So, let’s get started with cleaning the board.